FOOTNOTES:

ἐπεὶ τά γ' ἔργα μουπεπονθότ' ἐστι μᾶλλον ἢ δεδρακότα.

The Chorus, moved by the mingled impetuosity and sound reasoning of their suitor, perceive that the case is too grave for them to decide. Accordingly, they send a messenger for Theseus; but, before he can be summoned, Ismene arrives on horseback with the news that her brothers are quarrelling about the throne of Thebes. Eteocles, the younger, has usurped the sovereignty, while Polyneices has fled to Argos to engage the chiefs of the Achaians in his cause. Both parties, meantime, are eager to secure the person of Œdipus, since an oracle has proclaimed that with him will victory abide. Œdipus, hearing these tidings, bursts into a strain of passionate denunciation, which proves that the old fire of his temper is smouldering still unquenched. When he was forlorn and in misery, his unnatural sons took no thought of him. They sent him forth to roam a pariah upon the earth, leaving to his daughters the care and burden of supporting him. Now, basely anxious for their selfish profit, they come to claim possession of his old, world-wearied flesh. Instead of blessings, they shall meet with curses. Instead of the fair land of Thebes to lord it over, they shall barely get enough ground to die and be buried in. He, meanwhile, will abide at Athens, and bequeath a heritage of help and honor to her soil.

The Chorus now call upon Œdipus to perform the rites of purification required by the Eumenides—rites which Sophocles has described with the loving minuteness of one to whom the customs of Colonus were from boyhood sacred. Ismene goes to carry out their instructions, and in her absence Theseus arrives upon the scene. Theseus, throughout the drama, plays towards Œdipus the part of a good-hearted hospitable friend. His generosity is ethically contrasted with the meanness of Creon and the selfishness of Polyneices, while, artistically, the practical energy of his character serves for a foil to the stationary dignity of the chief actor. Sophocles has thus contrived to give weight and importance to a personage who might, in weaker hands, have been degraded into a mere instrument. Œdipus assures the Attic king that he will prove no useless and unserviceable denizen. The children of Erechtheus, whose interests rank first in the mind of Theseus, will find him in the future a powerful and god-protected sojourner within their borders. His natural sympathy for the persecuted and oppressed having been thus strengthened by the prospect of reciprocal advantage, Theseus formally accepts Œdipus as a suppliant, and promises him full protection. At this point, forming, as it were, a halting-place in the action of the play, Sophocles introduced that famous song about Colonus, which no one has yet succeeded in translating, but which, for modern ears, has received new value from the music of Mendelssohn.

What follows, before the final climax of the drama, consists of the efforts made by Creon, on the part of Eteocles, and by Polyneices, to enlist Œdipus respectively upon their sides in the war of succession to the Theban throne. Creon displays his heartless, cunning, impudent, sophistical, and forceful character, while Œdipus opposes indignation and contempt, unmasking his hypocrisy, and stripping his specious arguments of all that hidestheir naked selfishness. In this scene we feel that Sophocles is verging upon the Euripidean manner. A little more would make the altercation between Creon and Œdipus pass over into a forensic wrangling-match. As it is, the chief dramatic value of the episode is to exhibit the grandeur of the wrath of Œdipus in its righteous heat when contrasted with the wretched shifts of a mere rhetorical sophist.

After Creon, by the help of Theseus, has been thwarted in his attempt to carry off Antigone, Polyneices approaches with crocodile tears, fawning intercessions, and fictitious sorrow for his father's desolation. Œdipus flashes upon his covert egotism the same light of clear unclouded insight which had unmasked Creon. "What," he asks, "is the value of tears now, of prayers now? Dry were your eyes, hard as stone your heart, dumb your lips, when I went forth from Thebes unfriended. Here is your guerdon: Before Thebes's walls you shall die, pierced by your brother's hand, and your brother by yours." The imprecation of the father upon the son would be unnatural, were it not for the son's falseness, who behaved like a Regan to Œdipus in his calamity, and who now, when the old man has become a mysteriously important personage, seeks to make the most of him for his own uses.

