_ who is also a _Theos_, and can make rain or blue sky,
pestilence or fertility. This explains many things in the Priest's first
speech, in the attitude of the Chorus, and in Oedipus' own language
after the discovery. It partly explains the hostility of Apollo, who is
not a mere motiveless Destroyer but a true Olympian crushing his
Earth-born rival. And in the same way the peculiar royalty of Jocasta,
which makes Oedipus at times seem not the King but the Consort of the
Queen, brings her near to that class of consecrated queens described in
Dr. Frazer's _Lectures on the Kingship_, who are "honoured as no woman
now living on the earth."

The story itself, and the whole spirit in which Sophocles has treated
it, belong not to the fifth century but to that terrible and romantic
past from which the fifth century poets usually drew their material. The
atmosphere of brooding dread, the pollution, the curses; the "insane and
beastlike cruelty," as an ancient Greek commentator calls it, of
piercing the exposed child's feet in order to ensure its death and yet
avoid having actually murdered it (_Schol. Eur. Phoen._, 26); the whole
treatment of the parricide and incest, not as moral offences capable of
being rationally judged or even excused as unintentional, but as
monstrous and inhuman pollutions, the last limit of imaginable horror:
all these things take us back to dark regions of pre-classical and even
pre-homeric belief. We have no right to suppose that Sophocles thought
of the involuntary parricide and metrogamy as the people in his play do.
Indeed, considering the general tone of his contemporaries and friends,
we may safely assume that he did not. But at any rate he has allowed no
breath of later enlightenment to disturb the primaeval gloom of his
atmosphere.

Does this in any way make the tragedy insincere? I think not. We know
that people did feel and think about "pollution" in the way which
Sophocles represents; and if they so felt, then the tragedy was there.

* * * * *

I think these considerations explain the remarkable absence from this
play of any criticism of life or any definite moral judgment. I know
that some commentators have found in it a "humble and unquestioning
piety," but I cannot help suspecting that what they saw was only a
reflection from their own pious and unquestioning minds. Man is indeed
shown as a "plaything of Gods," but of Gods strangely and
incomprehensibly m