naturally suggests an epic poem, and not a tragedy. Perhaps Jocasta, the mother of the hostile brothers, is the most prominent personage, but yet her death is only a sort of appendix to the sacrifice of Creon's son, Menœkeus, and to the mutual slaughter of the brothers. All the scenes of the play, though thus loosely connected, are full of pathos and beauty, and hence no play of Euripides has been more frequently copied or quoted. The conception of the two brothers is very fine, Polynices, who is the exile and the assailant, being the softer character, and relenting in his hate at the moment of his death. Eteocles, on the contrary, who is on the patriotic and popular side of defending Thebes from foreign attack, is drawn a hard and cruel despot, who defends his case by the bold assertion that he now holds the throne, that none but a fool would resign so great a prize, and who dies in silence.
Antigone is introduced near the opening of the play for the sake of the celebrated scene on the walls, when her old attendant slave (παιδαγωγός) whom Dolce calls a Bailo, and Schiller a Hofmeister, shows her the various chiefs. This scene, of which the earliest form is the discourse between Helen and Priam on the walls of Troy (in the third book of the Iliad), has often since been copied in various literature. The critics quote instances from the Latin poet Statius (in his Thebaid), from Tasso, from the Persian Firdusi (wherever he found it), and in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. The princess reappears at the close of the play, with a character combining the features of her two portraits in Sophocles' Antigone and second Œdipus. The most dramatic part of the play is the dialogue between the brothers, and Jocasta's efforts to reconcile them, followed by the narrative of their death.
If the choral odes, which are very elegant, do not aid the action, but are rather calm contemplations of the mythical history of Thebes, Euripides would doubtless defend himself by pleading that he had
