It seems that the _Triptolemus_ was his first play, produced in 468 B.C. when the poet was twenty-eight. It would then be one of the works with which he won his victory[385] over Æschylus, and it bore marks of the older writer’s influence. The theme is the mission of Triptolemus, who traversed the earth distributing to men corn, the gift of Demeter, and founded the mysteries at Eleusis. This topic gave room for a long geographical passage which recalls those of the _Prometheus_. Other early dramas were the _Thamyras_ in which the dramatist himself took the name-part and played the cithara, and the _Nausicaa_ or _Women Washing_ wherein Sophocles acted the part of that princess and gained applause by his skill in a game of ball. The satyric drama _Amphiaraus_ contained a curious scene wherein an illiterate man conveyed some name or other word to his hearers by a dance in which his contortions represented successive letters. Another satyric play _The Mustering of the Greeks_ (Ἀχαιῶν Σύλλογος) or the _Dinner-Party_ (Σύνδειπνοι) earned the reprobation of Cicero[386] apparently for its coarseness, which can still be noted in the fragments. In _The Lovers of Achilles_ (Ἀχιλλέως ἐρασταί) there was a passage describing the perplexity of passion, which in its mannered felicity recalls Swinburne or the Sonnets of Shakespeare:— Love is a sweet perplexity of soul, Most like the sport of younglings, when the sky In winter-clearness scatters frost abroad: They seize a glittering icicle, filled a while With joy and wonder; but ere long the toy Melts, and they know not how to grasp it still, Tho’ loth to cast it from them. So with lovers: Their yearning passion holds them hour by hour Poised betwixt boldness and reluctant awe. The _Laocoon_, which dealt with a famous episode in the capture of Troy, supplies a fragment describing Æneas’ escape from the city with his father upon his shoulders; one or two other passages[387] besides this recall Vergil’s treatment. Another tragedy from the same cycle of stories, the _Polyxena_, is praised by “Longinus”[388] in the same terms of eulogy as the culmination of the _Œdipus Coloneus_ itself. The _Tereus_,[389] to judge from the number of fragments, was very popular; it dealt with the frightful fable of the Thracian King Tereus, his wife Procne, and her sister Philomela, all of whom were at last changed into birds. Aristophanes[390] has an obscure series of jests about this play and the beak-mask with which Sophocles “outraged” the Thracian monarch. A solitary relic of the _Orithyia_ tells how the maiden was carried off by the wind-god Boreas Unto Earth’s verge, beyond the farthest sea, Vistas of Heaven, and well-springs of the dark, To the Sun’s ancient garden. In 1907 there came to light at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt considerable fragments[391] of two Sophoclean dramas.