] but he had been trained in the Eleusinian mysteries, and
strenuously asserted the value of the institution most intimately
associated with the primitive political traditions of the past--the
Areopagus.[57] He had been born in the generation after Solon, to whose
maxims he fondly clung; and it was the Dorian development of Hellenic
life and the philosophical system based upon it with which his religious
and moral convictions were imbued. Thus even upon the generation which
succeeded him, and to which the powerful simplicity of his dramatic and
poetic diction seemed strange, the ethical loftiness of his conceptions
and the sublimity of his dramatic imagination fell like the note of a
mightier age. To us nothing is more striking than the conciliatory
tendencies of his conservative mind, and the progressive nature of what
may have seemed to his later contemporaries antiquated ideals.

Sophocles.

Sophocles (495-405) was the associate of Pericles, and an upholder of
his authority, rather than a consistent pupil of his political
principles; but his manhood, and perhaps the maturity of his genius,
coincided with the great days when he could stand, like his mighty
friend and the community they both so gloriously represented, on the
sunny heights of achievement. Serenely pious as well as nobly patriotic,
he nevertheless treats the myths of the national religion in the spirit
of a conscious artist, contrasting with lofty irony the struggles of
humanity with the irresistible march of its destinies. Perhaps he, too,
was one of the initiated; and the note of personal responsibility which
is the mystic's inner religion is recognizable in his view of life.[58]
The art of Sophocles may in its perfection be said to typify the
greatest epoch in the life of Athens--an epoch conscious of unequalled
achievements, but neither wholly unconscious of the brief endurance
which was its destiny.

Euripides.

Euripides (480-406), as is the fate of genius of a more complex kind,
has been more variously and antithetically judged than either of his
great fellow-tragedians. His art has been described as devoid of the
idealism of theirs, his genius as rhetorical rather than poetical, his
morality as that of a sophistical wit. On the other hand, he has been
recognized not only as the most tragic of the Attic tragedians and the
most pathetic of ancient poets, but also as the most humane in his
social philosophy and the most various in his ps