Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/408

Argos (not named) merely represents the sovereign conscious of his duty to suppliants. The reason of the women's objection to the marriage is hardly expressed, but force is wrong, the abandonment of suppliants is a breach of religion, and the Divine punishment of both is certain:

“Nay, not though he be dead and in the Unseen
Will he escape—the worker of such deeds.
E'en there, they say, among the shades there sits
Another Zeus to render final doom
On sin that man commits.”

In the Persians, again, which represents the horror with which news of the defeat of Xerxes at Salamis is received in Persia, what the poet cares for most is to show the punishment of pride and presumption, and of the sacrilege committed by burning the temples in Greece. Xerxes, though a mortal, expected to be able to defy the gods. He put chains upon the sea—the divine Hellespont: his army coming to Hellas scrupled not to burn the images and the temples of the gods and to overturn their altars. Thence came his fall:—

“Ill fares the man whose heart is swollen with pride,—
High pride that breaking into flower gives forth
A deadly crop—a harvest all of tears.”

In the Seven against Thebes it is the effect of a father's curse and the inevitable and abiding consequences of sin that the poet is illustrating. When Oedipus blinded himself in horror at his involuntary crime his sons Eteocles and Polynices imprisoned