Oedipus the King and Priest King Oedipus

PROLOGUE

OEDIPUS
My children, scions of the ancient Cadmean line, what is the meaning of this thronging round my feet, this holding out of olive boughs all wreathed in woe?
The city droops with elegaic sound and hymns with pails of incense hang. I come to see it with my eyes, no messenger's. Yes, I whom men call Oedipus the Great. [He turns to the PRIEST]
Speak, Elder, you are senior here. Say what this pleading means, what frightens you, what you beseech.
Coldblooded would I be, to be unmoved by petitioners so pitiful.
PRIEST
King Oedipus, the sovereign of our land, you see here young and old clustered round the shrine.
Fledglings some, essaying flight, and some much weighted down (as I by age, the Presbyter of Zeus), and striplings some--ambassadors of youth.
In the market place sit others too at Pallas's double altar, garlanded to pray, and at the shrine where Ismenus breathes oracles of fire.

Oh, look upon the city, see the storm that batters down this city's prow in waves of blood: The crops diseased, disease among the herds. The ineffectual womb rotting with its fruit. A fever-demon wastes the town and decimates with fire, stalking hated through the emptied house where Cadmus dwelled. While poverty-stricken night grows fat on groans and elegies in Hades' halls.
We know you are no god, omnipotent with gods.
That is not why we throw ourselves before you here, these little suppliants and I.
It is because on life's unequal stage we see you as first of men and consummate atoner to the powers above.
For it was you, coming to the Cadmus capital,
Who disenthralled us from the Sphinx (her greedy dues) that ruthless sorceress who sang.
Not primed by us, not taught by hidden lore, but god-inspired, we so believe,
You raised us up again and made us sound.
So, Oedipus, you most respected king, we plead with you to find for us a cure:
Some answer breathed from heaven, perhaps, or even enlightenment from man.
For still we see the prowess of your well-proved mind, its tested buoyancy.

So, go, you best of men.
Raise up our city. Go, now on your guard.
Your old devotion celebrates you still as Defender of the State. You must not let your reign go down as one when men were resurrected once-and once relapsed.
Mend the city, make her safe.
You had good omens once. You did your work.
Be equal to your stature now.
If king of men (as king you are), then be it of a kingdom manned and not a desert.
Poop and battlement are wasted when all is nothing but waste of men.

OEDIPUS
This quest that throngs you here, poor needy children, is no new quest to me. I know too well, you all are sick, yet sick, not one so sick as I. Your pain is single, each to each, it does not breed. Mine is treble anguish crying out for the city, for myself, for you. It was no man asleep you woke--ah no!--But one in bitter tears and one perplexed in thought, found wandering. Who clutched the only remedy that came: to send the son of Menoeceus, Creon-- my own Jocasta's brother--to the place Apollo haunts at Pythia to learn what act or covenant of mine could still redeem the state. And now I wonder. I count the days. His time is up.
He does not come. He should be here. But when he comes-the instant he arrives whatsoever he shall tell me from the god, that to the hilt I'll do or I am damned.

PRIEST Reassuring words indeed! And timely too, for look, they're signaling that Creon comes. [CREON is seen approaching in the distance]

OEDIPUS His eyes are bright. 0 great Apollo, bring him here effulgent with success!

PRIEST Yes, success it is, I think. See the laurel chaplets thick with berries on his head!

OEDIPUS
We shall know in a moment. He can hear us now. [OEDIPUS shouts to him] What news, royal brother?
What mandate, Son of Menoeceus, from the mouth of the god? [Enter CREON]

CREON
Favorable! I'd even say, if all goes well, our wounds will issue into blessings.

OEDIPUS Which means? . . . You leave me half in hope, half buried in despair.

CREON Do you want to hear it publicly, on the spot, or shall we go inside?

OEDIPUS Speak out to all. It's more for them than me, though more my own than my own soul.

CREON
Very well, then. This is what the god has said, The Prince Apollo openly enjoins on us to sever from the body politic a monstrous growth that battens there: stop feeding that which festers.
OEDIPUS
By what purge? How diagnosed?

CREON
By banishment. Or blood for blood. The city frets with someone's blood.
OEDIPUS
Whose? Is the unhappy man not named?

CREON
Laius, sire. Him we had as king in days before you ruled.

OEDIPUS
So I've heard . . . A man I never saw.

CREON
A murdered man. And now clearly is required the just blood of his assassins.

OEDIPUS
But where in the world are they? Oh where can one begin to search the long-lost traces of forgotten crime?

CREON
"Here," says the god. "Seek and you shall find. Only that escapes which never was pursued."

OEDIPUS
Where did Laius meet his violent end? At home? In the fields? In foreign parts?

CREON
He planned a pilgrimage, he said; and so left home, never to come back again the way he went.

OEDIPUS
He went alone? No companions and no witnesses who could furnish a report?
CREON
Dead. All done to death but one, who fled in panic, and he tongue-tied save on a single point.

OEDIPUS
What point? Tell it. Clues breed clues and we must snatch at straws.
CREON
Brigands, this man insists, attacked the King: not one but many, and they cut him down.

OEDIPUS
No brigand would be so bold, unless . unless bought-right here-bought with bribes.
CREON
So we thought, but with Laius gone we were sunk in miseries and no one stirred.

OEDIPUS
What miseries could ever let you leave unsolved the death and downfall of a king?

CREON
Sire, it was the siren Sphinx of riddles who sang us from the shadowed past to what was sorely present.

OEDIPUS
Then I'll go back and drag that shadowed past to light. Oh yes, the pious Apollo and your piety has set on foot a duty to the dead: A search which you and I together will pursue. My designs could not be suited more: to avenge the god and Thebes in a single blow. Ah! Not for any far-flung friend, but by myself and for myself I'll break this plague. For who knows, tomorrow this selfsame murderer may turn his bloody hands on me. The cause of Laius therefore is my own.
So, rise up, Children, and be off. Take your prayer boughs too. Summon here the counselors of Thebes, and muster too the Cadmus clan.
I am resolute, and shall not stop till with Apollo's help all-blessed we emerge, or else we are lost-beyond all purge.

[OEDIPUS goes into the palace followed by CREON]

PRIEST
Children, rise. The King has pledged us all our pleas and we have heard Apollo's voice. Oh, may he bring salvation in his hands and deal a death to all disease. [The PRIEST disperses the suppliants. The CHORUS of Theban Elders enters]

ODE OF ENTRY
[The first ode opens with a hymn to Apollo, the god of victory and healing (known as Paean). Its stately dactylic measure, as the CHORUS moves toward the altar of Zeus, is bright with hope yet weighted with awe and uncertainty.
Then as the Elders survey the sufferings of Thebes, the rhythm changes into one of dismay, broken by the sad lines of trochees and iambs. In the final strophe and antistrophe the Elders clinch their prayer for help on a note of energy and determination.

Strophe I
What god-golden voice from the gold-studded shrine of the Pytho Comes to our glorious Thebes?
My spirit is tremulous, racked with its eagerness. Help
Healer of Delos-Paean! I am fainting with fear of what fate you will fashion me now, Or turn in the turning of time. Speak to me, Oracle, child everlastingly sprung
From Hope so goldenly. Come!

Antistrophe I
I call on you first, Zeus's daughter, immortal Athena. Then on your sister, earth's guardian, Artemis ringed round with praises and throned in our square. Ah! And far-shooting Phoebus. You three that are champions swift to deliver, appear! For if ever the fire of disaster Reared on our city, you beat its affliction away. Defend and be near us today.

Strophe II
Sorrows in a legion. Sorrows none can cipher.
No shaft of wit or weapon For a people stricken.
Shriveled soil and shrinking Wombs in childbirth shrieking.
Soul after soul like fire Beats, beats upward soaring
To the god of the setting sun.

Antistrophe II
A decimated city Dying. And deadly the dead. All lying uncried for. But crying Matrons and mothers graying
At every altar praying, Till the chiming sorrow of dirges
Is splintered by shouts of the paean: Rescue! 0 golden daughter Of Zeus's with your smile.

Strophe III
Muffle the wildfire Ares Warring with copper-hot fever
Without clash of sword or shield. Whirl him back homeward and headlong. Plunge him down from our shores
Into Amphitrite's foaming Lap or the unquiet grave
Of hissing Thracian seas. For, oh, what night has spared us
He does at break of day. Zeus you sovereign of thunder,
Shiver him with lightning.

Antistrophe III
Aureate champion Apollo, Let us sing the song of your arrows Shot from the bow of the sun; While Artemis blazing with torches Courses the Lycean mountains. And you, O Theban Bacchus, Wine blushed, xanthic crowned, You smiling god of succor, Come all torchlit flaring, Come wheeling with your Maenads, Fall on the god that is godless. [OEDIPUS has entered]

First Episode

OEDIPUS
You pray! Then listen:
What you pray for you can have--remission of these miseries and help if you'll hear my plan: a plan to stop the plague.
I speak of course as stranger to the story and stranger to the crime, being too late your latest citizen
And helpless, therefore, to track it very far unless you lend me clues.
Wherefore, I boldly challenge all you Thebans here with this: Does any man among you know who killed Laius son of Labdacus? Such a one I now command to tell me everything. [He waits for a reply]
If self-incrimination keeps him silent, let him be assured
He need fear nothing worse than banishment and he can depart unharmed. [He pauses again)
Perhaps one of you is aware the murderer was someone from some other land. Let him not be shy to say it.
I shall heap rewards on him, besides my deepest blessing.
[No one stirs]
What, silent still?
If anyone is out to shield a guilty friend (or is it guilty self?),
He'd best listen to the penalties I plan. That man, whoever that man be, I this country's reigning king
Shall sever from all fellowship of speech and shelter, sacrifice and sacrament,
Even ritual touch of water, in this realm. Thrust out from every home, he'll be the very picture of that pestilence he brought upon our city,
As Apollo's word from Pythia has just revealed to me. Yes, such an ally, nothing less, am I of both religion and the murdered man.

As to the killer, slipping off alone or with a band of men,
I now call down a life to fit a life dragged out in degradation.
And if I myself should prove myself to have him in my halls an intimate, Then on myself I call down every curse I've just invoked. See to it that every syllable I say is done.
For my sake, for the god Apollo, and for this land, so fruitless now and so cast off by heaven.
Why, even without a sanction so divine, how could you find it in you to neglect a monarch's death and not pursue this ending to the best of men?
Whose very scepter I hold in my hands as King; His marriage bed my bed of seed, our children even shared with share of her had he been blessed with progeny-Oh, blessed and not struck down by fate!

Such ties swear me to his side as if he were my father.
I shall not rest until I've tracked the hand that slew the son of Labdacus, the son of Polydorus, heir to Cadmus in the line of ancient Agenor.
And those who disobey I'll ask the gods to curse with fields that never sprout and wombs that never flower, And all the horrors of this present plague and worse.
The rest of you, my loyal men of Thebes, who think with me, may Justice champion and the whole of heaven help.

