“_’The royal line of Argos springs from her. Time fails to tell the story to its close: But of her strain one valiant shall be born, And famous with the bow; he from these ills Shall loose me.’ Thus the titaness, my mother, Primeval Themis, prophesied to me, But of the ways and means too long it were To tell thee, and it profits not to know._“[20] To immortal eyes, seeing the end in the beginning, it was a glorious destiny; one to compensate perhaps, if not to justify, all that she had endured. But Io is only a mortal maid. The vision of the future opens before her in one radiant moment, and then all is dark again, and nothing remains but her inexplicable pain. Even before Prometheus has finished speaking the cloud had fallen upon her mind again. “_Alas! Woe worth the day! Again a thrill, a spasm of frenzy Shoots through me, soul-distracting: The unforged goad of the gadfly Stings me afresh; and my seated heart Knocks at my ribs for fear, My sight swims, and my senses reel; And a frantic gust of madness sweeps me Wide of the course...._”[20] Tormented and distracted, she rushes from the scene as wildly as she had come; but as the titan and the sea-nymphs sadly watch her go, they see that her face is set now toward the East. ----- Footnote 20: From Mr Robert Whitelaw’s translation of the _Prometheus_ (Clarendon Press, 1s. net). _Sophocles: Jocasta_ Jocasta, in _Œdipus the King_ of Sophocles, is a very real woman. Moreover, though she is a splendidly dramatic figure, she is not heroic in anything save her death. True, she is a queen, deriving royalty through several generations from Cadmus himself; and possessing the throne of Thebes so surely that when the king her husband died she had perforce to marry with his successor in order to establish him in the kingship. But despite her special royalty, which makes her, as Professor Murray has pointed out, like one of the consecrated queens of early times: despite the extreme deference which is paid to her, the weight that attaches to her counsel, and the sense of brooding fate that clings about her, she is before all an appealing and convincing human creature. This vivid reality is a new fact in our study of Greek heroines, and the reason for it is that we have come now to the Drama of Sophocles. We have seen, so far, the women of Homer and those of Æschylus; and we have observed one or two characteristics which distinguish them.