Antigone
Sophocles
Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 3: The Antigone. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891.
- Why not? There are other fields for him to plough.
- But not fitted to him as she was.
- I abhor an evil wife for my son.
- Haemon, dearest! How your father wrongs you!
- Enough! Enough of you and of your marriage!
- Will you really cheat your son of this girl?
- Death it is who will end these bridals for me.
- Then it seems that it is resolved that she will die.
- Resolved, yes, for you and by me.To the two Attendants.No more delay! Servants, take them inside! Hereafter they must be women, and not left at large.
- For it is known that even the brave seek to flee, when they see Death now closing on their life.Exeunt Attendants, guarding Antigone and Ismene. Creon remains.
- Blest are those whose days have not tasted of evil. For when a house has once been shaken by the gods,
- no form of ruin is lacking, but it spreads over the bulk of the race, just as, when the surge is driven over the darkness of the deep by the fierce breath of Thracian sea-winds,
- it rolls up the black sand from the depths, and the wind-beaten headlands that front the blows of the storm give out a mournful roar.
- I see that the ancient sorrows of the house of the Labdacids
- are heaped upon the sorrows of the dead. Each generation does not set its race free, but some god hurls it down and the race has no release. For now that dazzling ray of hope that had been spread
- over the last roots in the house of Oedipus—that hope, in its turn, the blood-stained dust of the gods infernal and mindlessness in speech and frenzy at the mind cuts down.
- 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,