Jocasta is more slightly drawn than Œdipus, yet what we have suffices. Two features are stressed by the poet—her tenderness for Œdipus and her flippant contempt in regard to the oracles. This last is clearly a dramatic lever of great power; through it the king is first brought to suspect that he is the guilty man. It has a strong and pathetic excuse. Because of the oracle, she was robbed of her child and yet all in vain—the infant not yet three days old was cast away, but none the less Laius was killed. It is precisely her rage against the oracle for cheating her which brings to Œdipus the knowledge that it has been fulfilled. Further than this Sophocles has not characterized the queen; he places an ordinary woman in a situation of extraordinary horror and pathos, leaving us to feel her emotions, without any elaboration of his own. To read the conversation between Œdipus and the Corinthian, with the short colloquy of Œdipus and Jocasta which follows, is to experience as perhaps nowhere else can be experienced that “purgation of pity and terror” which is the function of tragedy. It all centres for the moment in Jocasta, yet she says very little. We are required to imagine it for ourselves—the intertwined amazement, joy, loathing, despair, which fill the woman’s heart during the few minutes for which she listens in silence to the king and the messenger. To have lost her child at birth, then after mourning his death for many years at length to find that he lives, that he stands before her, mature, strong, and kingly, but her own husband; then to realize that not now but long ago did she recover him, yet did not know him but loved him otherwise—this even Sophocles has not put into speech. Only one hint of it comes to us in the queen’s last words:— ἰοὺ, ἰού, δύστηνε· τοῦτο γάρ σ’ ἔχω μόνον προσειπεῖν, ἄλλο δ’ οὔποθ’ ὕστερον. First she screams at his ignorance and would tell all in one word “Son!” But she cannot say it, nor dare she use again the name “husband”. All dear titles have been forfeited by being all merited together; and with the cry “Unhappy one!” she goes to death.