Antigone

Sophocles

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

  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,