The protracted dialogues with Creon and Polyneices serve to enhance the sublimity of Œdipus. He, all the while, is seated, a blind, travel-stained, neglected mendicant, upon the marble bench of the Eumenides. There is horror in his very aspect. Hellas rings with the abominations connected with his name. Yet, to this poor pariah, to this apparent object of pity and loathing, come princes and warriors capable of stirring all the States of Greece in conflict. He rejects them, firm in his consciousness of heaven-appointed destiny. Sophocles seems bent on showing how the wrath of God may be turned aside from its most signaland notorious victims by real purity of heart and nobleness of soul; how, from the depths of degradation and affliction, the spirit of man may rise; and how the lot of demigods may be reserved for those whom the world ignorantly judges worthy of its scorn. Œdipus of late stood like the lightning-blasted tree that travellers dread—theevitandum bidentalof Roman superstition. His withered limbs have now more health and healing in them than the leaf-embowered forest oak.

The treatment of Polyneices in theŒdipus Coloneüssupplies a good example of the Sophoclean tendency to humanize the ancient myths of Hellas. The curse pronounced by Œdipus formed an integral element of that portion of the legend which suggested to Æschylus theSeven against Thebes. By its force, the whole weight of the doom that overhangs the house of Laius is brought to bear upon the suicidal brethren, both of whom rush helplessly, with eyes open, to meet inevitable fate.

ὦ Ζεῦ τε καὶ Γῆ καὶ πολισσοῦχοι θεοί,Ἀρά τ' Ἐρινὺς πατρὸς ἡ μεγασθενής

are the opening words of the prayer of Eteocles in that tragedy; while phrases like these, ὦ πόνοι δόμων νέοι παλαιοῖσι συμμιγεῖς κακοῖς and ὦ μέλαινα καὶ τελεία γένεος Οἰδίπου τ' ἀρά, form the burden of the choric songs. Sophocles does not seek to make the wrath of Œdipus less terrible; he adheres to the old outline of the story, and heightens the tragic horror of the curse by framing for it words intense by reason of their very calculated calmness (1383-1396). At the same time he shows how the obstinate temper of Polyneices, and his sense of honor, are necessary to its operation. After the dreadful sentence, dooming him to self-murder by his brother's spear, has been pronounced, Polyneices stands before his father and his sister like one stunned. Antigone, with a woman's instinct, entreats him to choose the only way still left of safety. He may disband the army, and retire from the adventure against Thebes. To this her brother answers:

ἀλλ' οὐχ οἷόν τε. πῶς γὰρ αὖθις ἂν πάλινστράτευμ' ἄγοιμι ταὐτὸν εἰσάπαξ τρέσας;

when she persists, he repeats μὴ πεῖθ' ἃ μὴ δεῖ. Thus, instead of bringing into strong relief the operation of blind fate, Sophocles places in the foreground the human agencies which contribute to the undoing of Polyneices. His crime of unfilial egotism, his dread of being thought a coward, and his honor rooted in dishonor, drive him through the tempest of his father's curse upon the rock of doom. The part played by Antigone in this awful scene of altercation between her father and her brother, first interceding for mercy, and then striving to break the stubborn will of the rebellious youth,[141]prepares our minds for the tragedy in which she will appear as protagonist. Hitherto she has been remarkable for filial love. She now shows herself a gentle and tender sister to one who had deeply wronged her. The absolute unselfishness which gives to her the beauty as of some clear, flawless jewel shines forth by anticipation in theColoneüs, enlisting our warmest sympathies upon her side, and tempering the impression of hardness that might be produced by a simple study of theAntigone.

When Polyneices, with the curse still ringing in his ears, has fled forth, Cain-like, from the presence of his father, thunder is heard, and the end approaches. The chief actors, led by the blind hero, move from the stage in order suited to the processional gravity of the Greek theatre, while the speech of the Messenger, conveying to the Chorus the news of the last minutes in the life of Œdipus, prepares the spectators for the reappearance of his daughters on the scene. As in theŒdipus Tyrannus, so nowa new motive of interest is introduced in the last act of the drama. TheAntigoneis imperatively demanded as a sequel. Our attention is riveted upon Antigone, who in losing her father has lost all. Her first thought is that he died nobly, peacefully, at one with God. Her next thought is that she shall never see him again, never more bear the sweet burden of anxiety and pain for him, never even have access to his hidden tomb. Her third thought is a longing to be dead with him, enfolded in oblivion of the fate which persecutes her kith and kin. Life stretches before her boundless, homeless, comfortless, nor has she now a single memory for him whose love might have consoled a woman of less stubborn soul—for Hæmon. It is characteristic of his whole conception of Antigone that Sophocles introduced no allusion to that underplot of love at this point. When Theseus reproves her for despair, she awakes to fresh unselfishness: "Send me to Thebes," she cries, "that I may stay, if possible, my brothers' strife." Throughout this final scene the single-hearted heat and firm will of Antigone, her desire for action, and her readiness to accept responsibility are contrasted with Ismene's yielding temper and passivity. We are thus prepared for the opening of the third drama, which, though written first by Sophocles, is the artistic close and climax of the tale of Thebes.

