Although he be the dearest of my friends.
Again, Polyneices is said to have commanded, as he lay dying, his mother and Antigone to bury him in Theban soil[176]:
But bury me, O thou who gav’st me birth,
And my loved sister, in my native land,
Your mediation to appease the city
Uniting, that of my paternal soil
Enough for a poor grave I may obtain,
Though I have lost the empire.
Thus Euripides conceives in a twofold aspect the act of Polyneices. Subjectively, he thinks, Polyneices was justified in attacking and in slaying his brother[177]: objectively, however, or technically, he was a traitor and a fratricide because prima facie he was the aggressor.[178] But the sympathetic intuition of Antigone looks beyond the superficial enactments of a political justice of which the obscure and oscillating dictates cannot compete with her love for her brother in life, with her grief for him in death, and with her reverence for the solemn injunction which his dying lips had uttered.
The punishment of Oedipus which is mentioned in the Phoenissae is based, we believe, on the conception of his fatal act as voluntary homicide,[179] but it also takes into account the facts of the Homeric narrative. The Homeric[180] story of the continued rule of Oedipus ‘over the Cadmeans’ was not in harmony with Achaean principles of blood-vengeance. Homer does not understand it. Perhaps this is because, in Boeotia, as Leaf points out,[181] the Achaeans had not established their power. It is possible that Oedipus enjoyed immunity from punishment because of his position as a Minoan autocrat, but as there existed in legendary story many capable and willing avengers it is better to attribute his immunity to a discrimination between degrees in homicide-guilt which we have associated with Pelasgian tribal custom, and to interpret the Homeric reference as a Pelasgian ‘reminiscence.’[182]