Our city’s shame he wields, the raw flesh rav’ning Sphinx,
Fast riveted with bolts, her body burnish’d-bright
Repoussé work, and under in her grasp she bears
A man Cadmean, that upon this warrior
Most thickly fly the bolts. ’Tis likely, now he’s come,
He’ll not be retail-dealer in the trade of war,
Nor will he bring discredit on his long road’s track.”
Euripides used the same story in his “Tyrian Women,” but openly scorned the Homeric note of Æschylus. With the enemy at the gates there is no time to describe the warriors, and the emphasis is shifted from the horror of the curse to the burden on Iocasta’s heart. Still living, she seeks to reconcile her sons, and at last kills herself on their dead bodies. Polyneices is not only his country’s enemy but a homesick man whose eyes grow wet when he sees the familiar altars and Dirce and the old gymnasium, and who begs his mother just before he dies to bury him in Thebes. Antigone is brave enough to support her mother, comfort her father, and promise to bury her brother, but so tenderly young that an old servant helps her up a cedarn stairway to the palace roof that she may see the Argive army in the plain. Another vision of brave youth is given in the character of Menœceus, last virgin descendant of the Sown Men. Informed by Tiresias that by a voluntary death he can save Thebes, he evades his father and makes one of the patriotic speeches that never failed to thrill an Athenian audience in the Dionysiac theatre:—
“Now I will go and, standing on the rampart’s heights
Over the deep dark dragon-pen, the very spot