Cithæron still towers on the horizon; in its “winding glens” the infant Œdipus had been exposed and rescued by a vagrant hireling in charge of mountain flocks. But the play takes us back to the city, with its royal palace and temples and market-place. As usual, it is the Thebes of Sophocles’s day that is used for scenery. The drama opens when the fruitful country has been laid waste by a pestilence and her citizens are praying to Artemis, whose temple stands in the Agora, to Apollo at his oracular seat by the river Ismenus, and to all the gods by the altar in front of the royal palace. But in these few hints all localized interest is exhausted. The austere and disciplined beauty of the dramatic structure throws into high relief the pitifulness and the terror of a father’s sin at work in the third and fourth generation, and of the human struggle against destiny. The universal truth of the tragedy as apprehended by Sophocles was as independent of the walls of Thebes as of the confines of the theatre in Athens. And yet in modern Thebes, itself the shadow of a greater past, we may realize afresh the catastrophe that befell the ancient king. He had saved the city by guessing the riddle of the Sphinx and thus destroying her. He had been acclaimed as king in place of Laius, slain by an unknown hand, and had married Iocasta, Laius’s queen. Now he promises to save his people from the pestilence by obeying the Delphic command that the slayer of Laius shall be found and exiled. He discovers that he is the murderer, and, in a crescendo of horror, that he is the son both of the man he murdered and of his own wife. In spite of their effort to kill him in his infancy, he has reappeared, the innocent agent of their destruction, as the irrefutable god of prophecy had foretold. Iocasta hangs herself. Œdipus’s children face a world that will remember against them the sin of their father. He puts out his eyes, and goes into voluntary exile, defeated by fate, a broken-hearted fugitive, not yet conscious that in the surrender of his will to God he may atone and be at peace. Borne from afar upon the quiet air of to-day we may hear ghostly echoes of the songs of the people that watched him. He was an example of the emptiness of life:— “O generations of mankind, How all your life I ever find With Naught and Nothingness aligned! For who, what man the wide world o’er, Of happiness e’er gaineth more Than only this—to have his own He dreams, and as he dreams ’tis gone. Thy fate, thine, Œdipus, beholding, O luckless one, thy wretched fate, And from it my opinion moulding Naught mortal I congratulate.” And he also exemplified the truth of Solon’s aphorism that no one should be congratulated before the end:—