CHORUS
Great king, your oath will make a perjuror of me if I do not tell the truth. I swear I am not the killer, nor can I show you who the killer is. Apollo proposed the search, it's up to him to point the culprit out.

OEDIPUS
Certainly, but show me a man who can force the hand of heaven.
CHORUS
Then, the next best thing, if I may say it . . -

OEDIPUS
Next best, third best, say it-anything.

CHORUS
My lord, there lives a man who with a king's eyes sees the secrets of a king: Tiresias of Apollo.
He is our source of light, our chance of learning, King.

OEDIPUS
I know. Don't think that I've been idle there.
Twice I have sent for him at Creon's bidding.
I cannot understand what keeps him so.

CHORUS
At least we can dismiss those other tall old tales.

OEDIPUS
What tales? I must hear them all.

CHORUS
How he met his death through traveling vagabonds.

OEDIPUS
I've heard that too. We have no witnesses, however.

CHORUS
And he'd be a brazen man indeed who could rest in peace after all your menaces.
OEDIPUS
Mere words will not stay one whom murder never could.

CHORUS
And yet there's one to meet the challenge. Look:
They're leading in the holy prophet, sole temple of incarnate truth on earth. [The old blind prophet TIRESIAS is led in by a boy]

OEDIPUS Come, great mystic, Tiresias--intuitive, didactic master of the finite and the infinite-
Though you cannot see it you must surely feel the overwhelming weight of all this city's woes.
You are our last refuge, Pontiff, and our help.
Apollo, if you have not heard the news, has sent back to us who sent to him, an answer saying: "No deliverance from the plague except you seek and find the Laius killers and punish such with death or banishment."
Now, sir, do not begrudge the smallest hint your skill from birds or any other omen can elicit.
Save yourself, the city, and save me.
Save us from this whole corruption of the dead.
We are in your hands.
What more rewarding for a man than stir himself to help where help he can? [There is an ominous pause before TIRESIAS answers]

TI RESIAS
Oh, what anguish to be wise where wisdom is a loss! I thought I knew this well. What made me come?

OEDIPUS
What makes you come so full of gloom?

TIRESIAS
Please send me home. Take up your load and I'll take mine.
Believe me, it is better so.

OEDIPUS
What? Refuse to speak? Is that fair and loyal to your city?

TIRESIAS
Ah, fair speech! If yours were only so I should not shy away.

OEDIPUS
By all the gods, do not deny us what you know. We ask you, all of us, on bended knees.

TIRESIAS
All ignorant! And I refuse to link my utterance with a downfall such as yours.

OEDIPUS
You mean, you know and will not say? You'd rather sacrifice us all and let the city rot?

TIRESIAS
I'd rather keep you and me from harm.
Don't press me uselessly. My lips are sealed.

OEDIPUS
What, nothing? You miserable old man!
You'd drive a stone to fury. Do you still refuse?
Your flinty heart set in hopeless stubbornness?

TIRESIAS
My flinty heart! Oh, if you could only see what lurks in yours you would not chide me so.

OEDIPUS
Hear that? What man alive, I ask, could stand such insults to our sovereignty and state?

TIRESIAS
It will out in time. What if I hold my tongue?

OEDIPUS
Out in time! Then why not say it now?

TIRESIAS
No. I've had my say. So choose your rage and fume away.
[TIRESIAS begins to move off]

OEDIPUS
Indeed I shall. I do. I vent it all on you. Yes, you, you planned this thing, and I suspect you of the very murder even, all but the actual stroke. And if you had your eyes I'd say you played that chief part too. [TIRESIAS turns back)

TIRESIAS
Would you so? Then I shall charge you to abide by the very curse you trumpeted just now. From this day forth keep far from every person here and me: The rotting canker in the State is you.

OEDIPUS
Insolence! And dare you think you're safe?

TIRESIAS
Yes safe. For truth has made me strong.

OEDIPUS
What truth? Hardly learned from your profession!

TIRESIAS
No. Learned from you; who force it out of me.

OEDIPUS
Force what? Say it again. I must have it straight.

TIRESIAS
Was it not straight? You'd bait and goad me on?

OEDIPUS
It made no sense. So speak it out again.

TIRESIAS
I say, the murderer of the man whose murder you pursue is you.
OEDIPUS
What! A second time? This you will regret.

TIRESIAS
Shall I add to it and make you angrier still?

OEDIPUS
To your heart's content. Mouth away!

TIRESIAS
I say that you and your most dearly loved Are wrapped together in a hideous sin, blind to the horror of it.

OEDIPUS
You think you can go on blabbering unscathed?

TIRESIAS
Unscathed indeed, if truth is strength.

OEDIPUS
It is. But not for you, you purblind man: in ears and mind and vision.

TIRESIAS
Poor fool! These very gibes you mouth at me will soon be hurled by every mouth at you.

OEDIPUS
You can't hurt me, you night-hatched thing! Me or any man who lives in light.

TIRESIAS
You're right. I'm not the one that fate casts for your fall. Apollo is enough. It's in his able hands,

OEDIPUS [remembering that it was CREON who urged him to send for TIRESIAS, Apollo's priest]

Creon? Of course! Was it you or he that thought up that?

TIRESIAS
Hardly Creon. You are your own worst enemy.

OEDIPUS
Oh wealth and sovereignty! Statecraft surpassing art!
Oh life so pinnacled on fame! What ambushed envy dogs your trail! And for a kingship which the State put in my hands, all given, never asked.

So this is what he wants, Creon the loyal, Creon so long my friend! Stealing up to overthrow and snatch!
Suborning sorcerers, like this vamper-up of plots, this hawking conjurer, a genius born blind with eyes for gain. Yes, you. Tell me, when did you ever play the prophet straight? Or why when the bitch-dog Sphinx of riddles sang, you never spoke a thing to break the spell?
And yet her riddle called for insight trained-no traveler's guess--which you plainly showed you did not have either from theology or birds. But I, the Oedipus who stumbled here without a hint, could snuff her out by human wit, not taking cues from birds. And I'm the one you want to topple down to give yourself a place by Creon's throne.
Oh! Do not be surprised if this plot of yours to brand me as a scapegoat turns around and brands you and him. And were you not as doting as you seem, I'd lash you with the lessons of your fraud. [CHORUS leader steps forward, holding up a hand in restraint]
CHORUS
Forgive us, Oedipus, but this is anger.
He spoke in anger too. And both beside the point.
What we want to know is how best to carry out the god's designs.
TIRESIAS
Perhaps you are a king, but I reign too-- in words.
I'll have my equal say. I'm not your servant. No, I serve Apollo. So don't ever mark me down as Creon's myrmidon.
I'm blind, you say; you mock at that!
I say you see and still are blind--appallingly:
Blind to your origins and to a union in your house.
Yes, ask yourself where you are from?
You'd never guess what hate is dormant in your home or buried with your dear ones dead, or how a mother's and a father's curse
Will one day scourge you with its double thongs and whip you staggering from the land. It shall be night where now you boast the day.
Then where shall your yelp of horror not resound, Where round the world not ring, echoing from Mount Cithaeron, when at last you see-yes soon-What portless port this palace and this marriage was you made, scudding in before a lucky breeze? What flood of sorrows-ah! you do not dream--will pull you down and level off your pride To make it match your children and the creature that you are. Go on then, hurl abuse at everything that I or Creon say. No man alive shall see his life so ground away.

OEDIPUS [stepping forward threateningly]
Dear gods! Must I listen to this thing?
Look it dawdles! Wants to wallow in perdition!
Does not turn in panic from my home!

TIRESIAS
You called me here. I never would have come.

OEDIPUS
Nor I have ever summoned you if I'd known you'd go foaming at the mouth.

TIRESIAS
A born fool of course to you am I, and yet to parents you were born from, wise.

OEDIPUS
Parents? Wait! Who was I born from after all?

TIRESIAS [stopping and turning]
This very day will furnish you a birthday and a death.

OEDIPUS
What a knack you have for spouting riddles!

TIRESIAS
And you, of course, for solving them!

OEDIPUS
Go on! You challenge there my strongest point.

TIRESIAS
Oh yes! Your lucky strain. Your royal road to ruin.

OEDIPUS
A ruin that saved the State. That's good enough for me.

TIRESIAS [turning his back]
I'll take my leave, then. Your hand, boy-home.

OEDIPUS
Yes, take him home. Good riddance too! You're nothing but a nuisance here, and one I can do without.

TIRESIAS [turning face-about]
You'll not be rid of me until I've spoken what I came to say. You do not frighten me. There's not a thing that you can do to hurt. I tell you this: the man you've searched for all along with threats and fanfares for the murder of King Laius, That man, I say, is here: a stranger in our midst, they thought, but in a moment you shall see him openly displayed a Theban born, and shattered by the honor. Blind instead of seeing, beggar instead of rich,
He'll grope his way in foreign parts, tapping out his way with stick in hand.
Oh yes, detected in his very heart of home: his children's father and their brother, son and husband to his mother, bed-rival to his father and assassin.
Ponder this and go inside,
And when you think you've caught me at a lie, then come and tell me I'm not fit to prophesy. [TIRESIAS lets his boy lead him away. OEDIPUS waits, then stomps into the palace)

SECOND CHORAL ODE

[The Elders, spurred on by the proclamation of OEDIPUS, begin to imagine with righteous and indignant anticipation what shall be the fate of the man whose sin has plunged Thebes in misery. The meter is swift and resolute. Then they remember the baffling threat of TIRESIAS and they catch their breath at the unthinkable possibility that Oedipus himself may be implicated (Strophe and Antistrophe II).]

Strophe I
Show me the man the speaking stone from Delphi damned
Whose hands incarnadine
Achieved the master stroke of master murdering.
Faster than horses that beat on the wind he must fly.
The son of Zeus caparisoned in light and fire
Is on his heels.
The pack of sure-foot Fates will track him down.

Antistrophe I
A Voice that coruscates from high Parnassian snows
Leaps down like light.
Apollo to the hunt will run the man to earth
Through savage woods and stony caverns.
A lone wounded bull he limps, lost and alone,
Dodging living echoes
From the mantic earth that sting and gad around him.

Strophe II
Terrible auguries tear me and trouble me:
The seer's divining.
I cannot assent. I cannot deny.
Deserted by words,
I live on hopes-all blind for today and blind for tomorrow. A division between the Rouse of Laius and Oedipus Yesterday or today
I knew not, nor know of a quarrel
Or a reason or challenge to challenge
The fame of Oedipus,
Though I seek to avenge the curious death
Of the Labdacid king.

Antistrophe II
Zeus and Apollo are wise and discern
The conditions of man.
But oh among men where is there proof
That a prophet can know
More than me, a man? Yet wisdom can surpass
Wisdom in a man. But nevertheless I'll not
Be quick to judge
Before the proof. For once
The winged and female Sphinx
Challenged him and found him sound
And a friend of the city. So never in my mind at least
Shall he be guilty of crime.

