This version agrees in the main with that of Sophocles, and points to the antiquity of the story. Even in those early times the fate of Jocasta and Œdipus was part of an ancient myth. Like the story of Io, remote ancestress of the founder of their city, it is a tale of wrong wrought upon mortals by a god. Perhaps it is not so primitive as the Io legend. There is nothing in it quite so naïve as the idea of the heifer-maiden loved by the supreme god and mercilessly hunted by his jealous queen. The Olympian hierarchy is now established, with its system of greater and lesser gods, and Zeus at their head has grown, in accordance with the theory of Æschylus, wiser with age. Apollo is now the persecutor. And with the development in the divine order goes a corresponding complexity in the human elements of the story. The actors in it are the instruments of their own suffering. The inimical power is not now frank tyranny. Its victims even believe it to be friendly, or at least placable; and it is by their own deeds that the decree against them is brought to pass. Yet this apparent advance still leaves the story in a dark past, far behind the poets. And there are some aspects of it—the curse fulfilled by Œdipus of parricide and incest; and the stark unreason with which it was regarded—which make us feel that the primitive age has only just given place to one of gross superstition. The essence of the tragedy lies in the double fact of Apollo’s hostility to Œdipus and Jocasta and their ignorance of it. When Laius and Jocasta were young upon the throne of Thebes they prayed to Apollo to give them a son. The oracle at Delphi replied to Laius, “I will give thee a son, but it is doomed that thou leave the sunlight by the hands of thy child.” Thus the decree was launched. Laius and Jocasta trembled at the doom, and considered how it might be averted. When their son was born, they took a cruel and desperate means to save its father’s life. Three days after his birth they handed over the babe to a herdsman, to be exposed on Mt. Kithairon. And first they pierced his heels, to ensure his death. So Jocasta, out of love for her husband and fear of the oracle, brought herself to a deed which poisoned all her life. Yet it was of no avail against fate. For the man who took her babe had pity on it; and meeting a friendly herdsman who was in the service of Polybus, king of Corinth, he gave the child to him. Polybus and his queen Merope were childless; and the herdsman believed that they would welcome the little foundling. He was not mistaken: calling him Œdipus from his swelled feet, they brought him up as their son.