But ever from all time. None knows their origin.”
The Athenian reverence for Law made natural an even more magnificent reiteration of this idea in the “Œdipus Tyrannus:”—
“Be mine the lot to win pure reverence in every word and work for which the Laws are set on high, in Heaven’s ether born as children of Olympus, him alone; no mortal nature among men gave birth to them nor ever shall oblivion lull them to slumber. Great is God within them and he grows not old.”
Beneath a neighbouring hill Antigone was walled up in one of the rock-cut caverns that abound in Greece. Her lover Hæmon, Creon’s son, kills himself within the door. His mother takes her life, and Creon is left to a late and impotent knowledge of the truth. Before the end the chorus of Theban girls think of Antigone’s betrothal and in a famous hymn to Love flash brief fire upon the lonely moral heights of the play. But suddenly the song dissolves into a lamentation which still haunts the ear in Thebes:—
“But already I too past all bounds of the law
Am swept onward myself as I look on this sight,
And the fount of my tears I no longer can check,
When Antigone here I behold as she fares
To that chamber where all shall be resting.”
In historic Thebes heroism had lost its lustre. When Greece was tested, the result in this city is revealed in the laconic words of Herodotus, that among the Greeks who sent earth and water to Xerxes were the Thebans and the other Bœotians, except the Platæans and the Thespians. “The grace of the olden time is fallen upon sleep,” Pindar complained after recounting the “noble deeds” of the heroic age. His own sympathy with the national cause is clearly seen in another ode written after the expulsion of the Persians: “Some god has turned aside the stone of Tantalus from overhead, a load that Hellas might not brook.”