ORESTES. You have too much to say; the time is passing.
Go!
AEGISTHUS. Lead the way.
ORESTES. You must go before me.
AEGISTHUS. That I may not escape you?
ORESTES. That you may not
Be killed where you would choose. You shall taste all
The bitterness of death.—If retribution
Were swift and certain, and the lawless man
Paid with his life, there would be fewer villains.
[Exeunt ORESTES, PYLADES, ELECTRA, AEGISTHUS
CHORUS [chants]. Children of Atreus, now at last
Your sufferings are ended. You have won
Your own deliverance; now once more
Is the line of your fathers restored.
1510
EXPLANATORY NOTES
ANTIGONE
3 Creon: he is not named in the Greek, which here designates him simply stratēgos, ‘general’.
The enemy: the Greek says ‘the Argive army’, the troops Polyneices, one of Antigone and Ismene’s two brothers, had raised in support of his cause.
That none shall bury him: lines 1080–4, indicate that burial was refused to all the Argive dead. Antigone is concentrating on the corpse which concerns her personally. Denial of burial was an outrage; according to Iliad 23. 71, the souls of the dead refused to allow the unburied to join their company.
4 public stoning: a punishment associated particularly with treachery.
his own hands... destroyed herself: Ismene summarizes the appalling events recounted at much greater length by the messenger in Oedipus the King, see pp. 90–2, with one important difference. In Antigone Sophocles assumes a version of the myth in which Oedipus had died ‘hated and scorned’, whereas in Oedipus the King it is left unclear how and when he is to die. See further below, note to p. 97.
5 the dead: the Greek says ‘those beneath the earth’, although Ismene is presumably including the unburied Polyneices.
The sacred laws: archaic socio-religious rules also described as the ‘unwritten laws’, the ‘ancestral laws’, and the ‘common laws of Greece’. They protected the relationships between family members, between hosts and guests, and between the living and the dead. They are often articulated negatively as taboos on intra-familial murder, incest, murder of guest or host, and disrespect towards the dead.
6 of seven gates: a traditional epithet of Thebes (Odyssey 11. 263).
Dirke: the name of a river running to the west of Thebes, named after the wife of Zethus, an early co-ruler of the city with his brother Amphion.
6 a snow-white shield: Argive soldiers were traditionally imagined bearing shields painted white. This may have arisen from a confusion of the toponym ‘Argos’ with the adjective argos, ‘white’.
He: the generalized Argive soldier.
in Polyneices’ | Fierce quarrel: in the Greek there is a play on the word for ‘quarrel’ (neikos), which supplied the latter part of Polyneices’ name Polu-neikēs, ’much-quarrelling’.
like some eagle: the figure equating Polyneices and his army with a predatory bird descending on Thebes is continued into the antistrophe.
7 the sons of a Dragon: the Thebans. Cadmus, the mythical founder of Thebes and the dynasty ending in Antigone and Ismene, was thought to have slain a dragon and sown its teeth in the earth, from which sprang a harvest of ‘sown men’, the ancestors of the Theban aristocracy. The image of a dragon and an eagle in combat was traditional in Greek epic poetry (Iliad 12. 201).
With a fiery bolt: tradition made Zeus strike down with a thunderbolt the Argive leader Capaneus, the first to scale the Theban ramparts, who had delivered the ‘arrogant boast’ obliquely alluded to in line 127. The story was too familiar for Capaneus to need naming by Sophocles: he is often depicted in the visual arts falling from his ladder after being struck by lightning.
possessed with frenzy: in the Greek Capaneus is explicitly likened to a maenad.
the great War-god: Ares, the Greek god of martial violence. Thebes was one of the few Greek cities where Ares received an important cult; in myth he fathered both Harmonia whom Cadmus married and the dragon which Cadmus killed.
Seven foemen: none of Polyneices’ six allies is mentioned by name in Sophocles’ Antigone. In Oedipus at Colonus they are catalogued as Amphiareus, Tydeus, Eteoclus, Hippomedon, Capaneus, and Parthenopaeus (1313-20). Their respective fates at the hands of Theban heroes is recounted fully in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes.
Argive arms . . . temple of Zeus: after victory in battle it was established practice to honour the gods by fastening military spoils to temple walls. The Greek here explicitly honours Zeus in his capacity as Zeus tropaios, the god who causes a rout (trope) of the enemy.
Victory: originally an offshoot of Athena, Victory (Nike) was conceptualized as a winged female deity.
8 Theban Dionysus: For several reasons it is appropriate to suggest that the end of the battle be marked by a night-long celebration of Dionysus, the god of wine and dancing; he was an important deity at Thebes, particularly associated with nocturnal festivals (Euripides, Bacchae 486), and he led in his entourage Eirene, the divine personification of peace.
Laius: previous king of Thebes, the son of Labdacus and father of Oedipus.
with polluted sword: the weapons with which the brothers killed each other are described as polluted because a special pollution (miasma) attached to intra-familial murder.
nearest kinship: Creon is only related to the sons of Oedipus by marriage, as the brother of their mother Iocasta. Sophocles chooses to present Polyneices and Eteocles as childless, ignoring alternative traditions which attributed sons to them (e.g. Herodotus 4. 147; 5. 61).
