[302] As long ago as 1836-38 a Swiss author, Heinrich Hoessli, wrote a remarkable book with the title The Unreliability of External Signs as Indications of Sex in Body and Mind.  I may add here that if it were known how many of the “shrieking sisterhood” who are clamoring for masculine “rights” for women, are among the unfortunates who were born with male brains in female bodies, the movement would collapse as if struck by a ton of dynamite.  These amazons often wonder why the great mass of women are so hard to stir up in this matter.  The reason is that the great mass of women—­heaven be thanked!—­have feminine minds as well as feminine bodies.

[303] Probably no passage in any drama has ever been more widely discussed than the nine lines I have just summarized.  As long ago as the sixteenth century the astronomer Petrus Codicillus pronounced them spurious.  Goethe once remarked to Eckermann; (III., March 28, 1827) that he considered them a blemish in the tragedy and would give a good deal if some philologist would prove that Sophocles had not written them.  A number of eminent philologists—­Jacob, Lehrs, Hauck, Dindorf, Wecklein, Jebb, Christ, and others—­have actually bracketed them as not genuine; but if they are interpolations, they must have been added within a century after the play was written, for Aristotle refers to them (Rhet.  III., 16,9) in these words:  “And should any circumstance be incredible, you must subjoin the reason; as Sophocles does.  He furnishes an example in the Antigone, that she mourned more for her brother than for a husband and children; for these, if lost, might again be hers.

     “’But father now and mother both being lost,
     A brother’s name can ne’er be hailed again.’”

It is noticeable that Aristotle should pronounce Antigone’s preference strange or incredible from a Greek point of view; that point of view being, as we have seen, that a woman’s first duties are toward her husband, for whom she should ever sacrifice herself.  It has been plausibly suggested that Sophocles borrowed the idea of those nine lines from his friend Herodotus, who (III., 118) relates the story of Darius permitting the wife of Intophernes to save one of her relatives from death and who chooses her brother, for reasons like those advanced by Antigone.  It has been shown (Zeitschrift f. d.  Oesterreich Gymn., 1898; see also Frankfurter Zeitung, July 22, 24, 27, 1899; Hermes, XXVIII.) that this idea occurs in old tales and poems of India, Persia, China, as well as among the Slavs, Scandinavians, etc.  If Sophocles did introduce this notion into his tragedy (and there is no reason for doubting it except the unwarranted assumption that he was too great a genius to make such a blunder), he did it in a bungling way, for inasmuch as Antigone’s brother is dead she cannot benefit her family by favoring him at the expense of her betrothed; and moreover, her act of sacrificing