The fame of Antigone was secured by Sophocles. Thebes seems to have been always noted for the beauty of its women, from Semele, the bride of Zeus, to the tall yellow-haired ladies admired by Dicæarchus, and Æschylus suggests the loveliness of Antigone as Euripides suggests her youthfulness. But through Sophocles we know her unadorned as the embodiment of loyalty and courage. On the sunny morning that followed the defeat of the Argives, when the eye of golden day had at last arisen over Dirce’s stream, she buried her brother and defied Creon’s edict, which forbade burial to an enemy of the country, in a noble speech of justification:— “Not Zeus hath published this decree, not Zeus for me, Neither hath Justice, house-mate with the gods below, Laws like to this defined for men. Nor did I think Within these edicts, these of thine, such strength inhered That, being a mere mortal, thou could’st override Th’ unwritten and unfailing statutes of the gods. For not of yesterday nor of to-day their life, 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.”