of the two terms. Tartarus is here besought, as plainly as language can express it, to drive Polynices out, not to take him in. There can be only one explanation of that prayer. Polynices' death has already been foretold; but his father's curse pursues him beyond death. Tartarus, in whose keeping the dead should lie, is conjured to drive him forth from the home of the dead, even as the peasants now pray that the earth may cast out those whom they hate.
And the context shows clearly that the curse was so understood by Polynices. Turning to Antigone and Ismene with impassioned entreaty he implores them—them at least, though all others forsake him and turn against him—if so be his father's cruel imprecations come to fulfilment and they, his sisters, ever return to their home, not to leave him dishonoured, but to lay him in the grave and to grant him the guerdons of the dead[1]. Why then this insistence, unless the father's curse had extended beyond death? Merely to introduce a reference to the plot of the Antigone? Clearly more than that. Polynices was to die bound by his father's curse, slain by his brother's hand, doubly debarred, if modern beliefs be a key to ancient, from dissolution and from reception into the nether world. The words of his father's invocation of Tartarus had conveyed to his mind the certainty of a doom outlasting death, that Tartarus should not receive him, but reject him from the home of the dead. Only one faint gleam of hope was left, that by the fulfilment of those last offices of love toward the departed, which were for all men a passport to the lower world, he, burdened and bound with a father's curse, both slayer and slain of his own brother, might yet be not debarred from his last home, but free to enter into rest.
Thus Sophocles in language less popular, but hardly less clear, than that of Euripides proclaims that the belief in the non-*dissolution or rejection of the body by the earth and the powers under the earth was a terror as potent then as it is now, and an ever effective weapon of malediction. Aeschylus had gone even further, and, by enlisting this terror among the threats uttered on behalf of a dead man by a god in his most holy
- ↑ Soph. O. C., 1405.
