You know the story of Sophocles' _Antigone_: how, when two brothers disputed the throne of Thebes, one, Polynices, was driven out and brought a foreign host against the city. Both brothers fall in battle. Their uncle takes up the government and publishes an edict that no one shall give burial to the traitor who has borne arms against his native land. The obligation to give or allow decent burial, even to an enemy, was one which the Greeks held peculiarly sacred. Yet obedience to the orders of lawful authority is an obligation binding on every citizen. No one dares to disregard the king's order save the dead man's sister. She is caught in the act and brought before the king. 'And thou,' he says, 'didst indeed dare to transgress this law?' 'Yes,' answers Antigone, 'for it was not Zeus that published me that edict; not such are the laws set among men by the Justice who dwells with the Gods below; nor deemed I that thy decrees were of such force that a mortal could override the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of to-day or yesterday but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth.'[22] There you have the assertion of a law supreme and binding on all men, eternal, not to be set aside by human enactment. And now turn to this passage from the traveller and historian Herodotus, an almost exact contemporary of Sophocles. He has been telling how Cambyses, king of the Persians, has been wantonly insulting the religion and customs of the Egyptians. 'The man must have been mad,' he says: 'For if one was to set men of all nations to make a choice of the best laws out of all the laws there are, each one upon consideration would choose those of his own country: so far do men go in thinking their own laws the best. Therefore it is not likely that any but a madman would cast ridicule on such things. And that all men do think thus about their laws may be shown by many proofs, and above all by this story. For when Darius was king he called to him the Greeks who were at his court and asked them, 'How much money would you take to eat your fathers when they die?' And they answered that they would not do this at any price. After this Darius called the men of an Indian tribe called the Kallatiai, who eat their parents, and asked them in the presence of the Greeks, who were told by an interpreter what was said, 'How much money would you take to burn with fire your fathers when they die?' And they cried with a great voice that he should speak no such blasphemy. Thus it is that men think, and I hold that Pindar spoke rightly in his poem when he said that law was king over all.'[23] There you have law, king over men and gods, but a capricious monarch commanding here this, there that.