9 To drink his kindred blood: imagery connected with anthropophagy was used traditionally in Greek poetry to denote extremes of hatred (e.g. Iliad 4. 35, Theognis 349). It is not to be taken literally.
11 To avoid a curse: it was believed that guilt fell on anyone who passed a corpse without throwing earth upon it.
hot iron . . . To walk through fire: the guard refers to archaic ordeals connected with the sanctioning of oaths.
‘We must report . . . We dare not hide it’: in the Greek there is no direct speech here.
12 you shall be hanged Alive: evidence from slaves was believed to be more reliable if exacted under torture (see e.g. Isaeus 8. 12).
13 Ox-team: the Greek actually says ‘mules’, believed to be superior to oxen for ploughing (Iliad 10. 352).
14 If he observe Law: the Greek actually says ‘the laws of the land’, providing an important contrast with the divine law mentioned subsequently.
an unlucky father: Sophocles explicitly names Oedipus here.
16 this visitation: the Greek makes it clear that the guard believed that the whirlwind was sent by the gods.
this offence and that: i.e. Antigone’s present and previous attempts to provide the corpse with burial.
the Powers who rule among the dead: the Greek names Dikē, the divine personification of ‘Justice’, a daughter of Zeus.
17 the laws of Heaven: see above, note to p. 5.
closer still | Than all our family: the Greek says ‘closer to me in blood than anyone who worships Zeus at our family altar’.
18 him: i.e. Eteocles.
19 the god of Death: Hades, explicitly named in the Greek.
21 O my dear Haemon . . . wrongs you!: the manuscripts attribute this line to Ismene. Nowhere else does Antigone name her fiancé .
He is your son . . . from him: many editors attribute this line to the chorus.
It is determined . . . she must die: some manuscripts attribute this line to Ismene.
wind from Thrace: Boreas, the god of the north wind, was believed to live in Thrace, a country bordering on northern Greece approximately equivalent to the modern Bulgaria. See further below, note to p. 34.
23 last-born of your children: the significance of this detail will become painfully clear, below p. 44.
r /> for Antigone: the Greek adds, ‘and for the disappointment with regards to his marriage’.
24 to Sacred Kinship: the Greek actually says ‘to Zeus who presides over the family’.
27 as will avert . . . a curse upon the city: Creon does not inflict the threatened punishment of stoning on Antigone, choosing starvation instead. The token supply of food with which she is to be imprisoned is intended to avert the pollution which the killing of a kinswoman would normally be supposed to incur, but may also be seen as an offering to the gods of the underworld.
28 Love: the Greeks had several different words customarily translated as ‘love’. Here the Greek term is the personified force exclusively of sexual love, Eros, usually depicted as a boy.
Aphrodite: goddess of sexual love, and mother of Eros.
Hades: the Greek suggests that Antigone is going to a nuptial chamber, introducing the motif of the ‘bride of death’ which becomes prominent henceforward.
29 Acheron: a river of the underworld, usually conceptualized as a stagnant lake, whose name was derived from a word meaning ‘lamentation’.
alone among mortals: the translation omits the important point that Antigone goes to her death ‘autonomously’ (auto-nomos), i.e., of her own free will.
Niobe: a princess from Phrygia in Asia Minor, the daughter of Tantalus. Niobe married Amphion, an early ruler of Thebes. She boasted that she had borne many beautiful children, whereas Leto, the mother of Apollo and Artemis, had borne only two. The divine siblings killed Niobe’s sons and daughters in recompense. The bereaved mother was subsequently transformed into stone on Mount Sipylus back in her homeland, her tears symbolized in perpetuity by the rivers which course down the mountain side. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles dramatized her tragic story.
a goddess, and born of the gods: the former is not strictly speaking true, but Niobe was of divine descent. Her paternal grandfather was Zeus.
30 Dirke’s stream: see above, note to p. 6.
Labdacus: Oedipus’ paternal grandfather.
O brother: some have thought that this is a macabre address to Oedipus, simultaneously Antigone’s father and her brother. It is more likely, however, that it refers to Polyneices, whose armed assault on Thebes with an Argive army, and consequently both his death and Antigone’s, were precipitated by his marriage with Argeia, daughter of the Argive king Adrastus.
31 Persephone: the daughter of Demeter and Zeus (Hesiod, Theogony 912–13), and, in her capacity as wife to Hades, goddess of the underworld.
my brother: here Antigone means Eteocles.
For when you died . . . : the ‘you’ here is plural, encompassing Oedipus, Iocasta, and Eteocles. As above, p. 4, Sophocles is supposing a version of the myth in which Oedipus died at Thebes, rather than, as in his Oedipus at Colonus, at Athens.
