For this reason, and also because the poet shows his characters moving in intimate human relationships, the women of Sophocles are intensely living creatures. Electra in her conflict with Chrysothomis, and Antigone with Ismene, are of the stuff of life; and the situations thus created are pure drama. Here two great natures clash. Closely bound by the ties of blood and affection, but at the opposite poles of temperament, the struggle between them is all the more bitter from the intimacy of their relationship. Both claim our esteem and both are sincerely confident in the purity of their intentions. But each mistrusts the other, believing her to be fatally misguided or wilfully blind. It is by this faculty of seeing all sides of an issue, or, as Matthew Arnold expressed it, “to see life steadily and see it whole,” that Sophocles has heightened and deepened the dramatic values of a story. Out of that, too, he has made Jocasta, with all her state and despite the unnatural horror with which she is touched, a pitiable figure. Here again two noble natures, near and very dear to each other, are brought into conflict. In this case, however, there is an added element of tragic irony which increases the dramatic power threefold. For we know, as we watch the tender comradeship of Œdipus and Jocasta, that there is this sinister thing in the background, ready to flame out at any instant and make them loathsome in each other’s eyes. And the moment when the shameful truth is revealed, literally dragged to light by Œdipus to his own undoing, is perhaps the most awful in Greek tragedy. The story belongs to the Theban cycle, of which we have already heard. It is older than Homer, who calls Jocasta _Epicasta_; and it had many variants. In the Eleventh Book of the _Odyssey_ there is the quaint epitome of it which the hero gives when he is describing his visit to the World of the Dead. Among the shades which throng there he sees Jocasta. “_And then beheld I Epicasta fair, Oedipus’ mother, her who unaware Did a strange deed through ignorance of mind, To intermarry with the son she bare._ “_And he his mother wedded, having slain His father: and these things the Gods made plain To all men suddenly; then he among The folk Cadmean held a troublous reign,_ “_In lovely Thebes, according to the fate By purpose of the Gods predestinate For evil: but she went her way alone To the strong Warder of the darkling gate._“[21]