SECOND EPISODE

[CREON enters, distraught] CREON
Good citizens, I hurry here shocked into your presence by a monstrous charge laid on me by Oedipus the King.
If he thinks in all this turmoil of our times that any word or act of mine was ever done in malice, done to harm, I'd rather end my life than live so wronged. For this is not a trifling calumny but full catastrophe: to find myself called traitor; traitor to my town, to you, and to my friends.

CHORUS
We are convinced the taunt was made in anger, not coolly uttered by a mind at calm. CREON
It was uttered, then? Said that I had got the seer to tell a tale of lies?
CHORUS
It was said. We cannot fathom why.

CREON
But said with steady eyes, steady mind-this onslaught made against my name?

CHORUS
I do not know. I turn my eyes away from what my sovereign does. But look! He's coming from the house himself. [OEDIPUS comes raging in]

OEDIPUS
What? You again? You dare come back? Have the face to put your foot inside my door? You the murderer so self-proved, the self-condemned filcher of my throne? In heaven's name, what cowardice or lunacy did you detect in me to give you gall to do it? Did you think that I would never spot such treachery, such slinking jobbery, or that when I did I'd not be one to fight? What madman's game is this: To go out hunting crowns unbacked by friends and money, when crowns are only wonby many friends and well-crammed money-bags?

CREON
Wait! Listen to my answer to your charge. And when you've heard me, judge.

OEDIPUS
No. You're too good at talking. And I'm not good at hearing one found so laden with malevolence.

CREON
We'll deal first with that very point.

OEDIPUS
That very point, we'll leave alone: that you're no traitor, eh?

CREON
If you really think a stubborn mind is something to be proud of you're not thinking straight.

OEDIPUS
And if you really think a brother-in-law can get away with murder, you're not thinking at all.

CREON
All right, then-tell me what I've done. What's the crime I've wronged you with?
OEDIPUS
Did you or did you not urge me to send for that reverend frothy-mouthing seer?
CREON
I did. And I still stand by that advice.

OEDIPUS
Then how long is it since Laius .

CREON
Laius? I don't follow the connection.

OEDIPUS
Disappeared—died--was mysteriously dispatched?

CREON
Old calendars long past would tell us that.

OEDIPUS
And was this--this "prophet" in his practice then?

CREON
He was, and just as wise, just as honored.

OEDIPUS
And did he at any time then speak of me?

CREON
No. At least never in my hearing.

OEDIPUS
And you did nothing to investigate his death?

CREON
Of course we did: a full commission, and nothing learned

OEDIPUS
But the all-seeing seer did not step forward and all see?

CREON
That I cannot answer for and shall not venture an opinion.

OEDIPUS
You could answer very well-at least upon a certain point.

CREON
What point is that? If I know, I won't hold it back.

OEDIPUS
Just this: were you not hand-in-glove with him, he never would have thought of pinning Laius's death on me.

CREON
What prompted him, only you can tell.
Now I should like to ask, and you can do the answering.

OEDIPUS
Ask away, but don't expect to find a murderer.

CREON
Well then, are you married to my sister?

OEDIPUS
I am. Why should I deny it?

CREON
And reign equally with her over all the realm?

OEDIPUS
I do, and do my best to grant her every wish.

CREON
And of this twosome do I make an equal third?

OEDIPUS
Exactly! Which is why you make so false a friend.

CREON
No. Try to reason it as I must reason it. Who would choose uneasy dreams to don a crown when all the kingly sway can be enjoyed without? I could not covet kingship for itself when I can be a king by other means. All my ambitions now are satisfied through you, without anxiety, but once a king, all hedged in by constraint. How could I suit myself with power and sovereignty a now, if power and sovereignty once grasped were grasped in pain? I am not so simple as to seize the symbol when I can have the sweet reality:
Now smiled upon by all, saluted now, now drawn aside by suitors to the King, my ear their door to hope.
Why should I let this go, this ease, and reach for cares?
A mind at peace does not engender wars.
Treason never was my bent, nor I a man who parleys with an anarchist.

Test me. Go to Delphi. Ask if I have brought back lies for prophecies. And do not stop, but if you find me plotting with a fortuneteller, take me, kill me, full-indicted on a double not a single count: not yours alone but mine.
Oh, do not judge me on a mere report, unheard!
No justice brands the good and justifies the bad.
Drive friendship out, I say, and you drive out life itself, one's sweetest bond.
Time will teach you well. The honest man needs time, The sinner but a single day to bare his crime.

CHORUS
He speaks well, sire. The circumspect should care. Swift thinking never makes sure thought.

OEDIPUS
Swift thinking must step in to parry where swift treachery steps in to plot. Must I keep mum until his perfect plans are more than match for mine?

CREON
Then what is it you want-my banishment?

OEDIPUS
Banishment? Great heavens, no! I want you dead:
A lesson to all of how much envy's worth.

CREON
So adamant! So full of disbelief!

OEDIPUS
Only a fool would believe in a rabid man.

CREON
Rabid? It's clear you're not thinking straight.

OEDIPUS
Straight enough for me.

CREON
Then why not for me as well?

OEDIPUS
What! For a treason-monger?

CREON
You make no sense.

OEDIPUS
I make decisions.

CREON
Crazed decisions!

OEDIPUS
My own poor Thebes!

CREON
Hear him Thebes!

OEDIPUS
Not just yours. My city too.

CHORUS
Princes, please!
Look. Jocasta hurries from the house: a timely balm on both your hurts. You must compose your quarrel. [JOCASTA hurries in)

JOCASTA
You wretched men! Out on all this senseless clatter! Shame to wrangle over private wrongs, with Thebes our city in her agonies! Get back home, sir, you, and Creon you into your house. Stop turning trifles into tragedies.

CREON
Trifles, sister! Oedipus your husband plans to do me devilish harm, with choice of dooms: exile from my father's land or death.
OEDIPUS
Exactly that, my wife, I've caught him in a plot, against my very person. So cleverly devised.

CREON
May I be stricken dead if I be guilty in the smallest part of what you charge!
JOCASTA
For the gods' sakes, listen, Oedipus. He's sworn by all the gods, in front of us, for me and for us all.

CHORAL DIALOGUE

Strophe I CHORUS
Believe her, King, believe. Be willing to be wise.

OEDIPUS
What! You'd have me yield?

CHORUS
He's never told you lies before. He's sworn. Be kind.

OEDIPUS
You know for what you plead?

. CHORUS
We know. OEDIPUS
Explain
CHORUS
Do not impeach a friend or lead him to disgrace; his oath annulled upon a word.

OEDIPUS
It's come to that? My banishment or death preferred to what you want for him?

Strophe II CHORUS
No, by Helios, no, god of the primal sun!
Call gladless death upon me--godless, friendless--
If that be in my mind.
The dying land undoes me,
Sorrow heaped on sadness
Now to see you and him--combine in madness.

OEDIPUS
Go then, let him go, though I go abundantly to die, or flung from here and fated;
Yours not his the cry that breaks me.
He a thing that's hated.

CREON
Yes, how you hate, even in your yielding!
But passion spent, compunction follows.
Such men justly bear the tempers they created.

OEDIPUS
Get yourself gone then! Out of my sight! [CREON leaves, while OEDIPUS continues to stand there disappointed and shaken]

Antistrophe I CHORUS
Madam, why delay to lead him away?

JOCASTA
I stay . ..to know.

CHORUS
Hot and hasty words, suspicion and dismay .

JOCASTA
From both?

CHORUS
From both.

JOCASTA
What words?
CHORUS
Enough! Enough! The agony! 0 let it alone! Let it sleep with all its pain.

OEDIPUS
Very well, but understand You've numbed me to the heart by your demand.

Antistrophe II CHORUS
Sire, I've said it more than once
How insensate we'd be, what crass
And total fools to abdicate
From you who set this foundering ship,
This suffering realm, back on her course
And now again can take the helm.
[End of Choral Dialogue. JOCASTA gently leads OEDIPUS aside]

JOCASTA
In the name of all the gods, my king, inform me too what in the world has worked you to this rage?

OEDIPUS
Willingly, my wife-so more to me than these. It's Creon; he has played me false.

JOCASTA
What's the charge? Tell me clearly-what's the quarrel?

OEDIPUS
He makes me murderer of Laius.

JOCASTA
His own invention or on evidence?

OEDIPUS
Ah! The fox: he sends along a mouthing seer and keeps his own lips lily pure.

JOCASTA
Oh then, altogether leave behind these cares and be persuaded and consoled. There is no art of seership known to man. I have my proof. Yes, short and certain proof.
Once long ago there came to Laius from-let's not suppose Apollo personally but from his ministers-an oracle,
Which said that fate would make him meet his end through a son, a son of his and mine. Well, there was a murder, yes, but done by brigands in another land, they say, Where three highways meet, and secondly, the son, not three days old, Is left by Laius (through other hands of course) upon a trackless hillside, his ankles riveted together.
So there! Apollo fails to make the son his father's murderer, and the father (Laius sick with dread) murdered by his son.
All foreseen by fate and seers, of course, and all to be forgotten. If the god insists on tracking down the truth, why then, let the god himself get on the track.

OEDIPUS
My queen, each word that strikes my ear has shattered peace, struck at my very soul.

JOCASTA
You start! What pale memory passes now?

OEDIPUS
Laius was killed-I thought I caught the words-where three highways meet?

JOCASTA
So they said. That is how the story goes.

OEDIPUS
The place? Where did the mishap fall?

JOCASTA
A land called Phocis, at a spot where the road from Delphi meets the road from Daulia.

OEDIPUS
And the time? How many years ago?

JOCASTA
A little before you came to power here the news was made public in the town.

OEDIPUS
O Zeus, what plaything will you make of me?

JOCASTA
Why, Oedipus, what nightmare thought has touched you now?
OEDIPUS
Don't ask! Not yet! . . . Laius, tell me, his age? His build?

JOCASTA
Tall, the first soft bloom of silver in his hair; in form, not far removed from yours.

OEDIPUS
Oh lost! Yes, surely lost! self-damned, I think, just now and self-deceived.

JOCASTA
Self-what, my king? that look you give, it chills.

OEDIPUS
I am afraid--afraid the eyeless seer has seen. But wait: one thing more .
JOCASTA
Yes? It frightens me, but ask. I'll try to tell.

OEDIPUS
Did he Set out in simple state or with an ample bodyguard as king?
JOCASTA
Five men in all, and one a herald. A single chariot for the King.
OEDIPUS
It's all too clear . . My wife, where did you get these details from?
JOCASTA
A servant. The only man who got away.

OEDIPUS
Is he in the house by chance?

JOCASTA
No, for the moment he was back and saw you reigning in dead Laius's place, he begged me, pressed my hand, to send him to the country, far from Thebes, where he could live a shepherd's life. And so I sent him. Though a slave, I thought he'd more than earned this recompense.

OEDIPUS
Could we have him here without delay?

