“Now by his spear he swears—which he is confident To reverence above the god or his own eyes— The town of the Cadmeans he will surely sack In spite of Zeus. Thus cries aloud this fair-faced shoot Of mother mountain-bred, a man though boy in years. His downy beard is just appearing on his cheeks, As youth’s prime makes it grow, the thick hair cropping out, But he with spirit fierce, no maiden’s namesake this, And terrible bright eye, comes up to take his post. Nor yet without a vaunt stands he beside the gate, For on his bronze-wrought shield, his body’s circled screen, 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 The seer described minutely, I myself will slay And liberate my country.”