Oedipus at Colonus

Sophocles

Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 2: The Oedipus at Colonus. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889.

  1. nor as ever yet born in the great Dorian isle of Pelops: a plant unconquered, self-renewing, causing terror to destroying enemies.
  2. It greatly flourishes in this land—the gray-leafed olive, nurturer of children. Youth cannot harm it by the ravages of his hand, nor can any who lives with old age. For the sleepless eye
  3. of Zeus Morios watches over it, and gray-eyed Athena.
Chorus
  1. And I have more praise for this city our mother,
  2. the gift of a great divinity, a glory most great: the might of horses, the might of colts, and the might of the sea. For you, son of Cronus, lord Poseidon, have set her on the throne of this pride,
  3. by establishing first in our roads the bit that cures the rage of horses. And the shapely oar, well-fitted for the sea, in flying past the land leaps to follow the hundred-footed Nereids.
Antigone
  1. Land that is praised above all lands, now it is your task to make those bright praises seen in deeds!
Oedipus
  1. What strange new thing has happened, my daughter?
Antigone
  1. Creon there draws near us, and not without followers, father.
Oedipus
  1. Ah, dearest old men, now give me
  2. the final proof of my salvation!
Chorus
  1. Courage! It will be yours. For even if I am aged, this country’s strength has not grown old.
Enter Creon, with attendants.
Creon
  1. Gentlemen, noble dwellers in this land, I see from your eyes that a sudden fear has troubled you at my coming;
  2. but do not shrink back from me, and let no evil word escape you. I am here with no thought of force; I am old, and I know that the city to which I have come is mighty, if any in Hellas has might.
  3. No, I have been sent, aged as I am, to plead with this man to return with me to the land of Cadmus. I am not one man’s envoy, but have a mandate from all our people; since it belonged to me, by family, beyond all other Thebans to mourn his woes.
  4. Unhappy Oedipus, hear us, and come home! Justly are you summoned by all the Cadmeans, and most of all by me, since I—unless I am the worst of all men born—feel most sorrow for your woes, old man,
  5. when I see you, unhappy as you are, a stranger and a wanderer evermore, roaming in beggary, with one handmaid for your support. Ah, me, I had not thought that she could fall to such a depth of misery as that to which she has fallen—
  6. this poor girl!—as she tends forever your dark life amid poverty; in ripe youth, but unwed: a prize for the first passerby to seize. Is it not a cruel reproach—alas!—that I have cast at you, and me, and all our race?
  7. But indeed an open shame cannot be hidden. Oedipus, in the name of your ancestral gods, listen to me! Hide it, and consent to return to the city and the house of your ancestors, after bidding a kind farewell to this city. Athens is worthy; yet your own city has the first claim on your reverence,
  8. since it was Thebes that nurtured you long ago.