Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/369

347 LITERATURE OP ANCIENT GREECE. 347 with bold and strong colours. The action of the drama has reference throughout to the discovery of these horrors, and the moral ideas which are developed in it, must be brought out in this discovery, if they are particularly contained in it. Let us consider, then, what changes take place in CEdipus in the course of the tragedy. At the beginning, not only is he praised by the Thebans in the most emphatic terms as the best and wisest of men, but he also shows that he is himself fully con- scious of his own worth, and well satisfied with the measures he has set on foot, in the first instance, to investigate the cause of the de- structive malady, and then to discover the murderer of Lai'us; and in this he is not disturbed by any misgiving, not even by the faintest shadow of a suspicion, that he himself may be this murderer. In this self-reliance, and the confidence which springs from it, we have an explanation of the violence and unjustifiable warmth with which CEdipus repels the declaration of Teiresias, that he himself by his presence has brought pollution on the land, which he ought to remove by withdrawing as soon as possible. Here an occasion was presented on which CEdipus should have felt how vain and perishable human greatness is, how weak the virtue of man ; on which he ought to have examined his heart, and to have questioned himself whether there was no dark spot in his life to which this fearful crime might correspond. Such, however, is his self-confidence, that where the truth comes so near to him, he sees only falsehood and treason, and maintains his fancied security, until, in a conversation with Iocasta, when she men- tions that Lai'us was murdered at a place where three roads meet, he is for the first time disturbed by a sudden suspicion,* and an entire re- volution takes place in his mind. It is particularly worthy of remark that the steps which Iocasta takes to tranquillize her husband, and to banish all the terror occasioned by the prophesies of Teiresias, are just those which lead to a discovery of all the horrors; she endeavours to prove the nothingness of the prophetic art by means of that which shortly afterwards confirms its authority. We may recognise in this, as in many other features of this tragedy, distinct traces of that sublime irony, which expresses the poet's sorrow for the limitation of human existence by striking contrasts between the conceptions of the individual and the real state of the case. It is expressed in many passages of the tragedies of Sophocles, but is particularly developed in King (Edipus, for the theme of the whole is the infatuation of mail in regard to his own destiny, and in this play the idea is echoed even by the words and turns of expression. f The same sort of peripeteia is further repeated pu%ris ■xXo.vnu.a xa.va.x.ii/r,tn; (pptvuv- f See Mr. Thirlwall's excellent essay "on tlie Irony of Sophocles," in the Philolo- gical Museum, Vol. II. No VI. p. I*!.
 * Olov /ju a,Kouira.vT apr'iu; !£((> yuvcci,