ed
for an oracle commanding him to die for his people (pp. 6, 7). And he
never thinks of refusing that "task" any more than he tries to elude the
doom that actually comes, or to conceal any fact that tells against him.
If Oedipus had been an ordinary man the play would have been a very
different and a much poorer thing.

Jocasta is a wonderful study. Euripides might have brought her character
out more explicitly and more at length, but even he could not have made
her more living or more tragic, or represented more subtly in her
relation to Oedipus both the mother's protecting love and the mother's
authority. As for her "impiety," of which the old commentaries used to
speak with much disapproval, the essential fact in her life is that both
her innocence and her happiness have, as she believes, been poisoned by
the craft of priests. She and Laius both "believed a bad oracle": her
terror and her love for her husband made her consent to an infamous act
of cruelty to her own child, an act of which the thought sickens her
still, and about which she cannot, when she tries, speak the whole
truth. (See note on p. 42.) And after all her crime was for nothing! The
oracle proved to be a lie. Never again will she believe a priest.

As to Tiresias, I wish to ask forgiveness for an unintelligent criticism
made twelve years ago in my _Ancient Greek Literature_, p. 240. I
assumed then, what I fancy was a common assumption, that Tiresias was a
"sympathetic" prophet, compact of wisdom and sanctity and all the
qualities which beseem that calling; and I complained that he did not
consistently act as such. I was quite wrong. Tiresias is not anything so
insipid. He is a study of a real type, and a type which all the
tragedians knew. The character of the professional seer or "man of God"
has in the imagination of most ages fluctuated between two poles. At one
extreme are sanctity and superhuman wisdom; at the other fraud and
mental disease, self-worship aping humility and personal malignity in
the guise of obedience to God. There is a touch of all these qualities,
good and bad alike, in Tiresias. He seems to me a most life-like as well
as a most dramatic figure.

As to the Chorus, it generally plays a smaller part in Sophocles than in
Euripides and Aeschylus, and the _Oedipus_ forms no exception to that
rule. It seems to me that Sophocles was feeling his way towards a
technique which would have approached that of the New Comedy or even the