Tiresias is reputed to possess the largest share of supernatural knowledge. From him the truth which the oracle has withheld may be best ascertained. But Œdipus has anticipated this prudent counsel, and on Creon's suggestion has already sent for Tiresias, and is surprized that he has not yet arrived. At length the venerable man appears. His orbs of outward sight have long been quenched: but so much the clearer and stronger is the light which shines inward, and enables him to discern the hidden things of heaven and earth. The king conjures him to exert his prophetic power for the deliverance of his country and its ruler. But instead of a ready compliance, the request is received with expressions of grief and despondency: it is first evaded, and at length peremptorily refused. The indignation of Œdipus is roused by the unfeeling denial, and at length he is provoked to declare his suspicion that Tiresias has been himself, so far as his blindness permitted, an accessary to the regicide. The charge kindles in its turn the anger of the seer, and extorts from him the dreadful secret which he had resolved to suppress. He bids his accuser obey his own recent proclamation, and thenceforward as the perpetrator of the deed which had polluted the land, to seal his unhallowed lips. Enraged at the audacious recrimination, Œdipus taunts Tiresias with his blindness: a darkness, not of the eyes only, but of the mind; he is a child of night, whose puny malice can do no hurt to one whose eyes are open to the light of day. Yet who can have prompted the old man to the impudent calumny? Who but the counsellor at whose suggestion he had been consulted? The man who, when Œdipus and his children are removed, stands nearest to the throne? It is a conspiracy—a plot laid by Creon, and hatched by Tiresias. The suspicion once admitted becomes a settled conviction, and the king deplores the condition of royalty, which he finds thus exposed to the assaults of envy and ambition. But his resentment, vehement as it is, at Creon's ingratitude, is almost forgotten in his abhorence and contempt of the hoary impostor who has sold himself to the traitor. Even his boasted art is a juggle and a lie. Else, why was it not exerted when the Sphinx propounded her fatal riddle? The seer then was not Tiresias but Œdipus. The lips then closed by the consciousness of