JOCASTA
Certainly. But what should make you ask?

OEDIPUS
There may be things, my wife, that I have said best left unsaid, which makes me want him here.

JOCASTA
He shall be here. But tell me, my king, may I not also know what it is unnerves you so?

OEDIPUS
You shall, for I have passed into territories of fear, such threatenings of fate, I welcome you, my truest confidante. My father was Corinthian, Polybus, My mother Dorian, called Merope. I was the city's foremost man until a certain incident befell, a curious incident, though hardly worth the ferment that it put me in.
At dinner once, a drunkard in his cups bawled out, "Aha! You're not your father's son." All that day I fretted, hardly able to contain my hurt. But on the next, straightway I went to ask my mother and my father, who were shocked at such a random slur. I was relieved by their response, and yet the thing had hatched a scruple in my mind which grew so deep it made me steal away from home to Delphi, to the oracle, and there Apollo~never hinting what I came to hear--packs me home again, my ears ringing with some other things he blurted out; horrible disgusting things: How mating with my mother I must spawn a progeny to make men shudder, having been my father's murderer.
Oh, I fled from there, I measured out the stars to put all heaven in between the land of Corinth and such a damned destiny.
And as I went, I stumbled on the very spot where this king you say has met his end.
I'll…I’ll tell the truth to you, my wife. As I reached this triple parting of the ways, a herald and a man like you described in a colt-drawn chariot came.
The leading groom-the old man urging him-tried to force me off the road. The groom jostled me and I in fury landed him a blow. Which when the old man sees, he waits till I'm abreast,
Then from his chariot cracks down on me, full on my head, a double-headed club.
He more than paid for it. For in a trice this hand of mine had felled him with a stick and rolled him from the chariot stunned. I killed him. I killed them all. Ah! If Laius is this unknown man, there's no one in this world so doomed as I. There's no one born so god-abhorred: a man whom no one, citizen or stranger, can let into his house or even greet-a man to force from homes.
And who but I have done it all? Myself, to fix damnation on myself!
To clasp a dead man's wife with filthy hands: these hands by which he fell. Not hell-born then? Not rotten to the core? A wretch who has to flee, yet fled cannot go home to see my own, Or I will make my mother wife, my father dead: my father, Polybus, who reared and gave me life. Forbid, forbid, most holy gods! Never let that day begin.
I'd rather disappear from man than see myself so beggared, dyed so deep in sin.

CHORUS
King, you tell us frightening things, but wait until you've heard the witness speak. Have hope.

OEDIPUS
Yes, all my hope upon a herdsman now, and I must wait until he comes.

JOCASTA
But when he comes, what is it you want to hear?

OEDIPUS
Just this: if his account is yours, I'm clear.

JOCASTA
But what was my account? What did I say?

OEDIPUS
Why, several bandits in your account, he claimed, cut down the King. If he will keep to several, I, as only one, am not the killer, not the same. But if he says it was a lone man journeying--ah then!--the verdict tilts too heavily to me.

JOCASTA
Rest assured; his account was that, exactly that,
He cannot cancel what he said. The whole town heard, not I alone. And even if he tries to change a word, he still can never make--oh surely, King!--the death of Laius tally with the oracle, which said it had to happen through a son of mine . poor babe, who never killed a thing but himself was killed--oh long before! After this, I'll never change my look from left to right to suit a prophecy.

OEDIPUS I like your reasoning. And yet . . . and yet . . that herdsman-have him here. Do not forget.

JOCASTA
Immediately. But let us go indoors. All my care is you, and all my pleasure yours. [OEDIPUS and JOCASTA enter the palace]

THIRD CHORAL ODE

[The Elders seem at first merely to be expressing a lyrical admiration for piety and purity of heart, but before the end of the ode we see that the reputation itself of OEDIPUS is at stake. JOCASTA’s blatant impiety has shocked the CHORUS into realizing that if divine prophecies cannot go unfulfilled and man’s insolence unpunished, then OEDIPUS himself, whoever he is, must be weighed in the balance. It is too late to go back. A choice will have to be made. They call desperately on Zeus.]
Strophe I O purity of deed and sweet intent, Enshrine me in your grace A minister to radiant laws Heaven-born which have No father but Olympus nor Fading genesis from man. Great is God in them And never old Whom no oblivion lulls.

Antistrophe I Pride engenders power, pride, Banqueting on vanities Mistaken and mistimed; Scaling pinnacles to dash A foot against Fate's stone. But the true and patriotic man Heaven never trips to fall. So I for one shall never desert The god who is our champion.

Strophe II But what if a brazen man parade In word or deed Impiety and brash disdain Of principalities and canons? Then dog him doom and pay him pride Wages for his haughty greed, His sacrilege and folly. What shield is there for such a man Against all heaven's arrows? Could I celebrate such wantonness And celebrate the dance?

Antistrophe II I shall not worship at the vent Where oracles from earth are breathed; Nor at Abae's shrine and not Olympia, unless these oracles Are justified, writ large to man. Zeus, if king of kings you are, Then let this trespass not go hidden From you and your great eye undying. The Laius prophecies are turned to lies; They fade away with reverence gone And honor to Apollo.

THIRD EPISODE
[JOCASTA hurries in from the palace with a garlanded olive branch and a burning censer in her hands]

JOCASTA
Men of State, I have a new design:
With these garlands and with incense in my hands to call at all the shrines. For rampant fancies in a legion raid the mind of Oedipus. He is so far from sense he cannot gauge the present from the past but pins his soul to every word of fear.
All my advice is bankrupt; I address myself to you Apollo, whose Lycean shrine is nearest to these rites and prayers:
That you may work some way to make us clean. For we are gone to pieces at the sight of him the steersman of the ship astray by fright.

[While JOCASTA is standing in prayer a MESSENGER from Corinth enters]

MESSENGER
Can you tell me please, good sirs, where is the palace of King Oedipus, or better, where's the King?
CHORUS
This is his palace, sir, and he's within.
This lady is his wife and mother . . . of his children.

MESSENGER
Heaven bless her always and bless hers: the perfect wife blessed perfectly with him.

JOCASTA
And you sir, too, be blessed for your remark . . But are you here to ask us news or give?

MESSENGER
To give it, madam. Happy news both for your house and husband.

JOCASTA
Happy news? From where?

MESSENGER
From Corinth, my lady. Oh a pleasing piece of news! Or I'd think so . . . Perhaps a little bittersweet.

JOCASTA
What's bittersweet? What's half-and-half to please?

MESSENGER
King Elect of Corinth is he:
So runs the order-in-council there.

JOCASTA
How so? The old man Polybus still reigns.

MESSENGER
No more. For death has sealed him in his grave.

JOCASTA
What? Is Oedipus's father dead?

MESSENGER
Yes, dead. It's true. On my life he's dead. [JOCASTA excitedly turns to servant girl]

JOCASTA
Quick girl--off and tell your master this!
Aha! Forecasts of the gods where are you now?
This is the man that Oedipus was terrified to kill, so fled;
And now, without the slightest push from him, he's dead. [Enter OEDIPUS]
OEDIPUS
Jocasta, dearest wife, why have you called me from the palace here? JOCASTA
Just listen to this man and fill your ears. How dwindled are the grand predictions of Apollo!

OEDIPUS
Who is this? What has he come to say?

JOCASTA
A man from Corinth, come to let you know your father is no more. Old Polybus is dead.

OEDIPUS
What? Let me have it from your mouth, good sir.

MESSENGER
Why, to give you first news first, he's gone. Be quite assured--he's dead.

OEDIPUS
Through treason or disease?

MESSENGER
A little touch will tip the old to sleep.

OEDIPUS
He died a natural death, then? Poor old man!

MESSENGER
A natural death, by right of many years.

OEDIPUS
Aha, my wife! So we are done with delving into Pythian oracles, this jangled mongering with birds on high, which foretold-yes, had it all arranged-- that I should kill my father. Ha! He's dead and under sods, while here I stand my sword still in its scabbard .Or did he pine for me? And did I kill him so? Well, he's dead, and may he rest in peace in Hades realm with all those prophecies-worth nothing now.

JOCASTA
Worth nothing-as I told you even then.

OEDIPUS
You told me, yes, but I was sick with fear.

JOCASTA
Forget it all. Give none of it a thought.

OEDIPUS
There's still that scruple of my mother's bed.

JOCASTA
How can a man have scruples when it's only Chance that's king?
There's nothing certain, nothing preordained.
We should live as carefree as we may.
Forget this silly thought of mother-marrying.
Why, many men in dreams have married mothers,
And he lives happiest who makes the least of it.

OEDIPUS
Everything you say would make good sense were my mother not alive-she is; so all your comfort cannot quiet me.

JOCASTA
At least your father's death has lightened up the scene.

OEDIPUS
It has, but now I fear a living woman.

MESSENGER
A woman, sir? Who ever could she be?

OEDIPUS
Merope, old man, who lives with Polybus--

MESSENGER
But what's in her that she can make you fear?

OEDIPUS
A dire warning sent from heaven, my friend.

MESSENGER
Some secret too horrible to tell?

OEDIPUS
No, you may be told.
Apollo once declared that I would come to couple with my mother, and with these very hands of mine spill out the life-blood of my father.
All of which has put me far and long from Corinth, in sweet prosperity maybe,
But what's so sweet as looking into parents' eyes?

MESSENGER
Is this the fear that drove you out of Corinth?

OEDIPUS
Exactly that, old man, and not to kill my father.

MESSENGER
Well, my King, since I came to save, why don't I loose you from that worry too?

OEDIPUS
Ah! If you could, I'd heap you with rewards.

MESSENGER
Ah! to be frank, that's why I came . . . to bring you home, and do myself some good.

OEDIPUS
No, not home. I'll not go near a parent still.

MESSENGER
My son, it's plain you don't know what you're at.

OEDIPUS
Speak out, old man. In the name of heaven-what?

MESSENGER
Well, you've fled from home because of this?

OEDIPUS
Yes, the fear Apollo may be proven right.

MESSENGER
And you, because of your parents, a criminal?

OEDIPUS
Yes, old man, it's that. I'm haunted by that dread.

MESSENGER
Then, don't you understand, you're terrified for nothing.

OEDIPUS
Nothing? How-when I am their son.

MESSENGER
Because Polybus and you were worlds apart.

OEDIPUS
Worlds apart? He was my father, wasn't he?

MESSENGER
No more nor less than I who tell you this.

OEDIPUS
No more nor less than you? Than nothing then.

MESSENGER
Exactly so. He never gave you life, no more than I.

OEDIPUS
Then, whatever made him call me son?

MESSENGER
You were a gift. He took you from my arms.

OEDIPUS
A gift? But he loved me as his own.

MESSENGER
~He had no children of his own to love.

OEDIPUS
And this gift of me you gave-was I freeborn or bought?

MESSENGER
Discovered . . . in a woody mountain dell of Cithaeron. [JOCASTA moves away. She has gone pale]

OEDIPUS
On Theban hills? What made you wander there?

