Antigone

Sophocles

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

  1. This search, at our desperate master’s word,
  2. 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.
  3. 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?
  4. 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
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
Chorus
  1. What would you infer from this? The lady
  2. has turned back and gone without a word, either for good or for evil.
Messenger
  1. 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.
  2. For she is not unhabituated to discretion, that she should err.
Chorus
  1. 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.
Messenger
  1. I will find out whether she is not, in fact, hiding some repressed plan in the darkness of her passionate heart.
  2. I will go in, since you are right—in an excess of silence, too, there may be trouble.Exit Messenger.
Enter Creon, attended and carrying the shrouded body of Haemon, on the spectators’ left.
Chorus
  1. 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,
  2. was the madness of this error.
Creon
  1. 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!
  2. 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!