Antigone

Sophocles

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

  1. 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!
Chorus
  1. Ah, how late you seem to see the right!
Creon
  1. God, I have mastered the bitter lesson! But then, then, I think, some god struck me on my head with a crushing weight, and drove me into savage paths,
  2. —ah!—and overthrew my joy to be trampled on! Ah, the labors men must toil through!
    Messenger
    1. My master, you have come, I think, like one whose hands are not empty, but who has a ready store: first, you carry that burden visible in your arms;
    2. second, you will soon look upon further sufferings inside your house.
    Creon
    1. What worse suffering is still to follow upon these sufferings?
    Messenger
    1. Your wife is dead, true mother of that corpse, poor lady, by wounds newly cut.
    Creon
    1. O harbor of Hades, hard to purify!
    2. Why, why do you ruin me? Herald of evil, of grief, what word do you say? Ah, you have done in a dead man anew! What are you saying, boy? What is this you report to me
    3. God no!—what new slaughter, my wife’s doom, is heaped upon this ruin?
      Chorus
      1. The sight is at hand. It is no longer hidden inside.
      Creon
      1. Ah, misery!
      2. There I see a new, a second evil! What destiny, ah, what, can still await me? I have just now taken my son in my arms, and now I see another corpse before me!
      3. Oh, tormented mother! Oh, my son!
      Messenger
      1. By the altar, with a sharp-whetted sword, she struck until her eyes went slack and dark. Before that she bewailed the noble fate of Megareus who died earlier, and then the fate of this boy, and also, with her last breath,
      2. she called down evil fortune upon you, the slayer of her sons.
      Creon
      1. Ah, no! I tremble with fear. Why does no one strike me full on my chest with a two-edged sword?