ceded Sophocles are mirrored for us in the pages of Herodotus. The deep moral feeling which prompts such warnings as that of the oracle to Glaucus, when tempted to commit perjury—"The Oath has a nameless child that wreaks destruction"—appears there side by side with a strong vein of fatalism and pessimism.
1. No man can escape his destiny. The course of every life is predetermined; and though a god may sometimes obtain a boon of the Fates (as the Delphic Oracle professed that Phœbus had done in the case of Crœsus), their decrees, even if thus delayed, are not less ultimately sure.
2. Malignity is an essential attribute of the divine nature. God is envious of human prosperity, and uplifts men only to cast them down. This doctrine was at first intended as a corrective of the natural presumption of the fortunate man; but was also the expression of profound bitterness and disappointment, as the story of Mycerinus shows.
3. The same spirit of sadness is expressed in the words of Artabanus to Xerxes, who had wept over the mortality of his great army: "Not one of these whom thou beholdest but will often think it better for himself to die than to live. The sweetness of life once tasted, the cruel hand of God is presently felt."
A sense of the misery and ephemeral shortness of human life had been growing up in Ionia for centuries with the growth of luxury under the impending shadow of Eastern despotisms. It finds utterance even in Homer, and is the characteristic note of the pleasure-loving Mimnermus. The last word of the earlier Ionian philosophy was the sad word "Change."
The same dark view of life had been expressed in other parts of Hellas. Thus Theognis of Megara had sung:—
"Far best is never to be born; next best by far, to die."
It is obvious that in all this there is a strain of thought and sentiment that prepares a fitting soil for tragedy. And the reader of Sophocles will often be
