Antigone
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Original / primary: Perseus Eng2
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in the valleys of Eleusinian Deo where all find welcome! O Bacchus, denizen of Thebes, the mother-city of your Bacchants, dweller by the wet stream of Ismenus on the soil
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of the sowing of the savage dragon’s teeth!
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Chorus
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The smoky glare of torches sees you above the cliffs of the twin peaks, where the Corycian nymphs move inspired by your godhead,
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and Castalia’s stream sees you, too. The ivy-mantled slopes of Nysa’s hills and the shore green with many-clustered vines send you, when accompanied by the cries of your divine words,
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you visit the avenues of Thebes.
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Messenger
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Neighbors of the house of Cadmus and of Amphion, there is no station of human life that I would ever praise or blame as being settled. Fortune sets upright and Fortune sinks the lucky and unlucky from day to day,
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and no one can prophesy to men concerning the order that has just been established. For Creon, as I saw it, was once blest: he had saved this land of Cadmus from its enemies; and having won sole and total dominion in the land, he guided it on a straight course and flourished in his noble crop of children.
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And now all this has been lost. When a man has forfeited his pleasures, I do not reckon his existence as life, but consider him just a breathing corpse. Heap up riches in your house, if you wish! Live with a tyrant’s pomp! But if there is no joy
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along with all of that, I would not pay even the shadow of smoke for all the rest, compared with joy.
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Chorus
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What is this new grief for our princes that you have come to report?
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Messenger
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They are dead, and the living are guilty of the deaths.
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Chorus
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Who is the murderer? Who the murdered? Tell us.
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Messenger
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Haemon is dead—his blood was shed by no strange hand.
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Chorus
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Was it his father’s, or his own ?
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Messenger
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He did it by his own, enraged with his father for the murder.
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Chorus
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Ah, prophet, how true, then, you have proved your word!
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Messenger
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Knowing that these things are so, you must consider the rest.
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Chorus
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Wait, I see the unhappy Eurydice, Creon’s wife, nearby. She comes from the house either knowing of her son, or merely by chance.
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Eurydice
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People of Thebes, I heard your words as I was on my way to the gates to address divine Pallas with my prayers.
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At one and the same time I was loosening the bolts of the gate to open it, and the sound of a blow to our house struck my ear. In terror I sank back into the arms of my handmaids, and my senses fled.
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But repeat what your news was, for I shall hear it with ears that are no strangers to sorrow.
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Messenger
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Dear mistress, I will tell what I witnessed and leave no word of the truth unspoken. For what good would it do that should I soothe you with words in which I must later be found false?
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The truth is always best. I attended your husband as his guide to the furthest part of the plain, where unpitied the body of Polyneices, torn by dogs, still lay. After we had prayed to the goddess of the roads
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and to Pluto to restrain their anger in mercy, we washed him with pure washing, and with freshly-plucked boughs we burned what remains there were. Lastly we heaped a high-mounded tomb of his native earth. Afterwards we turned away to enter the maiden’s stoney-bedded
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bridal chamber, the caverned mansion of Hades’ bride. From a distance, one of us servants heard a voice of loud wailing near that bride’s unwept bed and came to tell our master Creon. And as the King moved closer and closer, obscure signs rising from a bitter cry surrounded him—
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he groaned and said in bitter lament, Ah, misery, am I now the prophet of evil? Am I going on the path most lined with grief of all that I have walked before? My son’s voice greets me. Go, my servants,
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hurry closer, and when you have reached the tomb, enter the opening where the stones of the mound have been torn away, up to the cell’s very mouth. See if it is Haemon’s voice that I recognize, or if I am cheated by the gods.
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This search, at our desperate master’s word,
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we went to make, and in the furthest part of the tomb we saw her hanging by the neck, fastened by a halter of fine linen threads, while he was embracing her with arms thrown around her waist, bewailing the loss of his bride to the spirits below, as well as his father’s deeds, and his grief-filled marriage.
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But his father, when he saw him, cried aloud with a dreadful cry and went in and called to him with a voice of wailing: Ah, unhappy boy, what have you done! What plan have you seized on? By what misfortune have you lost your reason?