MESSENGER
On those hills I used to graze my flock.

OEDIPUS
What! A shepherd Out for hire?

MESSENGER
And on that day your savior too, my son.

OEDIPUS
My savior? Was I in pain when you took me in your arms?

MESSENGER
The ankles of your feet could tell you that.

OEDIPUS
Ah, don't remind me of that ancient hurt.

MESSENGER
I loosed the pin that riveted your feet.

OEDIPUS
My birthmark and my brand from babyhood!

MESSENGER
Which gave you also your unlucky name.*

OEDIPUS
Was this my mother's doing or my father's? For the gods' sakes say! [JOCASTA hides her face in her hands]

MESSENGER
That, I do not know. The man who gave you me could tell.

OEDIPUS
What, received at secondhand? Not found by you?

MESSENGER
Not found by me, but handed over by another shepherd.

OEDIPUS
What shepherd? Could you point him out?

MESSENGER
I think he was known as one of Laius's men.

OEDIPUS
You mean the king who reigned here long ago?

MESSENGER
The same. He was a herdsman of that king.

OEDIPUS
Could I see him? Is he still alive?

MESSENGER
Your own people could tell you best. [OEDIPUS turns to the CHORUS]
OEDIPUS
Does any man here present know this herdsman he is talking of: either seen him in the fields or hereabouts? The time has come for full discovery.

CHORUS
I think he means that herdsman, sir, you asked to see before.
Jocasta here is surest judge of that. [They all turn toward JOCASTA, who stands transfixed]

OEDIPUS
Come, madam, do you know the man we sent for once before? Is he the man he means?

JOCASTA [wildly]
Which man? What matters who he means? Why ask? Forget it all. It's not worth knowing.

OEDIPUS
Forget it all? I can't stop now.
Not with all my birth clues in my hands.

JOCASTA
In the name of heaven, don't proceed!
For your own life's sake, stop!
And I've been tortured long enough.

OEDIPUS
Oh come! It won't be you that is disgraced even if I'm proved a thrice-descended slave. [JOCASTA throws herself before him and clutches his knees]

JOCASTA
Yet be persuaded, please. Do not proceed.

OEDIPUS
Persuaded from the truth? Pursuing it? I must.

JOCASTA
Though I'm pleading for what's best for you.

OEDIPUS
What's best for me? I'm tired of hearing that.

JOCASTA [rising slowly]
God help you, Oedipus! Hide it from you who you are.

OEDIPUS
Will someone go and fetch the herdsman here? We'll leave the lady to her high descent.

JOCASTA
Good-bye, my poor deluded, lost and damned! There's nothing else that I can call you now. [JOCASTA rushes into the palace]
CHORUS
Oedipus, what made the Queen so wildly leave, struck dumb? A stillness just before the storm!

OEDIPUS
Storm, then, let it burst! Born from nothing though I be proved, let me find that nothing out. And let my wife with all a woman's pride bridle at my paltry origin.
I do not blush to own I'm Fortune's pampered child.
She will not let me down. She is my mother.
The moons my monthly cousins watched me wax and wane.
My fealty to that family makes me move true to myself. My family I shall prove.

FOURTH CHORAL ODE
[The Elders, forgetting for the moment JOCASTA's ominous withdrawal, anticipate the joy of discovering who OEDIPUS really is. Ironically, they imagine themselves already celebrating his remarkable origins.]

Strophe
If I am a prophet with sapient eyes,
Cithaeron you, my mystical mountain,
Tomorrow before the moon's full rise, - -
Shall shout out your name as the nurse and the mother,
The father as well of our Oedipus.
Then shall we weave our dances around you;
You who have showered our princes with graces.
Ayay, great Apollo! May it please you, ayay!

Antistrophe
Who was your mother, son? Which of the dryads
Did Pan of the mountains have? Was he your father?
Or was it Apollo who haunts the savannas?
Or perhaps Hermes on the heights of Cyllene?
Or was Dionysus god of the pinnacles
Of Helicon's hilltops where he abides
Presented with you by some Helliconian
Nymph, among whom he frequently frolics?

FOURTH EPISODE
[A figure, old and roughly clad, is seen approaching]

OEDIPUS
Look, Elders, if I may play the prophet too, I'd say-although I've never met the man-there's the herdsman we've been searching for.
He's old enough and matches this old man. But you no doubt can better judge than I: you've seen the man before.

CHORUS
We know him well. Laius never had a better servant. [The SHEPHERD enters, ill at ease. OEDIPUS surveys him and turns to the MESSENGER] OEDIPUS
First question then to you, Corinthian: is he the man you mean?
MESSENGER
The very man.

OEDIPUS
Come here, sir, and look me in the eyes. Tell me straight: were you ever Laius's?

SHEPHERD
Yes sir, born and bred, sir-never bought.

OEDIPUS
And what was your job? How were you employed?

SHEPHERD
Chiefly as a shepherd, sir.

OEDIPUS
A shepherd where? What was your terrain?

SHEPHERD [hedging]
Sometimes . . . the slopes of Cithaeron and sometimes . . . thereabouts.

OEDIPUS
Good, then you've run across this man before? [The SHEPHERD desperately tries to avoid looking at the
MESSENGER]
SHEPHERD How'd he be there, sir? What man do you mean, sir?

OEDIPUS
The man in front of you. Did you ever meet him?

SHEPHERD
Not to remember, sir . . . I couldn't rightly say.
MESSENGER
And no wonder, sire! But let me jog his memory. I'm sure he won't forget the slopes of Cithaeron where for three half-years we were neighbors, he and I; he with two herds, I with one: six long months, from spring to early autumn.
And when at last the winter came, we both drove off our flocks, I to my sheepcotes, he back to Laius's folds .
Am I right or am I wrong?

SHEPHERD [sullenly]
Aye, you're right. But it was long ago.

MESSENGER
Now tell me this. Do you recall a certain baby boy you gave me once to bring up as my own?

SHEPHERD
What're you getting at? What're these questions for?

MESSENGER
Take a look, my friend. He's standing there, your baby boy.

SHEPHERD
Damn you man! Can you not hold your tongue?

OEDIPUS
Watch your words, old man! It's you who ought to be rebuked, not he.

SHEPHERD
Great master, please! What have I done wrong?

OEDIPUS
Not answered this man's questions on the baby boy.

SHEPHERD
But, sir, he's rambling nonsense. He doesn't know a thing.

OEDIPUS
You won't talk for pleasure? Then perhaps you'll talk for pain. [OEDIPUS raises a threatening hand]

SHEPHERD
By all the gods, sir, don't hurt a poor old man.

OEDIPUS
Here, someone twist the wretch's hands behind his back. [A palace guard steps forward]

SHEPHERD
God help me, sir! What is it you must know?

OEDIPUS
The baby he's been speaking of--did you give it him or not?

SHEPHERD
I did . . . I did . . . I wish I'd died that day.

OEDIPUS
You'll die today, unless you speak the truth.

SHEPHERD
Much sooner, sir, if I speak the truth.

OEDIPUS
This man, it's clear, is playing for time.

SHEPHERD
No, not me, sir! I've already said I gave it him.

OEDIPUS
Then where's it from? Your home or someone else's.

SHEPHERD
Oh not mine, sir! I got it from another.

OEDIPUS
Someone here in Thebes? Of what house?

SHEPHERD
By all the gods, sir, don't ask me any more!

OEDIPUS
If I have to ask again-you're dead.

SHEPHERD
Then . . . from Laius's house . . . that's where it's from.

OEDIPUS
What, a slave? Or someone of his line?

SHEPHERD
Oh sir! Must I bring myself to say it?

OEDIPUS
And I to hear it. Yes, it must be said.

SHEPHERD
They say it was . . . actually his own.
But the Queen inside could probably explain.

OEDIPUS
She, she gave it you?

SHEPHERD
Just that, my lord.

OEDIPUS
With what intention?

SHEPHERD
To do away with it.

OEDIPUS
The child's own mother?

SHEPHERD
To escape a prophecy too horrible.

OEDIPUS
What kind of prophecy?

SHEPHERD
A warning that he'd kill his father.

OEDIPUS
In heaven's name, what made you pass him on to this old man?
SHEPHERD
Only pity, sir. I thought he'd take him home and far away.
Never this~h, never kept for infamy!
For if you are the one he says you are,
Make no mistake: you are a doom-born man. [OEDIPUS stares in front of him, then staggers forward]

OEDIPUS
Lost! Ah lost! At last it's blazing clear.
Light of my days, go dark. I want to gaze no more.
My birth all sprung revealed from those it never should,
Myself entwined with those I never could.
And I the killer of those I never would. [OEDIPUS rushes into the palace]

FIFTH CHORAL ODE
[The! Elders, seeing that the cause of OEDIPUS is lost, break into a desperate lament for the insecurity of all human fame, so bitterly exemplified now in the fall of the once-confident King.]
Strophe I
Oh the generations of man!
His life is vanity and nothingness.
Is there one, one
Who more than tastes of, thinks of, happiness,
Which in the thinking vanishes?
Yours the text, yours the spell,
I see it in you Oedipus:
Man's pattern of unblessedness.

Antistrophe I
You who aimed so high!
Who hit life's topmost prize-success!
Who Zeus, oh, who
Struck and toppled down the griffin-taloned
Deathknell witch, and like a saving tower
Soared above the rotting shambles here:
A sovereign won, supremely blest,
A king of mighty Thebes.

Strophe II
Caught in the end by Time
Who always sees, where Justice sits as judge,
Your unwed wedding's done,
Begetter and begot-O son of Laius!
Out of sight what sight might not have seen!
My sorrow heaves, my lips lament,
Which drew their breath from you and now
Must quiver and be still.

EPILOGUE [A PALACE OFFICIAL hurries out from the palace]
OFFICIAL
Listen, lords most honorable of Thebes: forget the House of Labdacus, all filial sympathy, if you would stop your ears, hide your eyes, not break your hearts against appalling pain. No rivers--even Ister, even Phasis could flush away, I think, the horrors hidden in these walls, where now other evils, courted evils self-incurred,
Will bring to light the perfect agony of self-inflicted pain.

CHORUS
Stop. What we've seen already is unbearable. What further agony will you load on us?

OFFICIAL
I'll tell it quickly and you can quickly hear:
Jocasta's gone, the Queen.

CHORUS
Dead? Poor lady! How?

