Sophocles

like corks they hold up the net, saving the spun line of flax from the deep," according to the tragic Sophocles.

Take Ares, who even among the poets is honoured as much as may be — "Ares, Ares, bane of mortals, blood-stained, stormer of walls" — this fickle and hostile one was, as Epicharmus says, a Spartan;

since even against these very verses one of the very philosophers has spoken in opposition — one whom no one, it seems to me, would ever say spoke against these out of contentiousness, and against what was said by Sophocles about wealth — against the former a little, against those of Sophocles more — yet not, as we now, at length, since he was not expounding offhand with great licence, but writing in books.

This is how Sophocles outrages me in his tragedies.

And so that Oïleus in Sophocles, who had before consoled Telamon over the death of Ajax, when he had heard of his own son, was broken.

For as Sophocles has said in his Hippodamia, “The soul is bound to greater caution by the addition of an oath.

But in fact I have ere now met with others who do not feel in this way, and in particular I remember hearing Sophocles the poet greeted by a fellow who asked, How about your service of Aphrodite, Sophocles—is your natural force still unabated?