ill-fortuned journey I have ever made?
That voice I hear is my son’s! Hurry, men!
Go in by the breech torn in the stone, go
deeper in, to the very mouth, to see
if it’s the voice of Haemon
that I hear, or if the gods deceive me.”
So charged by our despairing lord,
1220
we looked inside; in the deepest part
of the tomb we saw her hanging by the neck,
fastened in a noose of woven silk,
and him, his arms about her waist, pressing
her close, bewailing his bride lost to death,
and his father’s deeds, and his unhappy love.
And when Creon saw it, with a dark groan
he kept on toward him, calling him, crying:
“What have you done? What came over you?
When, when were your senses stolen from you?
1230
Come out, my child, I beg you, I implore you!”
But his son, glancing at him with wild eyes,
spat in his face and, not answering a word, drew
his two-edged sword, but missed his father
who dodged the blow; and then, turning his rage
against himself, without a pause, he leaned
down hard and drove the blade into his side
halfway to the hilt. Still conscious, he took the girl
in a failing clasp and, gasping out his life,
sprinkled her white cheeks with drops of blood.
1240
He lies, a corpse embracing a corpse, his sad
marriage ended—in Hades’ halls, at least—
an example to mankind, that the worst evil
a man can own is lack of sense.
(Eurydice goes back into the palace.)
CHORUS LEADER: What do you make of that? The lady
has left again, without a word, good or bad.
MESSENGER: I’m troubled, too, but I feed on the hope
that now she knows of her son’s sorrows, she won’t stand
to hear them wailed in public, but at home
will trust her maids to lead the dirge within.
1250
For she has good sense, and won’t go astray.
CHORUS LEADER: I don’t know; I think that too much silence
and loud, useless crying are both worrisome.
MESSENGER: I’ll find out, then, if she’s not holding
something in, concealed in her heart’s rage.
I’ll go into the house. Yes, you have a point.
Too much silence, as you say, seems ominous.
(Exit Messenger, into the palace. Creon now enters, from the side, escorted by attendants bearing the body of Haemon.)*110
CHORUS: And now here comes the lord himself,
bearing in his hands a glaring reminder,
if I may say so, that no one else’s
1260
but his own delusion is at fault.
strophe 1
CREON: iō, blunders of a senseless mind,
stubborn, deadly!
(to the Chorus) You are looking on killers
and victims, all blood relatives!
The misery my plans have come to!
My son, young, with a young death—
aiai, aiai!—
you died, you’ve lost your life
for my mistakes, not your own!
1270
CHORUS LEADER: oimoi! Justice! You’ve seen it, I think, too late.
CREON: oimoi!
I have learned, to my sorrow. It was a god
on my head then, bearing down hard;
he struck and hurled me into savage ways,
uprooting joy, trampling it underfoot.
O sorrows, harsh sorrows of mortal men!
(The Messenger emerges from the palace and addresses Creon.)
MESSENGER: Master, it looks as if you’ve come with these
troubles in your hands only to find others
1280
waiting in the house, soon to be seen!
CREON: What worse evil could follow after these?
MESSENGER: Your wife is dead, the mother of this corpse,
in grief just now, of a stab wound still fresh.
antistrophe 1
CREON: iō,
iō, haven of Hades, too clogged to cleanse,
why, then, is it me, why me you destroy?
You there, with your bad news,
your message of sorrow, what do you tell me?
aiai! You’ve killed me again, a man already dead.
What do you say, boy?*111 What is this new blood—
1290
aiai, aiai!—
death on top of death,
my wife’s, that you drape about me now?
(The palace doors open and servants emerge, bearing the body of Eurydice, which they place at Creon’s side.)
CHORUS LEADER: You can see it now; it is no longer within.
CREON: oimoi—
I see a second evil in my sorrow.
What fate, then, what fate awaits me still?
Just now I held my child in my arms
in sorrow, and now I see
her, face to face, a corpse.
1300
pheu, pheu! Unhappy mother! O my child!
MESSENGER: Fallen upon the sharpened sword, beside the altar…*112
she closed her eyes in darkness, wailing
a marriage bereft of Megareus,*113 who died before,
and now of Haemon; and finally she invoked
your evil deeds against you; you killed her children.
strophe 2
CREON: aiai, aiai!
I shudder with dread. Why doesn’t someone strike me
in the chest with a sharpened sword?
1310
Miserable, aiai!
And miserable the anguish I dissolve in.
MESSENGER: Guilty of these deaths and those,*114
you were indicted by your dead wife here.
CREON: In what way did she shed her life’s blood?
MESSENGER: She stabbed herself beneath her liver,*115 when she heard
of her son’s fate, and the house filled with wailing.
CREON: ōmoi moi! Never upon another will these
deeds of mine, this guilt of mine, be fastened.
For I killed you, I killed you, I
1320
am the one, the guilty one, truly. iō, attendants!
take me, as quickly as you can,
take me away from here,
I who am not, I who am no more than no one.
CHORUS LEADER: I commend your wish, if any wish makes sense
in evils. Quickest is best, when they beset us.*116
antistrophe 2
CREON: Let it come, let it come,
let it appear, the fate that is fairest,
1330
that brings me my final day—
the best fate. Let it come, let it come,
that I not look again on another day.
