There remain the _Electra_ and the _Antigone_, and the first of these is a signal example of the importance for a dramatist of choice of subject. Æschylus and Euripides have both left us plays dealing with the same story, and a comparison with the three tragedies will reveal the essential differences between the three poets. A dramatist must share—imaginatively at least—in his characters’ thoughts; and women like Clytemnestra and Electra were so beyond the range of Sophocles’ experience and sympathy that he is quite unable to make them live. Like everything that Sophocles wrote, the _Electra_ is full of literary accomplishment. The epic method, for example, is most ingeniously adapted to the theatre, and a vivid narrative of the chariot race in which Orestes is supposed to meet his death forms the centre of the play, but there is no real grip on the dramatic situation: it is literature, not life. In the _Antigone_, on the other hand, the poet is dealing with a subject thoroughly congenial to his temperament, the conflict between law and the individual, and one independent of sex, and the play is a magnificent example of his art. Here certainly the central figure is a woman, or, at least, a girl; but the interest does not depend upon her sex, for little dramatic use is made of the Hæmon episode. It is not her sex but her social position that affects the problem of the play, a problem vital enough in itself without any sex interest—‘How far is an individual justified in setting his or her conscience against the law of the State?’ Antigone is a girl orphan, born out of legal wedlock, a slave without a master; and it is a crowning stroke of irony to pit her lonely figure against the majesty of man-made law. To modern readers she seems intensely pathetic, and an Athenian audience would, doubtless, have sympathised with her as a rebel, if not as a woman. There is no word in Greek for ‘to command,’ and their only word for ‘to obey’ means literally ‘to allow oneself to be persuaded,’ so that the conscientious objector was not uncommon. But Sophocles had been a general, and knew by experience the way of Athenian soldiers, and it is not certain that he appreciates his heroine’s wilfulness in quite so favourable a light; for, as we see in his other plays, he was essentially on the side of law. He was rather an observer, with a wonderful command of language, than an original thinker or critic of the established order; and it is a curious turn of fortune for a poet, who had by no means a close or a sympathetic knowledge of woman’s character, that the _Antigone_, the only play where a woman takes a vital part, should be by far the greatest of his works.