Antigone
Sophocles
Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 3: The Antigone. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891.
- Why then do you wait? In none of your maxims
- is there anything that pleases me—and may there never be! Similarly to you as well my views must be displeasing. And yet, how could I have won a nobler glory than by giving burial to my own brother? All here would admit that they approve,
- if fear did not grip their tongues. But tyranny, blest with so much else, has the power to do and say whatever it pleases.
- You alone out of all these Thebans see it that way.
- They do, too, but for you they hold their tongues.
- Are you not ashamed that your beliefs differ from theirs?
- No, there is nothing shameful in respecting your own flesh and blood.
- Was not he your brother too, who died in the opposite cause?
- A brother by the same mother and the same father.
- Why, then, do you pay a service that is disrespectful to him?
- The dead man will not support you in that.
- Yes, he will, if you honor him equally with the wicked one.
- It was his brother, not his slave, who died.
- But he died ravaging this land, while he fell in its defense.
- Hades craves these rites, nevertheless.
- But the good man craves a portion not equal to the evil’s.
- Who knows but that these actions are pure to those below?