The most perfect female character in Greek poetry is Antigone. She is purely Greek, unlike any woman of modern fiction, except perhaps the Fedalma of George Eliot. In her filial piety, in her intercession for Polyneices at the knees of Œdipus, in her grief when her father is taken from her, she does, indeed, resemble the women whom most men among us have learned to honor in their sisters or their daughters or their mother. Of such women the Greek maiden, with her pure calm face and virginal straight lines of classic drapery, is still the saint and patroness. But what shall we say of the Antigone of this last drama, of the sister who iswilling, lest her brother lie unburied on the Theban plain, to lay her own life down, disobeying the law of her sovereign, defying Creon to the face, appealing against unjust tribunals to the judgment-seat of powers more ancient than the throne of Zeus himself, and marching to her living tomb with dauntless strength in order that the curse-attainted ghost of Polyneices shall have rest in Hades? To the modern mind she appears a being from another sphere. A strain of unearthly music seems to announce her entrance and her exit on the stage. That the sacrifice of the sister's very life, the breaking of her plighted troth to Hæmon, should follow upon the sprinkling of those few handfuls of dust—that she should give that life up smilingly, nor ever in her last hours breathe her lover's name—is a tragic circumstance for which our sympathies are not prepared: we can neither divest our minds of the fixed modern prejudice that the first duty of a woman is to her husband, nor can we fully enter into the antique superstition of defrauded sepulture. Yet it is necessary to do both of these things, to sequester Antigone from the sphere of modern obligations, and to enter hand in hand with her the inner sanctuary of antique piety, in order to do justice to the conception of Sophocles. This effort of the imagination may be facilitated by remembering, first, that Antigone inherited her father's proud self-will—

δηλοῖ τὸ γέννημ' ὠμὸν ἐξ ὠμοῦ πατρὸςτῆς παιδός· εἴκειν δ' οὐκ ἐπίσταται κακοῖς—

and, secondly, that disaster after disaster, the loss of Œdipus, the death of her two brothers, has come huddling upon her in a storm of fate, so that life is, in a manner, over for her, and she feels isolated in a cold and cruel world. This combination of her character and her circumstances renders her action in theAntigoneconceivable. Without the hardness she inherited from Œdipus, she could not have gone through her tragic part. Without thevow she registered above her father's grave, to bring help to her brethren, seeing that they alone were left, the sentiment of her last speech would sound rhetorical. Moreover, the poet who breathed into her form a breath of life so fiery has himself justified us in regarding her act as one removed from the plain path of virtue. Antigone was no Hindoo widow to die upon a husband's pyre. Her heroism, her resistance offered to the will of Creon, had in it a splendid criminality. It was just the casuistry of the conflict between public and private obligations, between the dictates of her conscience and the commands of her sovereign, that enabled Sophocles to render the peculiar stoicism of her character pathetic. In spite of all these considerations, it is probable that she will strike a modern reader at the first as frigid. Especially, if he have failed to observe thenuancesof her portrait in theŒdipus Coloneüs, he will be inclined to wish that Sophocles had softened here and there the outlines of her adamantine statue. Yet, after long contemplation of those perfect lineaments, we come to recognize in her a purity of passion, a fixity of purpose, a loyalty of kinship, a sublime enthusiasm for duty, simply conceived and self-justified in spite of all conventions to the contrary, which soar above the strain of modern tragic sentiment. Even Alfieri, in the noble drawing he has sketched from the Sophoclean picture, could not abstain from violating its perfection by this sentimental touch of common feeling:

Emone, ah! tutto io sento,Tutto l' amor, che a te portava: io sentoIl dolor tutto, a cui ti lascio.

No such words are to be found in Sophocles upon the lips of the dying Antigone. She is all for her father and her brothers. The tragedy of Hæmon belongs to Creon, not to her. Her furthest concessions to the sympathies which might have swayed a weakerwoman are found in this line,

ὦ φίλταθ' Αἷμον, ὥς σ' ἀτιμάζει πατήρ,

and in the passage of the Kommos where she bewails her luckless lot of maidenhood. For the rest, Sophocles has sustained her character as that of one "whom, like sparkling steel, the strokes of chance made hard and firm." This steely durability, this crystalline sparkle, divide her not only from the ideal raised by romance for womanhood, but distinguish her, as the daughter of Œdipus, from the general sisterhood even of Greek heroines.