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Come out, my son, I pray you, I beg you! But the boy glared at him with savage eyes, spat in his face, and without a word in response drew his twin-edged sword. As his father rushed out in flight, he missed his aim. Then the ill-fated boy was enraged with himself
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and straightway stretched himself over his sword and drove it, half its length, into his side. Still conscious, he clasped the maiden in his faint embrace, and, as he gasped, he shot onto her pale cheek a swift stream of oozing blood.
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Corpse enfolding corpse he lay, having won his marriage rites, poor boy, not here, but in Hades’ palace, and having shown to mankind by how much the failure to reason wisely is the most severe of all afflictions assigned to man. Eurydice departs into the house.
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Chorus
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What would you infer from this? The lady
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has turned back and gone without a word, either for good or for evil.
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Messenger
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I, too, am startled. Still I am nourished by the hope that at the grave news of her son she thinks it unworthy to make her laments before the city, but in the shelter of her home will set her handmaids to mourn the house’s grief.
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For she is not unhabituated to discretion, that she should err.
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Chorus
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I do not know. But to me, in any case, a silence too strict seems to promise trouble just as much as a fruitless abundance of weeping.
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Messenger
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I will find out whether she is not, in fact, hiding some repressed plan in the darkness of her passionate heart.
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I will go in, since you are right—in an excess of silence, too, there may be trouble. Exit Messenger.
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Chorus
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Look, here is the King himself approaching, his hands grasping a monument plainly signing that his—if we may say it—and no one else’s,
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was the madness of this error.
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Creon
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Ah, the blunders of an unthinking mind, blunders of rigidity, yielding death! Oh, you witnesses of the killers and the killed, both of one family!
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What misery arises from my reasonings! Haemon, you have died after a young life, youngest and last of my sons! O God! You have departed not by your foolishness, but by my own!
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Creon
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What worse suffering is still to follow upon these sufferings?
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Messenger
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Your wife is dead, true mother of that corpse, poor lady, by wounds newly cut.
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Creon
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O harbor of Hades, hard to purify!
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Why, why do you ruin me? Herald of evil, of grief, what word do you say? Ah, you have done in a dead man anew! What are you saying, boy? What is this you report to me
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God no!—what new slaughter, my wife’s doom, is heaped upon this ruin?
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Chorus
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The sight is at hand. It is no longer hidden inside.
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Chorus
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Wisdom is provided as the chief part of happiness, and our dealings with the gods must be in no way unholy. The great words of arrogant men have to make repayment with great blows, and in old age teach wisdom.
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Chorus
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Staggered, he fell to the earth with a crash,
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torch in hand, a man possessed by the frenzy of the mad attack, who just now was raging against us with the blasts of his tempestuous hate. But his threats did not fare as he had hoped, and to the other enemies mighty Ares dispensed each their own dooms with hard blows,
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Ares, our mighty ally at the turning-point.
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Chorus
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But since Victory whose name is glory has come to us, smiling in joy equal to the joy of chariot-rich Thebes,
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let us make for ourselves forgetfulness after the recent wars, and visit all the temples of the gods with night-long dance and song. And may Bacchus, who shakes the earth of Thebes, rule our dancing!
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Chorus
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Speech and thought fast as the
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wind and the moods that give order to a city he has taught himself, and how to flee the arrows of the inhospitable frost under clear skies and the arrows of the storming rain.
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He has resource for everything. Lacking resource in nothing he strides towards what must come. From Death alone he shall procure no escape, but from baffling diseases he has devised flights.
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Chorus
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Possessing resourceful skill, a subtlety beyond expectation he moves now to evil, now to good. When he honors the laws of the land and the justice of the gods to which he is bound by oath,
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his city prospers. But banned from his city is he who, thanks to his rashness, couples with disgrace. Never may he share my home,
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never think my thoughts, who does these things!
