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naked power the brethren armed, a starveling realm was their cause of battle. And while they dispute which of the twain shall plough scant Dirce’s squalid fields, or boast himself on the Tyrian exile’s lowly throne, the laws of God and man are broken, righteousness perisheth, and honour both in life and death. Alas! unhappy ones! what limits set ye to your wrath? what if it were the sky’s farthest bounds ye dared so impiously, whereon the sun looks when he issues from the eastern gate and when he sinks into his Iberian haven, or the lands he touches afar with slanting devious ray, lands that the North wind freezes or the moist South warms with fiery breath? nay, even though the wealth of Phrygia and of Tyre were gathered as the prize! A land of horror and a city God-accursed sufficed to rouse your hatred, and hell’s madness was the price of sitting in the seat of Oedipus!

And now by the losing of the hazard Polynices saw his reign deferred. How proud a day for thee, fierec tyrant,^[1] when alone and unchallenged in thy palaee thou didst look and behold all power thine, all other men thy subjects, and never a head but bowed beneath thy sway! Yet already murmurs are creeping among the Echionian^[2] folk, the people is at silent variance with its prince, and, as is the wont of a crowd, ’tis the claimant that they love. And one among them, whose chief thought it was to hurt by mean and venomous speech and never to bear the yoke of rulers with submissive neck, said: “Is this the lot that the hard fates have appointed for our Ogygian^[3] land, so often to change those whom we must fear, and to give uncertain allegiance to an alternate sway? From hand to hand they toss the