OFFICIAL
She killed herself.
You cannot apprehend, you who were not there, how horrible it was.
But I was there and what I tell you now is stamped upon my memory:
Oh, the struggles of that lost princess!
The moment she had burst into the palace, running through the doors demented, she made for the bridal bed, plunging her fingers through her hair and slamming shut the door behind her.
We heard her sobbing out Laius's name (so long dead), recalling the night his love had bred his murderer
And left a mother making cursed children with her son. "Unhappy bed!" she wailed. "Twice wicked soil!
The father's seedbed nurtured for the mother's son!"
And then she killed herself. How, I do not know.
The final act escaped our eyes- all fastened now upon the raving Oedipus, who broke upon us, stamping up and down and shouting out: "A weapon, quick! Where is the brideless bride?
Find me that double breeding ground where sown the mother, now has sown the son."
Some instinct of a demigod discovered her to him, not us near by. As if led on,
He smashes hollering through the double doors, breaking all its bolts, and lunges in.
And there we saw her hanging, twisted, tangled, from a halter.
A sight that rings from him a maddened cry.
He frees the noose and lays the wretched woman down, then--Oh hideous sequel!--rips from off her dress the golden brooches she was wearing,
Holds them up and rams the pins right through his eyes. "Wicked, wicked eyes!" he gasps, "You shall not see me nor my crime, not see my present shame.
Go dark for all time blind to what you never should have seen, and blind to the love this heart has cried to see."
And as this dirge went up, so did his hands to strike his founts of sight not once but many times.
And all the while his eyeballs gushed in bloody dew upon his beard . . no, not dew, no oozing drops-a spurt of black-ensanguined rain like hail beat down.
A coupled punishment upon a coupled sin: husband and wife one flesh in their disaster-
Their happiness of long ago, true happiness, now turned to tears this day, to ruin, death, and shame;
No evil absent by whatever cursed name.

CHORUS
Poor man! What agony!

OFFICIAL
He shouts for all the barriers to be unbarred and he displayed to all of Thebes, his father's murderer, his mother's . . . no, a word too foul to say . begging to be cast adrift, not rot at home as curser and the cursed.
His strength is gone. He needs a helping hand, his wound and weakness more than he can bear.
But you will see. The gates are opening. Look: a sight that turns all loathing into tears. [OEDIPUS, blinded, enters and staggers down the palace steps]

CHORAL DIALOGUE CHORUS Oh, most inhuman vision!
A world of pain out suffered and outdone. What possession in full flush has swamped your brain?
What giant of evil beyond all human brawn pounced on you with devil's doom?
Oh, the pity and the horror!
I cannot look-and yet so much to ask, so much to know, so much to understand.
I cannot look for shuddering.

OEDIPUS
I am deserted, dark,
And where is sorrow stumbling?
Whence flits that voice so near?
Where, demon, will you drive me?

CHORUS
To a doom no voice can speak, no eye regard.

Strophe I OEDIPUS
Aah! a nightmare mist has fallen
Adamantine black on me
Abomination closing.
Cry, cry, oh cry again!
Those needle pains:
The pointed echoes of my sinning.

CHORUS
Such great sufferings are not strange Where a double sorrow requires a double pang.

Antistrophe I OEDIPUS
Oh you my friends!
Still friends and by my side!
Still staying by the blindman!
Your form eludes, your voice is near;
That voice lights up my darkness.

CHORUS
Man of havoc, how
Could you hate your sight so?
What demon so possessed you?

Strophe II OEDIPUS
Friends, it was Apollo, spirit of Apollo.
He ~ade this evil fructify.
Oh yes, I pierced my eyes, my useless eyes, why not?
When all that's sweet had parted from my vision.

CHORUS
And so it has; is as you say.

OEDIPUS
Nothing left to see, to love,
No welcome in communion.
Friends, who are my friends,
Hurry me from here,
Hurry off the monster:
That deepest damned and god-detested man.

CHORUS
A man, alas, whose anguish fits his fate.
We could wish that we had never known you.

Antistrophe II
OEDIPUS
Yes, rot that man's unlocking my feet from biting fetters.
Unloosing me from murder to lock me in a blood-love.
Had I only died then, I should not now be leaving
All I love and mine so sadly shattered.

CHORUS
Your wish is also outs.

OEDIPUS
Then I should be free,
Yes, free from parricide:
Not pointed out as wedded
To the one who weaned me.
Now I am god-abandoned,
A son of sin and sorrows
All incest-sealed
With the womb that bore me.
Oh Oedipus, your portion!

CHORUS
But how can we say that your design was good? To live in blindness? Better live no longer. [End of strophic pattern]

OEDIPUS
Enough of this! Enough of your advice!
It was a good design. Don't tell me otherwise.
My best design! What kind of eyes should I need to gaze upon my father's face in Hades or my unhappy mother's: Those twin victims ruined by me for whom I should be hanged? Or eyes that could be eyes to stare into my children's faces? Joy? No no, a sight of pain engendered from those loins. Or even eyes to view again citadel and tower and holy idoled shrine I cast away?
Most cursed I, the prince of princes here in Thebes and now pariah self-damned and self-arraigned: The refuse-heap of heaven on display as son of Laius, parading and self-dyed in sin. What? Eyes to lift and gaze at these? No no, there's none! Rather plug my ears and choke that stream of sound, stuff the senses of my carcass dum~ glad to stifle voices with my vision, and sweet to lift the soul away from hurt.
Pity you, Cithaeron, that you gave me harbor, took me in and did not kill me straight; that you did not hush my birth from man. Pity you Polybus and Corinth, age-old home I called my father's: What fair skin you housed around what foulness! A prince of evil all revealed and son of sin. And you three roads and dell concealed, you copse of oak and straitened triple ways! I handed you my blood to drink, the chalice of my father's.
What memories have you of my manners then, or what I did when afterwards I came here?
You batch of weddings! Birthdays breeding seedlings from their very seed: Fathers, sons and brothers flourishing in foulness with brides and wives and mothers in a monstrous coupling . Unfit to tell what's too unfit to touch!
My load is mine, don't fear; no man could bear so much.

CHORUS
Wait! Here Creon comes to hear your pleas and deal with your designs. He takes your place as sole custodian of the State.
OEDIPUS
Ah! What words are left for me to him? What title to sincerity and trust when all my past behavior's proved so wrong? [Enter CREON]

CREON
It's not to scoff or scorn for past behavior, Oedipus, that I am here [Turns to attendant] You there, show some reverence for the dignity of man, and blush at least before Apollo's royal sun which feeds the world with fire, to so display unveiled putrescence in its very picture of decay-Assaulting earth, the heaven's rain, the light of day. Quickly take him home. A family's ears, a family's eyes, alone should know a family's miseries.
OEDIPUS
For the gods' own love, you best of men who visit me the worst with clemency beyond my dreams, grant me one request: I ask it for your sake not mine.

CREON
What favor could you want of me?

OEDIPUS
Expel me quickly, purge me far from Thebes to where no human voice is heard.
CREON
This I would have done at once but first must ask the god's design.
OEDIPUS
The god's design is open, all his oracle is clear: kill the impious one, the parricide, kill me.

CREON
So ran the words, but in these straits it's best to ask the god again what should be done.

OEDIPUS
What! Interrogations still for a thing so down?

CREON
Yes, and even you will now believe the god.

OEDIPUS
I do. But add to it this charge, I beg, this prayer: her poor remains still in the house, bury them-what tomb you wish.
You must not fail your own with proper rites. But as for me, my father's city here must never harbor me alive, so let me live among the hills, yes, Cithaeron, that very mountain famed as mine; Which my father and my mother gave me while they lived to be my tomb.
There I'll be obedient to the death they planned. For this I know, no sickness and no natural death will sever me from life . . . no, not me, preserved from death precisely for disaster. So let my fortune follow where it will.

Now for my children, first of all my sons. These you need not care for, Creon. They are men and they will always find a livelihood. But my little girls, that stricken pair of orphans whose place at table never missed being set with mine, who ate with me, drank from my cup--ah! these look after for me, guard them both. [CREON goes to fetch OEDIPUS's two little daughters, ANTIGONE and ISMENE. Meanwhile, OEDIPUS, thinking he is still there, continues to plead]

If I could only touch them with my hands and weep my fill, good Creon, one last time!
Just touch them, please, you generous-hearted prince, and think them in my arms as when I saw. [CREON returns leading ANTIGONE and ISMENE by the hand] Wait! That sobbing? Don't tell me it's my two darlings crying!
Has Creon pitied me and sent me all my heart's desire? Can that be true?

CREON
It is. I ordered it to stir again your old delight.

OEDIPUS
God bless you, Creon, bless your path through life, encompass you with surer joys than mine.
But children where, where are you? Hurry into these arms . . these brother's . . . these father's arms--that struck out the light and made his face this eyeless mask. For--oh my little ones!-he did not see, he had no knowing, When he became your father-in full view-the sower and the seed.

He cannot see you now but still can weep and ponder on those bitter days to come which cruel consort with the world will prove.
No public holidays, no carnivals, from which you will not hurry home in tears. And then one day a marriage time will come, but who will marry you? Who on this earth will face the destiny that dogs our line?
Our record's too replete: "This father killed his father, tilled the womb again from which he sprang, to beget you very children from his bed of birth."

Such will be their gibes, so who will want to marry you? There's none, my children, no not one, and life for you is all decline to doom and empty spinsterhood. [He turns to CREON]

Listen, Son of Menoeceus, now their natural parents are no more, they have no other father left but you.
You must not see your blood go down in beggary, or watch them roaming husbandless.
You must not leave them to a fate like mine.
Open your heart-they're young, bereft of everything unless you furnish it. Come . . . a promise noble prince . . . your hand! [CREON gives his hand] My darling little ones, if you could only understand, I'd tell you, oh, so many things!
Let this suffice, a simple prayer:
Abide in modesty so may you live the happy life your father did not have.

CREON
These tears . . . enough! . . . Now go inside!

OEDIPUS
I must, with bitterness.
CREON
All things have their time.

OEDIPUS
You know my terms? CREON
I'll know them when you tell me.

OEDIPUS
Then send me far away from home.

CREON
You ask what only the gods can give.

OEDIPUS
The gods? They are my enemy.

CREON
They'll answer all the swifter, then.

OEDIPUS
Ah! Do you mean it?
CREON
What I do not mean, I do not say.

OEDIPUS
Then lead me off.
CREON
Come! Let your children go.

OEDIPUS
No, no, never! Don't take them from me.

CREON
Stop this striving to be master of all. The mastery you had in life has been your fall. [CREON signs to the attendants, who disengage OEDIPUS from his children and lead him into the palace. CREON follows and the doors are closed. The CHORUS groups for the exit march]

ENVOI

CHORUS
Citizens of our ancestral Thebes,
Look on this Oedipus, the mighty and once masterful:
Elucidator of the riddle,
Envied on his pedestal of fame.
You saw him fall. You saw him swept away.
So, being mortal, look on that last day
And count no man blessed in his life until
He's crossed life's bounds unstruck by ruin still.

ANTIGONE

PROLOGUE

ANTIGONE

Come, Ismene, my own dear sister, come! What more do you think could Zeus require of us to load the curse that's on the House of Oedipus? There is no sorrow left, no single shame, no pain, no tragedy, which does not hound us, you and me, towards our end.
And now, what's this promulgation which they say our ruler has made to all the state? Do you know? Have you heard? Or are you sheltered from the news that deals a deathblow to our dearest?

