This play is simple in structure, superbly rich in execution. Œdipus dominates all the scenes, which reveal with piercing intensity his physical helplessness and the spiritual might which, marked at the opening, is overwhelming at the close. The poet’s task is not merely to portray the last hours of a much-tried man, but the novitiate of a superhuman Power. Œdipus at last reaches peace and a welcome from the infernal gods—he becomes a δαίμων. The terrific feature is that even in the flesh he anticipates his dæmonic qualities. In the interview between him and Polynices, the implacable hatred, the strength, the prophetic sight of the father, and the hopeless prayers, the wretchedness, the despair and moral collapse of the doomed son, are nothing but the presentation in human life of the actual dæmon’s power as prophesied for future generations. Before the close we feel that the aged exile’s sufferings, sombre wisdom, and simple burning emotions have already made him a being of unearthly powers, sundered from normal humanity; his strange passing is but the ratification of a spiritual fact already accomplished. But this weird climax is preceded by an equally wonderful study of the human Œdipus. The king who appears in the _Œdipus Tyrannus_ can here still be recognized. Passionate anger still directs much of his conduct, as friend and foe alike remind[365] him. But even his faults are mellowed by years and contemplation; his very anger shows some gleam of a profounder patience. Throughout, the temper of Œdipus is like that of the heavens above him—gloom cleft by flashes of insight, indignation, and love. Unlike other aged sufferers, he does not dwell in the past; unlike the saint and martyr whom a Christian dramatist might have portrayed, he does not lean upon a future of glory or happiness. Nor again has he sunk into a senile acquiescence in the present; he is far from being absorbed by the loving tendance of his daughters. The centre of his life has shifted, but not to any period of time—rather to another plane of being. Still in the flesh, his human emotions as essential as ever, his life is growing assimilated to the non-human existence of the whole earth. And so it is that Œdipus meets “death” with cheerfulness; he is departing to his own place. At the last moment the blind man leads those who see to the place of his departure. What to them is dreadful and secret is to him the centre of his longing; the terrific figures who inhabit his new home are welcome friends—at the beginning of the play he addresses the Furies themselves as “_sweet_ daughters of primeval Night”.[366] The whole drama at the end is full of this sense. In the farewell song of the chorus which commends the wanderer to the powers of Earth, there is an eerie precision and picturesqueness in the description of the lower world; the “infernal moor”[367] and the guardian hound gleam forth for an instant into strange familiarity.