"Yea, curses shall possess thy seat and throne, If ancient justice o'er the laws of earth Reign with the Thunder-god. March on to ruin! Spurned and disowned, the basest of the base, And with thee bear this burden; o'er thine head I pour a prophet's doom; nor throne nor home Waits on the sharpness of thy levelled spear: Thy very land of refuge hath no welcome; Thine eyes have looked their last on hollow Argos."[1]
Heartless renegade though he is, Polynices is not without some touch of a nobler spirit. He has learned his fate, and must return; but he will not discourage his friends by imparting to them the old man's words of doom. And so he tears himself from the embraces of his sisters, rejecting almost angrily the advice of Antigone, that he should lead his army back to Argos. "How," he asks, "can he
"Lead back an army that could deem I trembled?"
He makes a last request of his sisters—that they will give his body seemly burial; the next play will show how faithfully this charge was kept by one of them. And then, with a blessing on his lips, and a prayer that the gods will keep them at least from all harm, he goes forth as Saul went forth to Gilboa, as Otho headed his legions at Bedriacum—knowing himself to be a doomed man. So touching is the heroism, that (as a French critic observes) we know not whether we ought to condemn Polynices with Œdipus, to pity him with Theseus, or to love him with Antigone.[2]
- ↑ Lord Lytton's Athens, ii. 542.
- ↑ Patin, Etudes sur Sophocle, p. 243.
