Antigone
Sophocles
Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 3: The Antigone. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891.
- What is this? What universal truth are you announcing?
- —by how much the most precious of our possessions is the power to reason wisely?
- By as much, I think, as senselessness is the greatest affliction.
- Yet you came into being full of that disease.
- I have no desire to trade insults with the seer.
- Yet that is what you do in saying that I prophesy falsely.
- Yes, for the prophet-clan was ever fond of money.
- And the race sprung from tyrants loves shameful gain.
- Do you know that you ramble so about your king?
- I am aware, since through me you have saved this city.
- You are a wise seer, but fond of doing injustice.
- You will stir me to utter the dire secret in my soul.
- Out with it! But only if it is not for gain that you speak it.
- Indeed, I think I speak without mention of gain—where you are concerned.
- Be certain that you will not trade in my will.
- Then know, yes, know it well! You will not live through many more
- courses of the sun’s swift chariot, before you will give in return one sprung from your own loins, a corpse in requital for corpses. For you have thrust below one of those of the upper air and irreverently lodged a living soul in the grave,
- while you detain in this world that which belongs to the infernal gods, a corpse unburied, unmourned, unholy. In the dead you have no part, nor do the gods above, but in this you do them violence. For these crimes the avenging destroyers,
- the Furies of Hades and of the gods, lie in ambush for you, waiting to seize you in these same sufferings. And look closely if I tell you this with a silvered palm. A time not long to be delayed will reveal in your house wailing over men and over women.
- All the cities are stirred up in hostility, whose mangled corpses the dogs, or the wild beasts or some winged bird buried, carrying an unholy stench to the city that held each man’s hearth. There, now, are arrows for your heart, since you provoke me,