BOOK II. ends the terrible drought. Oidipous has understood and interpreted the divine voices of Typhon, or the thunder, which the gods alone
can comprehend.^ The sun appears once more in the blue heaven, in which he sprang into life in the morning; in other words, Oidipous is wedded to his mother lokaste, and the long train of woes which had their root in this awful union now began to fill the land with
a misery as great as that from which Oidipous had just delivered it^
As told by ^schylos and Sophokles, it is a fearful tale ; and yet if
the poets had but taken any other of the many versions in which
the myth has come down to us, it could never have come into
existence. They might, had they pleased, have made Euryganeia,
the broad shining dawn, the mother of Antigone and Ismene, of
Eteokles and Polyneikes, instead of lokaste, the violet light, which
reappears in the names lole, lamos, lolaos, lasion, and lobates.
Undoubtedly the mother of Oidipous might be either Euryganeia, lokaste or Astymedousa, who are all assigned to him as his wives; but only by giving the same name to his mother and his wife could the moral horrors of the story be developed, and the idea once awakened took too strong a hold on their imagination to be lightly dislodged.
The Thus far the story resolves itself into a few simple phrases, which Oidipous spoke of the thundercloud as looming over the city from day to day, while the waters remained imprisoned in its gloomy dungeons, like the rock which seemed ever going to fall on Tantalos,—of the sun as alone being able to understand her mysterious mutterings and so to defeat her scheme, and of his union with the mother from whom he had been parted in his infancy. The sequel is not less transparent. lokaste, on learning the sin of which she has unwittingly been guilty, brings her life to an end, and Oidipous tears out the eyes which he declares to be unworthy to look any longer on the things which had thus far filled him with delight. In other words, the sun has blinded himself Clouds and darkness have closed in about him, and the clear light is blotted out of the heaven.^
' The conduct of Signy, mother of winter), but the tears of Rapunzel (the Sinljotli in the Hclj^i Saga, stands out tears which Eus sheds on the death of in marked contrast with that of Oidipous Memnon) fall on the sightless eyeballs, and lokaste. and his sight is given to him again. In
2 lireal, Le Mythc d" Edipc, 17,
- So in the German story of Rapun-
Dioskouroi or Asvins, the Babes in the zel, the prince, when his bride is torn 'ood) one of the brothers, who is a from him, loses his senses with grief, tailor, and who is thrust out to starve, and springing from the tower (like falls into the hands of a shoemaker who Kcphalos from the Leukadian clilT) gives him some bread only on condition falls into thorns which put out his eyes. that he will consent to lose his eyes. Thus he wo-'.ders blind in the forest (of His sight is, of course, restored as in the the story of the Two Wanderers (the