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Chorus
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Your power, great Zeus—what human overstepping can check it? Yours is power that neither Sleep, the all-ensnaring, nor the untiring months of the gods can defeat. Unaged through time,
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you rule by your power and dwell thereby in the brilliant splendor of Olympus. And through the future, both near and distant, as through the past, shall this law prevail: nothing that is vast comes to the life of mortals without ruin.
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Chorus
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See how that hope whose wanderings are so wide truly is a benefit to many men, but to an equal number it is a false lure of light-headed desires. The deception comes to one who is wholly unawares until he burns his foot on a hot fire.
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For with wisdom did someone once reveal the maxim, now famous, that evil at one time or another seems good, to him whose mind a god leads to ruin.
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But for the briefest moment such a man fares free of destruction.
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Antigone
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Ah, you mock me! In the name of our fathers’ gods,
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why do you not wait to abuse me until after I have gone, and not to my face, O my city, and you, her wealthy citizens? Ah, spring of Dirce, and you holy ground of Thebes whose chariots are many,
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you, at least, will bear me witness how unwept by loved ones, and by what laws I go to the rock-closed prison of my unheard-of tomb! Ah, misery!
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I have no home among men or with the shades, no home with the living or with the dead.
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Antigone
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You have touched on my most bitter thought
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and moved my ever-renewed pity for my father and for the entire doom ordained for us, the famed house of Labdacus. Oh, the horrors of our mother’s bed! Oh, the slumbers of the wretched mother at the side
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of her own son, my own father! What manner of parents gave me my miserable being! It is to them that I go like this, accursed and unwed, to share their home.
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Ah, my brother, the marriage you made was doomed, and by dying you killed me still alive!
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Chorus
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And by the waters of the Dark Rocks, the waters of the twofold sea, are the shores of Bosporus and the Thracian city Salmydessus,
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where Ares, neighbor of that city, saw the accursed, blinding wound inflicted on the two sons of Phineus by his savage wife. It was a wound that brought darkness to the hollows, making them crave vengeance
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for the eyes she crushed with her bloody hands and with her shuttle for a dagger.
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Chorus
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Wasting away in their misery, they bewailed their miserable suffering
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and their birth from their mother stripped of her marriage. But she traced her descent from the ancient line of the Erechtheids, and in far-distant caves she was raised amidst her father’s gusts. She was the child of Boreas,
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running swift as horses over the steep hills, a daughter of gods. Yet she, too, was assailed by the long-lived Fates, my child.
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Chorus
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Thebes of all cities you hold foremost in honor, together with your lightning-struck mother.
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And now when the whole city is held subject to a violent plague, come, we ask, with purifying feet over steep Parnassus,
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or over the groaning straits!
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Chorus
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O Leader of the chorus of the stars whose breath is fire, overseer of the chants in the night, son begotten of Zeus,
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appear, my king, with your attendant Thyiads, who in night-long frenzy dance and sing you as Iacchus the Giver!
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Chorus
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Ah, how late you seem to see the right!
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Creon
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God, I have mastered the bitter lesson! But then, then, I think, some god struck me on my head with a crushing weight, and drove me into savage paths,
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—ah!—and overthrew my joy to be trampled on! Ah, the labors men must toil through!
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Messenger
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My master, you have come, I think, like one whose hands are not empty, but who has a ready store: first, you carry that burden visible in your arms;
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second, you will soon look upon further sufferings inside your house.
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Creon
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Ah, misery!
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There I see a new, a second evil! What destiny, ah, what, can still await me? I have just now taken my son in my arms, and now I see another corpse before me!
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Oh, tormented mother! Oh, my son!
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Messenger
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By the altar, with a sharp-whetted sword, she struck until her eyes went slack and dark. Before that she bewailed the noble fate of Megareus who died earlier, and then the fate of this boy, and also, with her last breath,
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she called down evil fortune upon you, the slayer of her sons.
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Chorus
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You have rushed headlong to the far limits of daring, and against the high throne of Justice
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you have fallen, my daughter, fallen heavily. But in this ordeal you are paying for some paternal crime.
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Chorus
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Your pious action shows a certain reverence, but an offence against power can no way be tolerated by him who has power in his keeping.
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Your self-willed disposition is what has destroyed you.