letter. Creon carries his point, but his victory becomes his misery; Antigone incurs death, but dies with her work done. In the "Philoctetes," again, there is an antithesis of a like kind. Philoctetes is injured and noble; Odysseus is dishonest but patriotic. Odysseus wishes to capture Philoctetes in the public interests of the army at Troy. He urges on Neoptolemus that the end sanctifies the means. Neoptolemus at first recoils; then consents; finally deserts the plot in a passion of generous pity for Philoctetes. The result is that Philoctetes is brought back to Troy, but by fair means. He eventually agrees to do that of which he had loathed the thought, and goes back to his hated enemies under circumstances which make that return the happiest event of his life. Odysseus, on the other hand, gains his end; but not by the means which he had proposed to himself. He carries Philoctetes back to Troy; but only after his stratagems have been foiled. Neoptolemus, meanwhile—true, after his first lapse, to honour—conquers without a change of front.
It is that same instinct of harmony which has already been seen to rule the work of Sophocles in its largest phases, which gives its motive and its delicate precision to his management of dramatic irony. He works out the contrasts of drama so clearly and with such fineness because he aims at showing how a beneficent power at last solves them; not, as in Æschylus, by victory over a supernatural evil power, nor, as in Euripides, by abrupt inter-