CHORUS LEADER: These things are in the future. We must deal
with what’s at hand. That’s where our concern must be.
CREON: I’ve made my prayer for all I want.
CHORUS LEADER: Have done with prayers. Mortals can have
no release from ruin sent by fate.
CREON: Lead away this empty shell of a man.
1340
I killed you, my son, unwillingly—and you,
lying here as well. ōmoi, unhappy! Nor do I know
which of you two to look upon, where to lean;
everything’s crooked in my hands, and for the rest
a fate too hard to bear has leapt upon my head.
(Exit Creon, followed by attendants carrying the bodies, into the palace. As they are leaving, the Chorus speak the final words in anapests.)
CHORUS:
Wisdom is laid down as the first part
/> of happiness, by far; and then, to be
irreverent in nothing
1350
that concerns the gods.
Resounding words
repaid with resounding blows
in old age teach wisdom to the proud.
(Exit Chorus, to the side.)
* * *
*1 Antigone is thinking of the curse that has dogged her family for generations. As she and Ismene are the last surviving members of that family, the curse upon it may well come to an end with their deaths.
*2 Creon, whose personal name means “ruler,” “lord,” “master.” His title here, stratēgos, designates him as leader of the army.
*3 Eteocles and Polynices, sons of Oedipus and Jocasta. They agreed to rule the city of Thebes alternately, Eteocles the first year, Polynices the following year, and so on, but Eteocles refused to step down when the time came, precipitating a civil war.
*4 Polynices married Argeia, daughter of Adrastos, king of Argos, and led an army of Argives and others against Thebes. He and his six companions in arms were known as the “Seven against Thebes.”
*5 It’s clear from lines 192–97 that the burial has not yet occurred.
*6 I render Dawe’s emendation.
*7 When he realized that he had killed his father and married his mother, Oedipus blinded himself. Sophocles dramatized these events in Oedipus the King, written sometime after Antigone.
*8 The famous river at Thebes, west of the city.
*9 Individual for collective: the famous army of the “Seven against Thebes.” See note to line 15.
*10 The rising sun is pictured as a horseman; the hostile army is the steed whose ardor he curbs, forcing it to fly in defeat. The ancient Greek bit was equipped with spikes and could, when harshly applied, bloody a horse’s mouth.
*11 “Polynices” means something like “man of many quarrels,” “man of strife.”
*12 The god of war.
*13 The Theban army is called a dragon or serpent (the Greek drakon can mean either) because the original Thebans sprang from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus.
*14 Capaneus, not named here but easily identified from his description, was one of the famed “Seven against Thebes” (see note to line 15). Overconfident to the point of blasphemy, he vowed to sack Thebes even against the will of Zeus and the other gods.
*15 The device of Capaneus’ shield was a naked man carrying a torch, and under it was written “I shall burn the city.”
*16 The victorious Thebans are imagined mounting the armor stripped from the dead of their enemies on wooden frames erected at the place where they fell or turned and ran from battle; these were called tropaia (whence our word “trophies”) in honor of Zeus Tropaios, Zeus who causes the enemy to turn (i.e. flee) from battle. The practice, familiar in Sophocles’ own times, is an anachronism in the Heroic Age, in which the play is set.
*17 Polynices and Eteocles. See notes to lines 13 and 15.
*18 The god Dionysus, son of Zeus and Semele, the daughter of Cadmus, was born in Thebes. He is often called simply Bacchus.
*19 I translate the emendation of Hermann, followed by West. Creon is meant.
*20 Two or three syllables are missing here. “Leader” is offered by Griffith.
*21 Father of Oedipus and ruler of Thebes before him.
*22 I.e. the images of the gods in their temples.
*23 The sacking of a city was followed by the slaughter of its men and the enslavement of its women and children.
*24 Literally, “Be guards of my commands.”
*25 “Be guards” in the previous line is taken to mean “Be guards of the corpse”—i.e. see to it that no one buries it.
*26 The Greek word here is agos, “any matter of religious awe; pollution, guilt.” An ancient annotator commented on this line: “Those who see an unburied corpse and do not pile dust upon it were thought to be enageis [in agos, i.e. guilty of an offense against the gods].”
*27 The Guard and the other men posted to watch the corpse (217).
*28 The Greek has a single word here, the neuter plural of the adjective deinos used as a noun. The range of possible meanings is wide (“wonderful, terrible, strange, extraordinary,” according to Griffith; “clever” and “skillful” are frequent senses also), but since human daring is depicted throughout the ode as both admirable and frightening, it seemed better to translate the word twice than to privilege one connotation over the other.
*29 The Guard and Antigone could hardly be “friends” in our sense of the word. Perhaps he is a slave of the royal household and feels close to it.
*30 Zeus of the Courtyard (Zeus Herkeios) was the presiding deity of a Greek household, whose altar in the center of the house was also the center of family worship. The phrase means “my entire family.”
*31 In the Athenian marriage contract, the husband takes the wife “for the tillage of legitimate children.” Metaphorically, the wife is the field the husband plows.
