The poet Sophocles, the rival and survivor of Euripides — for he lived to extreme old age — on being accused by his own son of insanity on the ground that the advance of age had destroyed his wits, is said to have produced that matchless tragedy, his Oedipus Coloneus, on which he happened to be engaged at the time, and to have read it aloud to the jury without adding another word in his defence, except that he bade them without hesitation to condemn him as insane if an old man’s poetry displeased them. At that point — so I have ............