Antigone

Sophocles

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

  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!