The peculiar qualities of Antigone are brought into sharp relief by the milder virtues of Ismene, who thinks it right to obey Creon, and who has no spirit for the deed of daring, but who is afterwards eager to share the punishment of her sister. Antigone repels her very sternly, herein displaying the force of her nature under its less amiable aspect: "Have courage! Thou livest, but my soul long since hath died." The glory of the act is hers alone. Ismene has no right to share it when the risks are past, the penalty is paid. Antigone's repulsion of her sister seems to supply the key to her own heroism. "Œdipus," she says, "is dead; my brethren are dead: for them I lived, and in their death I died to life; but you—your heart is not shut up within your father's and your brother's grave; it is still warm, still eager for love and the joys of this world. Live, then. For me it would be no more possible to live such life as yours than for the clay-cold corpse upon the bier."

The character of Creon, darkened in its tone and shadow to the utmost with a view to affording a foil of another species for Antigone, was thought worthy of minute and careful treatment by Sophocles. In theŒdipus Tyrannushe is wronged rather than wronging. While suffering from the unjust suspicion and hasty language of the king, he pleads his cause with decent gravity andshows no sign of either arrogance or cowardice. At the end, when Œdipus has fallen, his own behavior is such as would not disgrace a generous as well as prudent prince. The neutrality for good or evil which distinguishes Creon in this play, marking him out in contrast with the fiery heat of Œdipus, the impious irony of Jocasta, is, to say the least, respectable. In theŒdipus Coloneüshe plays a consistently mean and odious part; his pragmatical display of rhetoric before the burghers of Colonus, when tested by his violent and cruel conduct towards Antigone, proves him to be a hollow-hearted and specious hypocrite. The light here reflected back upon his respectability in theTyrannusis decidedly unfavorable. In theAntigoneCreon becomes, if possible, still more odious; only our animosity against him is tempered by contempt. To the faults of egotism, hardness, and hypocritical prating, are now added the infatuation of self-will and the godless hatred of a dead foe. There is, indeed, a show of right in the decree published concerning the two brothers, one of whom had brought a foreign army against Thebes; but it would be sophistry to maintain that Creon was actuated by patriotic motives. The defeat and death of Polyneices were punishment enough. By pursuing his personal spite beyond the grave Creon insults the common instincts of humanity, the sympathies of the people, and the supposed feelings of the gods, who cannot bear to gaze upon abominations. The pathetic self-devotion of Antigone, the voice of the city, the remonstrances of Hæmon, and the warnings of Teiresias are all thrown away upon his stubborn and conceited obstinacy. He shows himself, in short, to be a tyrant of the orthodox sort. Like a tyrant, he is, moreover, absurdly suspicious: the guardian has, he thinks, been bought; Ismene must be hatching treason; Hæmon prefers a woman to his duty; Teiresias is plotting for the sake of gain against him. When it is just too late, he gives way helplessly andfeebly, moved to terror by the dark words of the seer. Creon is, therefore, a mixed character, great neither for good nor for evil, weak through wilfulness, plausible in words and wavering in his determinations, a man who might have passed for excellent if he had never had to wield a kingdom's power. His own description of himself—μάταιον ἄνδρα—suits him not only in the utter collapse of his character and rain of his fortunes, but also in the height of his prosperity and fulness of his seeming strength.

Sophocles might fairly be censured for having made the misery of Creon the climax of a drama which ought to have had its whole interest centred in Antigone. Our sympathies have not been sufficiently enlisted on the side of Hæmon to make us care much about his death. For Eurydice it is impossible to rouse more than a languid pity. Creon, we feel, gets no more than he deserves; instead of being sorry for him, we are only angry that he was not swept away into the dustheap of oblivion sooner. It was surely a mistake to divert the attention of the audience, at the very end of the tragedy, from its heroine to a character which, like that of Creon, rouses impatient scorn as well as antipathy. That Sophocles had artistic reasons for not concluding this play with the death of Antigone may be readily granted by those who have made the crises of theAjax, theŒdipus Tyrannus, and theŒdipus Coloneüsthe subject of special study. He preferred, it seems, to relax the strained sympathies of his audience by a prolongation of the drama on an altered theme. Yet this scarcely justifies the shifting of the centre of interest attempted in theAntigone. We have to imagine that the inculcation of a moral lesson upon the crime of ἀσέβεια was the poet's paramount object.[142]If so, he sacrificed dramatic effect to ethics.