*32 Lines 572, 574, and 576 are assigned to different speakers by different modern editors: 572 to Antigone, 574 to the Chorus Leader; Dawe would give all three to Antigone. The manuscripts assign all three, as here, to Ismene (with one exception: see on 576).
*33 Boeckh gave this line to the Chorus Leader. There is no reason, however, why the Chorus Leader should suddenly take up the issue of Haemon, raised by Ismene at line 568.
*34 In one group of manuscripts this line is assigned to the Chorus Leader, in another to Ismene. But, as Griffith points out, the Chorus Leader would not use the singular pronoun she (the same as in line 574) “when both sisters are under Creon’s sentence of death” (Griffith, p. 218).
*35 Ismene, in the previous line, meant to say “it has been decreed that Antigone die.” Creon answers as if her meaning were “it has seemed good that Antigone die” (the one phrase can mean either in Greek). The irony would lose its meanness if this line were addressed to the Chorus Leader (see previous note).
*36 It is untypical of Greek tragedy to have a character remain onstage during a choral ode, but some interpreters think that Creon does so during as many as three odes in this play.
*37 Ata, the keynote of the ode, occurring four times within it. Here it is rendered “ruin,” but it also designates the state of mind, the “delusion” (lines 614, 625) or “infatuation” that leads to “ruin,” “destruction” (624) or “disaster.”
*38 The adjective means “descended from Labdacus.” Laius, Oedipus, Eteocles, Polynices, Antigone, and Ismene are all members of the Labdacid dynasty.
*39 Antigone and Ismene, the last surviving children of Oedipus.
*40 Antigone’s prospective marriage to Haemon offered hope for the continuance of the family. Now that she and her unmarried sister have been sentenced to death, that hope has disappeared.
*41 I render Schneidewin’s emendation. The manuscripts have “the months of the gods.”
*42 Exactly the same phrase in the same position at the end of the strophe reinforces the contrast between the man of “great prosperity” there and the man of “modest means” here (Sophoclea, p. 131).
*43 Zeus in his capacity as god of the household. See note to line 487.
*44 In his Loeb edition, Lloyd-Jones, following Blaydes, brackets lines 663–67:
But whoever transgresses or does violence
to the laws, or thinks he can tell rulers
what to do, won’t meet with praise from me.
The man the city has appointed—him we heed,
in matters small and just and in their opposites!
Others follow Seidler, retaining the lines but transposing them, so that they fall between 671 and 672.
*45 An Athenian ephebe, on being admitted to service in the hoplite ranks, swore not to abandon the man fighting beside him. This is another anachronism, transferring to the Heroic Age a practice familiar in Sophocles’ day (see note to line 112).
*46 Line 687 is interpolated:
Yet all might tu
rn out well another way.
*47 The metaphor is from a writing tablet: two slabs of wood, one of which, smeared with wax, has words inscribed on it; the other serves as a protective cover. Haemon imagines opening such a tablet, only to find it blank.
*48 The gods of the Underworld, whose claims Antigone has honored. To punish her for that will anger them.
*49 Creon is swearing an oath. “Olympus” here means the Olympian gods, Zeus in particular, who punishes oath breakers.
*50 The word is used in the broadest sense, to include family as well as friends.
*51 The sentence proclaimed in Creon’s edict was death by public stoning (line 36).
*52 The small offering of food will make possible the claim that nature, not the king, is responsible for the death of the victim. Were Creon to shed the blood of Antigone, his niece, he would bring pollution on the city by committing familial murder.
*53 These are the laws that make Aphrodite’s power the formidable thing it is in the experience of all living beings (as in lines 781–90). She has her place among the powers that rule the world.
*54 Literally, “a striking, beating of the head and breast in lamentation”; hence, “a dirge, a lament.” A second kommos concludes the play (lines 1257–1353).
*55 The entire Chorus sing the last four verses of the two stanzas begun by Antigone (839–70). Antigone then sings alone again, bringing the lyrical dialogue to an end with an epode (876–82).
*56 Creon’s orders, forbidding anyone to mourn for Polynices (line 28) or “support those who disobey” (219).
*57 A river in Hades, “the river of pain” (achos). In line 816 this river is personified as Antigone’s bridegroom.
*58 Niobe, who came from Phrygia to Thebes (hence her description as “our guest”) and married Amphion, by whom she had fourteen children (twelve, according to Homer). Her pride in their number led her to taunt the goddess Leto with having only two, Apollo and Artemis, who retaliated for the insult to their mother by slaying all of Niobe’s brood. Niobe then returned to her native land, where, weeping inconsolably for her dead children, she turned gradually to stone.
*59 A mountain of the Tmolus range, south of Sardis.
*60 Niobe’s father, Tantalus, was a son of Zeus, making her Zeus’ granddaughter.
*61 The Greek word here, metoikos, expresses Antigone’s indeterminate status. The technical meaning is “resident alien,” one living in a city but not a citizen of it; here, it refers to Antigone’s inhabiting a tomb yet not being one of the dead.
The Greek Plays Page 39
