that the bow, and Philoctêtes with it, must come to Troy, if the town is to be taken. It is all but impossible to approach the injured man; but Odysseus, the great contriver, agrees to try it, and takes with him the son of Achilles, Neoptolemus. Odysseus himself is known to Philoctêtes; so he keeps in the background, and puts Neoptolemus forward to entrap the man on board his ship by ingenious lies. The young soldier reluctantly consents. He wins entirely the confidence of the old broken-hearted solitary; everything is in train for the kidnapping, when a spasm of agony from the incurable wound comes on Philoctêtes. Neoptolemus does his best to tend him, and cannot face his victim's gratitude. At the last moment he confesses the truth. Philoctêtes has taken him for his single friend; he is really a tool in the hand of his cruellest enemy. This very interesting and Euripidean knot is loosed in the bad Euripidean manner by Heracles as "a god from the Mêchanê" (see p. 268).
The Œdipus at Colônus is a play of the patriotic-archæological type, of which our earliest example is the Heracleidæ of Euripides. It turns on the alleged possession by Attica of the grave of Œdipus—evidently only 'alleged,' and that not in early tradition, for we find in the play that no such supposed grave was visible. When Œdipus is an old man, and has, as it were, worn out the virulence of the curse upon him by his long innocent wanderings with his daughter Antigone, news is brought to him from Thebes by Ismênê of a new oracle. His body is to keep its 'hagos' or taboo—the power of the supernaturally pure or supernaturally polluted—and will be a divine