It should be noticed that Antigone, in whom the fate of thefamily of Laius is finally accomplished, falls an innocent victim. Her tragedy is no immediate consequence of the Œdipodean curse. While her brethren were wilfully involved in the doom of their house, she perished in the cause of divine charity. Finding that the immutable ordinances of Heaven clashed with the arbitrary volition of a ruler, she preferred to obey the law of conscience and to die at the behest of a pride-maddened tyrant. She is technically disobedient, morally most duteous. Thus theAntigonecarries us beyond the region of hereditary disaster into the more universal sphere of ethical casuistry. Its tragic interest depends less upon the evolution of the law of ancestral guilt than on the conflict of two duties. By suggesting the casuistical question to his audience, while he freed his heroine from all doubt upon the subject, Sophocles maintained the sublime simplicity which distinguishes Antigone above all women of romance. The retribution that falls on Creon furnishes a powerful example of the Greek doctrine of Nemesis; but over Antigone herself Nemesis exerts no sway. In her action there was nothing unconsidered; in her doom there was nothing unforeseen.

FOOTNOTES:[129]"Fain would I be a fair lyre of ivory, and fair boys carrying me to Dionysus's choir."[130]"Soul of mine, in due season it is meet to gather love, when life is young."[131]De Aud. Poet., p. 16 C.[132]De Subl., xxxiii. 5.[133]See above, p.378.[134]Notice the phrases βελτιόνες inPoet., cap. ii., as compared with καθ' ἡμᾶς, and again ὁμοίους ποιοῦντες, καλλίους γράφουσιν, in cap. xv., together with the whole analogy of painting in both of these places.[135]Cap. xxvi.[136]Œd. Tyr., 863;Ant., 450. The first translation is borrowed from Mr. M. Arnold.[137]See what Goethe says about the importance of Creon and Ismene in theAntigone. (Eckermann, vol. i.)[138]Our imperfect knowledge of the Attic drama prevents our forming any opinion as to the employment of thedeus ex machinâby the earlier tragedians.[139]English Translation, vol. i. p. 371.[140]Poetics, xi.[141]See especially 1181-1203, 1414-1443.[142]The last six lines spoken by the Chorus seem to justify this view. A couplet from thePheræiof Moschion might be inscribed as a motto upon theAntigone:κενὸν θανόντος ἀνδρὸς αἰκίζειν σκιάν·ζῶντας κολάζειν οὐ θανόντας εὐσεβές.

[129]"Fain would I be a fair lyre of ivory, and fair boys carrying me to Dionysus's choir."

[130]"Soul of mine, in due season it is meet to gather love, when life is young."

[131]De Aud. Poet., p. 16 C.

[132]De Subl., xxxiii. 5.

[133]See above, p.378.

[134]Notice the phrases βελτιόνες inPoet., cap. ii., as compared with καθ' ἡμᾶς, and again ὁμοίους ποιοῦντες, καλλίους γράφουσιν, in cap. xv., together with the whole analogy of painting in both of these places.

[135]Cap. xxvi.

[136]Œd. Tyr., 863;Ant., 450. The first translation is borrowed from Mr. M. Arnold.

[137]See what Goethe says about the importance of Creon and Ismene in theAntigone. (Eckermann, vol. i.)

[138]Our imperfect knowledge of the Attic drama prevents our forming any opinion as to the employment of thedeus ex machinâby the earlier tragedians.

[139]English Translation, vol. i. p. 371.

[140]Poetics, xi.

[141]See especially 1181-1203, 1414-1443.

[142]The last six lines spoken by the Chorus seem to justify this view. A couplet from thePheræiof Moschion might be inscribed as a motto upon theAntigone:κενὸν θανόντος ἀνδρὸς αἰκίζειν σκιάν·ζῶντας κολάζειν οὐ θανόντας εὐσεβές.

[142]The last six lines spoken by the Chorus seem to justify this view. A couplet from thePheræiof Moschion might be inscribed as a motto upon theAntigone:

κενὸν θανόντος ἀνδρὸς αἰκίζειν σκιάν·ζῶντας κολάζειν οὐ θανόντας εὐσεβές.

END OF VOL. I.

Transcriber's Notes:Simple spelling, grammar, and typographical errors were corrected.Punctuation normalized.Anachronistic and non-standard spellings retained as printed.

Simple spelling, grammar, and typographical errors were corrected.

Punctuation normalized.

Anachronistic and non-standard spellings retained as printed.

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