That is, the chorus here pray that they may always show their piety and reverence by obeying the divine laws. This sentiment is repeated more than once in the extant tragedies; as when Odysseus warns Agamemnon not to refuse burial to the body of Ajax: “’Tis not he, ’tis the law of heaven that thou would’st hurt.”[147] Through this belief Sophocles justified Antigone in her decision to defy the edict of the state, for Creon had ordained that her brother Polynices might not be buried, since he had attacked Thebes. But Greek belief regarded it as a sacred duty of the next of kin to bury their dead, and this duty Antigone could not but fulfil, although she knew that death would be her lot. When Creon asks her if she did indeed dare to transgress his edict, she replies: I heard it not from Zeus, nor came it forth From Justice, where she reigns in the Underworld. They too have published to mankind a law. Nor could I think thine edict of such might That one who is mortal thus could overrule The infallible, unwritten laws of Heaven. Their majesty begins not from today But from eternity, and none can tell The hour that saw their birth.[148] It was for this same principle that Socrates, a generation later, gave up his life. In his defense he told his jury why: “Perhaps someone may say, ‘But Socrates, can you not go off and live in exile, give up talking and be quiet?’ This is the very point on which it is hardest to persuade some of you, for if I say that this is exile to be disobeying the god and therefore that it is impossible to keep quiet, you will not believe me, but will say that I am ironical.”[149] Socrates believed that he had a divine commission to question and examine others, and that duty he must perform as the heroine in the tragedy must perform hers, cost him what it might. The eternal problem of human suffering, the fact that pain and misfortune are not always the result of wrong doing, but that the innocent suffer while the guilty escape, was a matter with which Sophocles was much concerned. His predecessor Aeschylus had tried to show in opposition to experience that sin always preceded pain; and in Sophocles the doom of Creon and his house is due to the king’s proud resentment wherein he sinned against heaven’s law. But in the same play the heroine Antigone, who has obeyed the divine mandates, is forced to suffer a most pathetic fate. King Oedipus was not intentionally guilty, and the fate of the innocent queen Deianeira surpasses in pathos that of any other tragic heroine. She was impelled by the tender desire to recall the love of her faithless husband, and the poet acquits her of blame, “She erred, though she intended well.”[150] But none the less she involved both husband and herself in dreadful doom.