ISMENE

Our dearest, Antigone? I've heard no news either good or bad, ever since we two were stripped of two brothers in a single day, Each dismissing each by each other's hand. And since the Argive army fled last night, I've heard no more--either glad or sad.

ANTIGONE

That's what I thought, that's why I've brought you here beyond the gates that you may hear my news alone.

ISMENE

What mischief are you hinting at?

ANTIGONE

I think you know . . . Our two dear brothers:
Creon is burying one to desecrate the other.
Eteocles, they say, he has dispatched with proper rites as one judged fit to pass in glory to the shades.
But Polyneices, killed as piteously, an interdict forbids that anyone should bury him or even mourn.
He must be left unwept, unsepulchered, a vulture's prize, sweetly scented from afar.
That's what they say our good and nobble plans for you and me, yes me; and now he's coming here to publish it
Creon plans: and make it plain to those who haven't heard.
Anyone who disobeys will pay no trifling penalty but die by stoning before the city walls. There's your chance to prove your worth, or else a sad degeneracy.

ISMENE

You firebrand! Could I do a thing to change the situation as it is?
ANTIGONE

You could. Are you willing to share danger and suffering and . .
ISMENE

Danger? What are you scheming at?

ANTIGONE

take this hand of mine to bury the dead?

ISMENE

What! Bury him and flout the interdict?

ANTIGONE

He is my brother still, and yours; though you would have it otherwise, but I shall not abandon him.

ISMENE

What! Challenge Creon to his face?

ANTIGONE

He has no right to keep me from my own.

ISMENE

Sister, please, please! Remember how our father died: hated, in disgrace, self-dismantled in horror of himself, his own hand stabbing out his sight. And how his mother-wife in one twisted off her earthly days with cord; and thirdly how our two brothers in a single day each achieved for each a suicidal nemesis. And now, we two are left.
Think how much worse our end will be than all the rest if we defy our sovereign's edict and his power.
Remind ourselves that we are women and as such are not made to fight with men. For might unfortunately is right and makes us bow to things like this and worse. Therefore shall I beg the shades below to judge me leniently as one who kneeled to force It's madness to meddle.

ANTIGONE

I will not press you any more.
I would not want you as a partner if you asked.
Go to what you please. I go to bury him.
How beautiful to die in such pursuit!
To rest loved by him whom I have loved, sinner of a holy sin,
With longer time to charm the dead than those who live, for I shall abide forever there. So go. And please your fantasy and call it wicked what the gods call good.

ISMENE

You know I don't do that. I'm just not made to war against the state.
ANTIGONE

Make your apologies! I go to raise a tomb above my dearest brother.
ISMENE

You foolhardy thing! You frighten me.

ANTIGONE

Don't fear for me. Be anxious for yourself.

ISMENE

At least tell no one what you do, but keep it dark, and I shall keep it secret too.

ANTIGONE

Oh tell it, tell it, shout it out! I'd hate your silence more than if you told the world.
ISMENE

So fiery-in a business that chills!

ANTIGONE

Perhaps, but I am doing what I must.

ISMENE

Yes, more than must. And you are doomed to fail.

ANTIGONE

Why then, I'll fail, but not give up before.

ISMENE

Don't plunge into such a hopeless enterprise.

ANTIGONE

Urge me so, and I shall hate you soon.
He, the dead, will justly hate you too.
Say that I'm mad, and madly let me risk
The worst that I can suffer and the best:
A death that martyrdom can render blest.

ISMENE

Go then, if you must toward your end:
Fool, wonderful fool, and loyal friend. [ISMENE watches ANTIGONE walk away, then she goes into the palace]

ENTRY ODE

[The CHORUS in a march-dance files into the theate,; singing a hymn of triumph. They celebrate the defeat of the invading Polyneices and the victory of Thebes over Argos.]

Strophe I

CHORUS
Sunshaft of the sun
Most resplendent sun
That ever shone on Thebes
The Seven Gates of Thebes:
Epiphany, you broke
Eye of the golden day
Marching over Dirce's streams
At dawn to drive in headlong flight
The warrior who came with shields
All fulminant as snow
In Argive stand at arms
Scattered now before the lancing sun.

LEADER

Propelled against our land By Polyneices's claims
This screaming eagle circled round, caparisoned with arms, he swooped, his wings their shields of snow. His crest their helmets in the sun. Antistrophe I

CHORUS

He stooped above our towers
Gaped above our gates
His hungry spears hovered
Then before he gorged
And glutted on our blood
Before Hephaestus hot
With pitch and flame had seized
Our crown of towers, all the din
That Ares loves burst around
Their rear, and panic turned His flank. The fight came on
Behind their backs: a dragon-breathing foe.

LEADER

The braggart's pompous tongue Is hated most by Zeus
And seeing them advance superb
In clank of gold, he struck their first
Man down with fire before he yelled Triumph from the walls.

Strophe II

CH0RUS

Thundering down to the ground with his torch
Knocked from his hands, this bacchanalian
Passionate lunatic breathing out hate
In hurricanes, fell in a flaming arc
His brandished torch all quenched, and great
Ares like a war horse wheeled:
Ubiquitous his prancing strength Trampling in the dust
Havoc that he dealt with several dooms.

LEADER

Seven champions dueled With seven at the Seven Gates and gave their panoplies To Zeus, save two, the fatal two
Who sharing parents shared their fall, Brother killing brother.

Antistrophe II

CHORUS

But now that this triumph, the loudest of triumphs,
Oh joy-bearing triumph! has come to our Thebes
The proud city of chariots, why
Now let us chase the memory far
Away of the wars that are blessedly past.
Come call on the gods with song and with dance
All through the night at the groves and the shrines, And Bacchus shall lead the round-- Shouting and shaking all Thebes with his revels.

LEADER

But look who comes, the lucky Son of Menoeceus:
The man the gods have made our king. What new vicissitudes of state vex him now? Why has he sent A herald to our summons? [CREON has entered from the palace, surrounded by soldiers. He addresses the CHORUS]

FIRST EPISODE

CREON

Gentlemen, the gods have graciously steadied our ship of state, which Storms have terribly tossed. And now I have called you here privately because of course I know your loyalty to the House of Laius. How again, when Oedipus was king, your duty never faltered, and when he fell you still upheld his sons. But now that they have gone, sharing their double end on a single day, (mutual murder, mutual recompense!), I nearest in line enjoy the scepter and the throne.

Now, naturally, there is no way to tell the character and mettle of a man until you've seen him govern. Nevertheless, I want to make it plain: I am the kind of man who can't and never could abide the tongue-tied ruler who through fear backs away from sound advice. And I find intolerable the man who puts his country second to his friends.
For instance, if I saw ruin and danger heading for the state,
I would speak out. Never could I make my country's enemy my private friend, knowing as I do, she is the good ship that bears us safe. So there you have my principles by which I govern. In accord with them, I made the proclamation that you heard just now: Eteocles, who died in arms for Thebes, shall have a glorious funeral as befits a hero going to join the noble dead. But his brother Polyneices, he who came from exile breathing fire against this city of his fathers and its shrines; The man who came all thirsting for his country's blood to drag the rest of us away as slaves. I've sent the edict out that none shall bury him or even mourn. He must be left all ghastly where he fell, a corpse for dogs to maul and vultures pick his bones.

You see the kind of man I am!
You'll not catch me putting traitors up on pedestals beside the loyal and true.
I'll honor him alone, alive or dead, who honors Thebes.

LEADER

Your disposition is quite clear, son of Menoeceus, Creon, touching friend or enemy of this our city. We know you have the power too to wreak your will upon the living and the dead. CREON

Then see to it my injunctions are performed.

LEADER

Put the burden on some younger men.

CREON

No. Sentries are already posted on the corpse.

LEADER

Then what exactly do you want us to do?

CREON

Merely see there're no infringements of the law.

LEADER

No man is mad enough to welcome death.

CREON

And death it is. But greed of gain has often made men fools.

[A SENTRY, disheveled and distraught, comes bumbling in towards the King]

SENTRY

King, I won't pretend I come at breakneck speed, I all out of breath, kept on stopping in my tracks . . . to think . and turning back. I held committee meetings with myself:
"You fool," I said, "you're 'eading straight for the lion's mouth," then, "Blockhead, what're you waiting for? if Creon gets the news from someone else, you're done!"
So I've come scurrying at a snail's pace by the long shortcut, the "forward" voice in charge. And 'ere I am, with a tale to tell that makes no sense, which any'ow I'll tell, cos I do believe nothing bad can 'appen that isn't on one's ticket.

CREON

Come to the point, man! What are you dithering about?

SENTRY

First, sir, if I may slip in a word about miself. It in't me that done it, and I dunno who darned done it neither; so it in't fair to make me take the rap.

CREON

Done it? Done it? You're a great marksman-hit the target first time! You must have something very odd to say.

SENTRY

It's awfully off-putting, sir, to bring bad news-especially to you, sir.
CREON
Then get on with it and go.

SENTRY

Right! I'll tell you straight. The body-it's buried like. I mean someone's just gorne and sprinkled dust on it-right proper thirsty dust-and gorne . .done the ritual, sir, you see.

CREON

What are you saying, man? Who would have dared?

SENTRY
Don't ask me, sir! There ain't no mark of pick or mattock, ground's all 'ard, unbroken, no wheel tracks neither: Not a sign of 'uman 'ands. When the sentry of the morning watch pointed to it, there it was at dawn, the corpse, an ugly mystery that struck us dumb. T'weren't exactly buried, just sprinkled with earth ritual like as if someone wanted to set it free. No marks of dog or jackal neither-not a scratch.
Then we flew at one another, guard accusing guard.
It came near to blows. There weren't no clue to clinch the quarrel. Any one of us coulda done it. See!
No evidence to disprove any one of us--not a shred.
So we dared one another to pick up red-'ot iron, walk through fire, and swear by all the gods He neither done the deed nor 'ad the slightest inkling who 'ad.
Well, one of us cut through the deadlock, saying . (We went weak as straws when we 'eard it, cos there weren't no denying, nor coming out of it in one piece neither):
This fella there and then blurts out: "We gotta tell the King.
There ain't no way to cover up."
He convinced the lot of us, so we drew straws. And 'oo should be the unlucky one to win the prize but yours truly.
So 'ere I am, unwelcome I can tell, and un'appy too, For there ain't no one likes the bringer of bad news.

LEADER
Sire, I've had misgivings from the first: could this be more than purely natural work?

