CHORUS
CREON:
ANTIGONE:
CREON:
ANTIGONE:
(ANTIGONE is led away by the guards.)
CHORUS (singing)
antistrophe 1
strophe 2
antistrophe 2
TEIRESIAS :
CREON :
TEIRESIAS:
CREON:
TEIRESIAS:
CREON:
TEIRESIAS:
CREON:
Still the same tempest of the soul vexes this maiden with the same
fierce gusts.
Then for this shall her guards have cause to rue their slowness.
Ah me! that word hath come very near to death.
I can cheer thee with no hope that this doom is not thus to be
fulfilled.
O city of my fathers in the land of Thebe! O ye gods, eldest of
our race!-they lead me henc--now, now-they tarry not! Behold me,
princes of Thebes, the last daughter of the house of your kings,-see
what I suffer, and from whom, because I feared to cast away the fear
of Heaven!
strophe 1
(Enter TEIRESIAS, led by a Boy, on the spectators' right.)
Even thus endured Danae in her beauty to change the light of day
for brass-bound walls; and in that chamber, secret as the grave, she
was held close prisoner; yet was she of a proud lineage, O my
daughter, and charged with the keeping of the seed of Zeus, that
fell in the golden rain.
But dreadful is the mysterious power of fate: there is no
deliverance from it by wealth or by war, by fenced city, or dark,
sea-beaten ships.
And bonds tamed the son of Dryas, swift to wrath, that king of the
Edonians; so paid he for his frenzied taunts, when, by the will of
Dionysus, he was pent in a rocky prison. There the fierce exuberance
of his madness slowly passed away. That man learned to know the god,
whom in his frenzy he had provoked with mockeries; for he had sought
to quell the god-possessed women, and the Bacchanalian fire; and he
angered the Muses that love the flute.
And by the waters of the Dark Rocks, the waters of the twofold
sea, are the shores of Bosporus, and Thracian Salmydessus; where Ares,
neighbour to the city, saw the accurst, blinding wound dealt to the
two sons of Phineus by his fierce wife,-the wound that brought
darkness to those vengeance-craving orbs, smitten with her bloody
hands, smitten with her shuttle for a dagger.
Pining in their misery, they bewailed their cruel doom, those sons
of a mother hapless in her marriage; but she traced her descent from
the ancient line of the Erechtheidae; and in far-distant caves she was
nursed amid her father's storms, that child of Boreas, swift as a
steed over the steep hills, a daughter of gods; yet upon her also
the gray Fates bore hard, my daughter.
Princes of Thebes, we have come with linked steps, both served
by the eyes of one; for thus, by a guide's help, the blind must walk.
And what, aged Teiresias, are thy tidings?
I will tell thee; and do thou hearken to the seer.
Indeed, it has not been my wont to slight thy counsel.
Therefore didst thou steer our city's course aright.
I have felt, and can attest, thy benefits.
Mark that now, once more, thou standest on fate's fine edge.
What means this? How I shudder at thy message!