Antigone

Sophocles

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

  1. grips this girl with the same fierce gusts.
Creon
  1. Then because of this her guards will have reason to lament their slowness.
Antigone
  1. Ah, no! That command verges close on death.
Creon
  1. I cannot console you with any hope that your doom is not to be fulfilled in that way.
Antigone
  1. O city of my fathers, land of Thebes, and you gods, our ancestors! I am led away now; there is no more delay!
  2. Look at me, you who are Thebes’ lords—look at the only remaining daughter of the house of your kings. See what I suffer, and at whose hands, because I revered reverence!Antigone is led away by the guards.
Chorus
  1. So too endured Danae in her beauty to change
  2. the light of the sky for brass-bound walls, and in that chamber, both burial and bridal, she was held in strict confinement. And yet was she of esteemed lineage, my daughter,
  3. and guarded a deposit of the seed of Zeus that had fallen in a golden rain. But dreadful is the mysterious power of fate—there is no deliverance from it by wealth or by war, by towered city, or dark, sea-beaten ships.
Chorus
  1. And Dryas’s son, the Edonian king swift to rage, was tamed in recompense for his frenzied insults, when, by the will of Dionysus, he was shut in a rocky prison. There the fierce and swelling force of his madness trickled away.
  2. That man came to know the god whom in his frenzy he had provoked with mockeries. For he had sought to quell the god-inspired women and the Bacchanalian fire,
  3. and he angered the Muses who love the flute.
Chorus
  1. And by the waters of the Dark Rocks, the waters of the twofold sea, are the shores of Bosporus and the Thracian city Salmydessus,
  2. where Ares, neighbor of that city, saw the accursed, blinding wound inflicted on the two sons of Phineus by his savage wife. It was a wound that brought darkness to the hollows, making them crave vengeance
  3. for the eyes she crushed with her bloody hands and with her shuttle for a dagger.
Chorus
  1. Wasting away in their misery, they bewailed their miserable suffering
  2. and their birth from their mother stripped of her marriage. But she traced her descent from the ancient line of the Erechtheids, and in far-distant caves she was raised amidst her father’s gusts. She was the child of Boreas,
  3. running swift as horses over the steep hills, a daughter of gods. Yet she, too, was assailed by the long-lived Fates, my child.
Enter Teiresias, led by a boy, on the spectators’ right.
Teiresias
  1. Princes of Thebes, we have come on a shared journey, two scouting the way by the eyes of one.
  2. For this is the method of travel for the blind, using a guide.