actors on the stage. Lucretius describes this commonest of all feelings in well-known lines: "Sweet it is," says he, "when on the great sea winds are troubling the waters, to behold from land another's deep distress. . . . 'Tis sweet again to look upon armies battling on the plains without sharing in the danger."[1]
It was the skilful manner in which all these emotions are worked up by Sophocles in this play that caused Aristotle, the great critic, to select 'Œdipus the King' as the model and masterpiece of Tragedy.
We are carried back by the poet to the same mythic period, with no pretence to historical date, to which Shakspeare carries us back in his kindred play of 'King Lear'[2]—an age of giants, when men's passions were at blood-heat, when atrocious crimes were followed by atrocious vengeance, and when the general violence and brutality of manners is only relieved by brighter touches in such characters as Theseus and Kent, Cordelia and Antigone. Œdipus himself might well say with Lear, that "the best and soundest of his time had been but rashness."
Laius, king of Thebes, took for his wife Jocasta, "daughter of the wise Menœceus," but she bore him no children. Then in his distress he asked help of the god of Delphi; and the god declared that a son should be born to him, but by the hands of this son he should surely die. As soon as the child, the hero of this tragedy, is born, his mother intrusts him to a servant, with strict charge that he should be left to