31 Yet what I did: The authenticity of the whole of the remainder of this speech has been questioned. Some scholars have deleted it all, others various individual verses. But if the speech includes lines which were not written by Sophocles, they had been interpolated by the time Aristotle published his Rhetoric in the fourth century BC, because he quotes lines 911–12 (Rhet. 3. 16. 9), ‘But since my mother and my father | Have both gone to the grave, there can be none | Henceforth that I can ever call my brother.’ The main ground on which deletions have been suggested is ethical: it has been objected that Antigone’s declaration that she would not have contravened a civic edict to bury a husband or child is ‘unbecoming’ and inconsistent with her obedience to the ‘unwritten law’ pertaining to burial avowed elsewhere. But the lines can equally well be defended by their being seen as an extreme expression of Antigone’s obsessive fidelity to her natal family, and therefore entirely in keeping with her overall characterization.
32 I fear these words . . . the verge of death: the manuscripts attribute these two lines to Antigone.
33 Fair Danae: Danae was an Argive princess, daughter of King Acrisius. He received an oracle from Delphi informing him that he would be killed by a son of hers. To prevent her from conceiving he therefore imprisoned her in a room built for the purpose within his palace. Both Sophocles and Euripides composed plays about Acrisius and Danae. This choral ode provides several examples of mythical characters who, like Antigone, suffered from incarceration.
divine seed: Acrisius’ plan was foiled because Zeus (named in the Greek here), taking the form of a shower of gold, visited Danae in her prison and impregnated her. She subsequently gave birth to Perseus (famous for slaying the Gorgon), who did eventually kill his grandfather.
Lycurgus: king of the Edonians in Thrace, Lycurgus rejected the worship of the god Dionysus. As a result, he was driven mad, committed various crimes, and was eventually imprisoned in a cave on Mount Pangaeum. This story was dramatized by Aeschylus.
the tuneful Muses: although more usually connected with the god Apollo, the Muses are sometimes imagined as forming part of Dionysus’ entourage.
Salmydessus: a town lying about 60 miles up the western coast of the Black Sea from the Bosphorus. The Greek adds that it was the domain of Ares, the god of war.
a wife . . . bitter constraint: Cleopatra, the wife of Phineus, king of Salmydessus. She was imprisoned after he had put her aside in favour of a new wife, Idaea or Eidothea.
34 a darkness that cried for vengeance: the translation of this whole strophe is a loose paraphrase of the Greek, which refers elliptically to a myth undoubtedly familiar to its original audience (Sophocles himself composed at least two tragedies on the theme). The stepmother, jealous of her rival Cleopatra’s two sons by Phineus, blinded them with a shuttle.
a race of ancient kings: the descendants of the early Athenian king Erechtheus. Cleopatra’s mother Oreithyia was Erechtheus’ daughter.
Her sire the offspring of gods: Cleopatra’s father was Boreas, the god of the north wind, himself the son of Eos, goddess of the Dawn.
in a distant country: Thrace. Boreas abducted Oreithyia from Athens to his northern home, where their children were reared.
the lofty Mountains: the translation omits the important point made in the original that, unlike Antigone, Cleopatra was ‘a child of the gods’.
35 my ancient seat | Of augury: Teiresias’ ‘bird-watching shrine’ could still be seen at Thebes by tourists in the second century AD(Pausanias 9. 16. 1).
offered sacrifice: Teiresias, baffled by the ominous clamour of the birds, attempts another form of divination, by setting alight an offering of bones wrapped in fat. The auspice was deduced from the manner in which the offering did or did not burn when set alight.
from him who guides me: his boy attendant (not Apollo).
Lydian silver: Lydia in Asia Minor was famous for its metal ore, and believed to be the country where money had been invented.
36 Zeus’ own eagles: in the Iliad the eagle is described as Zeus’ ‘swift messenger’, because, as the strongest of all birds, it is his favourite (24. 310–11).
36 the land I saved from mortal danger: this probably alludes to Teiresias’ advice, given earlier to Creon and Eteocles when Polyneices was besieging Thebes. A version of the story is given in Euripides’ Phoenician Women (930-1018). Teiresias had explained that Ares was angry with the city because Cadmus had long ago killed a child of the god, the dragon from whose teeth, when sown in the earth, the Theban aristocracy had sprung. If the city were to be saved from Polyneices, one of the descendants of the ‘sown men’ must die in order to propitiate Ares. As a result, Creon’s elder son, called Menoeceus by Euripides, but Megareus in Antigone (below, line 1302), had patriotically committed suicide.
37 One who should walk upon it: the translation does not make it entirely clear that both this and the subsequent phrase refer to Antigone.
Their sure avengers: the Erinyes (singular: Erinys), often translated into English as ‘Furies’, divinities whose special responsibility was to avenge crimes of blood, especially within the family. They were the agents of Dikē, ’Justice’ or ‘Retribution’. r />
Whose mangled sons: there has been no previous suggestion that funeral rites were to be denied to any of the enemy corpses except that of Polyneices. The recovery and burial of the remaining bodies, at the instigation of the Athenian king Theseus, was a familiar story, dramatized by Euripides in his Suppliant Women.
I have lived long: the Greek actually says that Teiresias has never been wrong either when the chorus had dark hair or since it has become grey—that is, in all their lifetime.