bulwark to the country possessing it. Consequently the Thebans intend to capture him, keep him close to their border till he dies, and then bury him in Theban ground. Œdipus meantime has reached Colônus, in Attica, the seat of the 'Semnai,' 'Dread Goddesses,' where he knows that he is doomed to die. Theseus accepts him as a citizen, and he passes mysteriously away. This is the only play in which Sophocles has practically dispensed with a plot, and it is interesting to see that the experiment produces some of his very highest work. The poetry leaves an impression of superiority to ordinary technique, of contentment with its own large and reflective splendour. But the time was past when a mere situation could by imaginative intensity be made to fill a whole play. Sophocles has to insert 'epeisodia' of Creon and Polyneikes, and to make the first exciting by a futile attempt to kidnap the princesses, the second by the utterance of the father's curse. The real appeal of the play is to the burning, half-desperate patriotism of the end of the War Time. The glory of Athens, the beauty of the spring and the nightingales at Colônus, the holy Acropolis which can never be conquered, represent the modern ideals of that patriotism: the legendary root of it is given in the figure of Theseus, the law-abiding, humane, and religious king; in the eternal reward won by the bold generosity of Athens; in the rejection of Argos and the malediction laid for ever on turbulent and cruel Thebes. The piece is reported to be effective on the stage. Certainly the spiritual majesty of Œdipus at the end is among the great things of Greek poetry; and the rather harsh contrast which it forms with the rage of the
