Antigone

Sophocles

Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 3: The Antigone. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891.

  1. in so much suffering on steep Sipylus—how, like clinging ivy, the sprouting stone subdued her. And the rains, as men tell, do not leave her melting form, nor does the snow,
  2. but beneath her weeping lids she dampens her collar. Most like hers is the god-sent fate that leads me to my rest.
Chorus
  1. Yet she was a goddess, as you know, and the offspring of gods,
  2. while we are mortals and mortal-born. Still it is a great thing for a woman who has died to have it said of her that she shared the lot of the godlike in her life, and afterwards, in death.
Antigone
  1. Ah, you mock me! In the name of our fathers’ gods,
  2. 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,
  3. 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!
  4. I have no home among men or with the shades, no home with the living or with the dead.
Chorus
  1. You have rushed headlong to the far limits of daring, and against the high throne of Justice
  2. you have fallen, my daughter, fallen heavily. But in this ordeal you are paying for some paternal crime.
Antigone
  1. You have touched on my most bitter thought
  2. 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
  3. 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.
  4. Ah, my brother, the marriage you made was doomed, and by dying you killed me still alive!
Chorus
  1. 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.
  2. Your self-willed disposition is what has destroyed you.
Antigone
  1. Unwept, unfriended, without marriage-song, I am led in misery on this journey that cannot be put off. No longer is it permitted me, unhappy girl,