_Lateran Museum, Rome_]
The scanty folds of his toga reveal the fine lines of his graceful
figure. The pose shows the bodily vigor which his early athletic
training gave him. He holds his head erect in a manner suggestive of his
military life. The face is that of an idealist and a poet, a man who
sees splendid visions. Yet it is not altogether dreamy in the ordinary
sense; it has the alert, energetic aspect of one who would turn from
vision to action. It is not hard to believe the tale of his one hundred
and twenty-three dramas: such a man would fill his life with activity.
The face has, too, the expression of genial kindliness which made the
great poet so beloved of his fellow men. His must have been that calm,
equable temperament not easily ruffled, which goes with the
self-respecting nature. A receptacle at his side is filled with the
scrolls of his tragedies. He stands in the attitude of a poet reciting
his lines to an assembled audience.
The statue shows how sane was the Greek ideal of intellectual greatness.
In those days genius did not mean eccentricity, but the rule of life was
a sound mind in a sound body. It is a mistaken notion of our own times
that bodily health must be sacrificed to the training of the brain. It
is even supposed by some that oddities of dress and manner are signs of
greatness.
The Greeks had no such delusions. Here is Sophocles, the greatest
dramatic poet of antiquity, a magnificent specimen of symmetrically
developed manhood. He is a man who has made the most of life's
opportunities as he understood them. He enjoys perfect bodily vigor; he
is as well a man of the world, at ease among men. There is evidently
nothing of the recluse in his character. He wears his beard carefully
trimmed as one who looks well to his personal appearance. Yet
intellectual greatness is stamped on face and bearing: the noble
countenance marks him as a poet.
There was a period in Greek history when it was a custom to adorn public
buildings with statues of famous men, living or dead. Libraries were
appropriately decorated with statues of poets, and we fancy that our
statue of Sophocles was made for such a purpose. The original is
supposed to have been set up by a certain Athenian statesman named
Lycurgus in the fourth century B. C.
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