Antigone (The Theban Plays, #3)

by Sophocles

I, for one, I’ll beg the dead to forgive me

CREON: Still talking? You talk too much! A born nuisance – SENTRY: Maybe so,

Oh it’s terrible when the one who does the judging judges things all wrong.

No matter – Death longs for the same rites for all. CREON: Never the same for the patriot and the traitor. ANTIGONE: Who, Creon, who on earth can say the ones below don’t find this pure and uncorrupt? CREON: Never. Once an enemy, never a friend, not even after death. ANTIGONE: I was born to join in love, not hate – that is my nature. CREON: Go down below and love, if love you must – love the dead! While I’m alive, no woman is going to lord it over me.

Oh no, my sister, don’t reject me, please, let me die beside you, consecrating the dead together. ANTIGONE: Never share my dying, don’t lay claim to what you never touched.

ANTIGONE: Courage! Live your life. I gave myself to death, long ago, so I might serve the dead.

ISMENE: What? You’d kill your own son’s bride? CREON: Absolutely: there are other fields for him to plow.

Better to fall from power, if fall we must, at the hands of a man – never be rated inferior to a woman, never.

What a splendid king you’d make of a desert island – you and you alone.

CREON: You, you soul of corruption, rotten through – woman’s accomplice! HAEMON: That may be, but you will never find me accomplice to a criminal. CREON: That’s what she is,

CREON: Don’t flatter me with Father – you woman’s slave!

HAEMON: You really expect to fling abuse at me and not receive the same?

LEADER: But Antigone – what sort of death do you have in mind for her? CREON: I will take her down some wild, desolate path never trod by men, and wall her up alive in a rocky vault, and set out short rations, just the measure piety demands to keep the entire city free of defilement. There let her pray to the one god she worships: Death – who knows? – may just reprieve her from death. Or she may learn at last, better late than never, what a waste of breath it is to worship Death. Exit to the palace.

Irresistible Aphrodite, never conquered – Love, you mock us for your sport.

CHORUS: Not crowned with glory or with a dirge, you leave for the deep pit of the dead. No withering illness laid you low, no strokes of the sword – a law to yourself, alone, no mortal like you, ever, you go down to the halls of Death alive and breathing.

ANTIGONE: But think of Niobe – well I know her story – think what a living death she died, Tantalus’ daughter, stranger queen from the east: there on the mountain heights, growing stone binding as ivy, slowly walled her round and the rains will never cease, the legends say the snows will never leave her … wasting away, under her brows the tears showering down her breasting ridge and slopes – a rocky death like hers puts me to sleep.

But she was a god, born of gods, and we are only mortals born to die. And yet, of course, it’s a great thing for a dying girl to hear, even to hear she shares a destiny equal to the gods, during life and later, once she’s dead.

CREON: Can’t you see? If a man could wail his own dirge before he dies, he’d never finish. To the guards. Take her away, quickly! Wall her up in the tomb, you have your orders. Abandon her there, alone, and let her choose – death or a buried life with a good roof for shelter. As for myself, my hands are clean.

I’ll soon be there, soon embrace my own, the great growing family of our dead Persephone has received among her ghosts.

A husband dead, there might have been another. A child by another too, if I had lost the first. But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death, no brother could ever spring to light again. For this law alone I held you first in honor.

ANTIGONE: Oh god, the voice of death. It’s come, it’s here. CREON: True. Not a word of hope – your doom is sealed.

All men make mistakes, it is only human. But once the wrong is done, a man can turn his back on folly, misfortune too, if he tries to make amends, however low he’s fallen, and stops his bullnecked ways. Stubbornness brands you for stupidity – pride is a crime.

Where’s the glory, killing the dead twice over?

all men fall, it’s only human, but the wisest fall obscenely when they glorify obscene advice with rhetoric – all for their own gain.

a corpse for corpses given in return, since you have thrust to the world below a child sprung for the world above, ruthlessly lodged a living soul within the grave – then you’ve robbed the gods below the earth, keeping a dead body here in the bright air, unburied, unsung, unhallowed by the rites.

You, you have no business with the dead, nor do the gods above – this is violence you have forced upon the heavens.

Fortune lifts and Fortune fells the lucky and unlucky every day. No prophet on earth can tell a man his fate.

Why should I try to soothe you with a story, only to prove a liar in a moment? Truth is always best.

I don’t even exist – I’m no one. Nothing.