CREON
Enough! You make me furious with such senile doddering remarks. It's quite insufferable. You really think they give a damn, the gods, about this corpse?
Next you'll say they make it a priority to bury him in state, and thank him for his burning down their altars, sacking shrines, scouting laws, and raping all the land.
Or are the gods these days considerate to criminals? Far from it! No, from the first, there's been a group of grumblers in this town: men who can hardly abide my rule, who nod and whisper, chafing beneath my law, who are not in love with it at all. These are the ones, I'll warrant, who have suborned my guards with bribes. Ah, Money! Money is a currency that's rank. Money topples cities to the ground, seduces men away from happy homes, corrupts the honest heart to shifty ways, makes men crooked connoisseurs of vice. But these plotters who have sold themselves, every man jack of them,
Will end up, gentlemen, with much more than he's bargained for. [He turns on the SENTRY] You there! Get this straight:
I swear by almighty Zeus whom I revere and serve, that either you find the man who did this burial and stand him here before my eyes, or Hades itself will be too good for you until you've first confessed to everything-yes, hanging from a cross. That perhaps will teach you, soldier, where to look for profit and that gold can glister from an evil source.
Ah! Money never makes as many as it mars.

SENTRY
Am I allowed a word. sir? Or do I just go?

CREON
Can't you see your very voice gets on my nerves?

SENTRY
'urts your ears, does it, sir? Or kinda your conscience?

CREON
What business of yours is it to diagnose my pain?

SENTRY
Because I only affect your ears; the culprit, your brain.

CREON
By God, what a born chatterer you are!

SENTRY
Maybe, but it weren't me that did the burying.

CREON
No, you just sold yourself for silver.

SENTRY
Oh, what a crying shame, when right reason reasons wrong! CREON
A logic-chopper and a wit! But don't imagine that will save your skin. If you fail to stand the man before my face, you'll find that dirty money pays in hurt. [CREON strides into the palace]

SENTRY
Well, let's 'ope he's found. But caught or not
(and only chance can tell), one thing's for sure: you won't catch me coming back again.
It's a goddam miracle I got out of 'ere alive. (SENTRY runs off]

FIRST CHORAL ODE

(The CHORUS of Citizens, in an intuitive foreshadowing of both Creon's and Antigone's fate, contrast the prowess and glory of human kind with the tragedy of their down-fall when they overstep the mark. There is a veiled warnmg to Creon not to exceed humane bounds, but also, by their listing all the predominantly masculine occupations (sailing, plowing, hunting, fishing, domesticating animals, verbal skills, building, making laws), they are advising women like Antigone to beware of taking on what they consider male roles.]

Strophe I

Creation is a marvel and
Man its masterpiece. He scuds
Before the southern wind, between
The pounding white-piling swell.
He drives his thoroughbreds through Earth
(Great goddess inexhaustible)
And overturns her with the plow
Unfolding her from year to year.

Antistrophe I

The light-balanced light--headed birds
He snares; wild beasts of every kind.
In his nets the deep sea fish
Are caught. Oh, mastery of man!
The free forest animal
He herds; the roaming upland deer.
The shaggy horse he breaks to yoke
The unflagging mountain bull.

Strophe II

Training his agile thoughts volatile as air
He's civilized the world of words and wit and law.
With a roof against the sky, the javelin crystal frosts
The arrow-lancing rains, he's fertile in resource
Provident for all, healing all disease:
All but death, and death-death he never cures.

Antistrophe II

Beyond imagining wise: his cleverness and skills Through labyrinthine ways for good and also ill. Distinguished in his city when law-abiding, pious But when he promulgates unsavory ambition, Citiless and lost.
And then I will not share My hearth with him; I want no parcel of his thoughts.

SECOND EPlSODE

[The SENTRY returns, leading ANTIGONE]

CHORUS
What visitation do I see from heaven?
And one I wish I could deny.
I am amazed. It is Antigone.
What! They bring you here in charge?
Poor Antigone, daughter of unlucky Oedipus.
Were you rash enough to cross the King?
And did they take you in your folly?

SENTRY
'ere she is, the culprit: caught red'anded in the very act of burying 'im. But where is Creon?

CHORUS
Coming from the house, and just in time. [Enter CREON]

CREON
Just in time for what?

SENTRY

King, it's most unwise, I find, ever to promise not to do a thing. Now look at me! I could 'ave sworn I'd not come scurrying back, After being almost skinned alive by all your flailing threats.
Yet 'ere I am against my oath, bringing in this girl, and all because beyond my wildest dreams, in fact with quite a thrill, I caught 'er at it-actually at the burying. No drawing straws this time-I'll say not! So grab 'er, King, she's yours. And I'm scot-free, or I should 'ope, quit of this 'ole goddam thing.

CREON
Tell me first when and how you found her.

SENTRY
She was burying the man. There ain't nothing more to tell.

CREON
Are you rambling? Do you know what you are saying?

SENTRY
Sir, I saw 'er in the act of burying that forbidden corpse. Is that plain and clear?

CREON
But how actually was she surprised and taken?

SENTRY
Well it was like this.
We 'ad returned to the spot, our ears ringing with all your nasty threats, and 'ad brushed the earth from off the body to make it bare again
(it was all soft and clammy),
And were squatting there windward of the stench, keeping each other up to the mark
And rounding 'ard on anybody that nodded . . Watching we were, till the midday sun, a great blazing ball bashed down on us something fierce,
When suddenly came this right twisting squall, sweeping across the plain, tearing the leaves off trees, buffeting 'eaven itself.
We 'ad to shut our eyes against this god-sent blight. When at last it cleared there was this vision of this girl, Standing there she was, giving out little shrill-like sobs: 'eartrending as a mother bird's what 'as seen its nest pillaged and its bairns all gone. That's 'ow she was wailing and calling curses down on them what done it when she saw the body bared.
Immediately she scoops up earth--a dry 'andful like-- and sprinkles it. Then 'olding up a shapely brazen urn, she pours three libations for the dead.
That's when we swooped and closed upon our quarry. She didn't flinch, and when we charged 'er with what she'd gorne and done, and done before, she just admitted it. It made me glad and sad: bliss to get myself out of trouble, distress to bring it on a friend. When all's said and done, 'owever, the safety of one's own sweet skin comes first.

CREON
Come girl, you with downcast eyes, did you, or did you not, do this deed?
ANTIGONE
I did. I deny not a thing.

CREON
You, soldier, you can go--be off wherever you please--Free of any serious charge. (The SENTRY stands for a moment, smiles, then bounds away]
Now tell me, Antigone, a straight yes or no: Did you know an edict had forbidden this?

ANTIGONE
Of course I knew. Was it not publicly proclaimed?

CREON
So you chose flagrantly to disobey my law?

ANTIGONE

Naturally! Since Zeus never promulgated such a law, Nor will you find that Justice,
Mistress of the world below, publishes such laws to humankind.
I never thought your mortal edicts had such force they nullified the laws of heaven, which unwritten, not proclaimed, can boast a currency that everlastingly is valid, an origin beyond the birth of man.
And I, whom no man's frown can frighten, Am far from risking heaven's frown by flouting these. I need no trumpeter from you to tell me I must die, we all die anyway
And if this hurries me to death before my time, why, such a death is gain. Yes, surely gain to one whom life so overwhelms.
Therefore, I can go to meet my end without a trace of pain.
But had I left the body of my mother's son unburied, lying where he lay, ah, that would hurt!
For this, I feel no twinges of regret.
And if you judge me fool, perhaps it is because a fool is judge.

LEADER

My word! The daughter is as headstrong as the father. Submission is a thing she's never learned.

CR EON

You wait and see! The toughest will is first to break: like hard untempered steel which snaps and shivers at a touch when hot from off the forge.
And I have seen high-mettled horses curbed by a little scrap of bit.
One who has no more authority than a common slave can ill afford to put on airs.
And yet, this girl, already versed in disrespect the first time she disobeyed my law,
Now adds a second insult, has done it again, and vaunts it to my face.
Oh, she's the man, not I, if she can flout authority and walk away unscathed. I swear I hardly care if she be my sister's child or linked to me by blood more closely than any member of my hearth and home; She and her sister will not now escape the utmost penalty.
I say the sister too. I charge her as accomplice of this burial.
Call her forth.
I saw her whimpering in there just now, all gone to pieces.
So does remorse blurt out the secret sin . . Although its opposite is even worse: crime detected glorifying crime.

ANTIGONE

Is there something more you want? Or just my life?

CREON

Not a thing, by God! It gives me what I want.

ANTIGONE

Why dawdle, then? Your conversation is hardly something I enjoy, or ever could, nor mine be more acceptable to you.
And yet it ought to be.
Where could I win respect and praise more validly than this: burial of my brother?
Not a man here would say the opposite, were his tongue not locked in fear.
Unfortunately, tyranny (blessed in so much else besides) can lay the law down any way it wants.

CREON

Your view is hardly shared by all these Thebans here.

ANTIGONE

They think as I, but trim their tongues to you.

CREON

Are you not ashamed to differ from such men?

ANTIGONE

There is no shame to reverence relatives.

CREON

And the other duelist who died--was he no relative?

ANTIGONE

He was. And of the same father and same mother.

CREON

So, slighting one, you would salute the other?

ANTIGONE

The dead man would not agree with you on this.

CREON

Surely! If you make the hero honored with the blackguard.

ANTIGONE

It was his brother not his slave that died.

CREON

Yes, ravaging our land, while he fell as its champion.

ANTtGONE

Hades makes no distinction in its rites and honors.

CREON

The just and unjust do not urge an equal claim.

ANTIGONE

The "crime" (who knows?) may be called a virtue there.

CREON

Not even death can metamorphose hate to love.

ANTIGONE

No, nor decompose my love to hate.

CREON

Curse you! Find the outlet for your love down there. No woman while I live shall govern me. [ISMENE is brought in under guard]

LEADER OF CHORUS

See where Ismene comes
Crying from the palace gates,
Her face all flushed.
A sister's tears are breaking rains
Upon her cheeks and from her eyes,
Her loveliness a shadow.

CREON [Turning viciously towards ISMENE]

Come, you serpent, secret lurker in my home, who sucked my blood even while I nurtured you two sister vipers at my throne-Speak. Confess your part in burying him.
Or do you dare deny complicity?

ISMENE

I did it too. If she'll allow my claim. I share with her the credit and the blame.
ANTIGONE

That is not true. You do not share with me, nor did I grant you partnership.
ISMENE

But now that your poor ship is buffeted, I'm not ashamed to sail the voyage at your side.

ANTIGONE

The dead of Hades know whose act it was. I do not take to those who take to talk.

ISMENE

Sister, do not scorn me; let me share your death and holy homage to the dead.

ANTIGONE

No share in work, no share in death, and I must consummate alone what I began.

ISMENE

Then what is left of life to me when you are gone?

ANTIGONE

Ask Creon. You and he are friends.

ISMENE

Ah! Must you jeer at me? It does not help.

ANTIGONE

You are right. It is a joyless jeering.

ISMENE

Tell me, even now: how can I help?

ANTIGONE

Save yourself. I shall not envy you.

ISMENE

Poor dear sister-let me suffer with you!

ANTIGONE

No. For you choose life, and I chose death.

ISMENE

When all my protests were of no avail.

ANTIGONE

We played our different parts, with different acclaim.

ISMENE

But now we share and equal share of blame.

ANTIGONE

Look up! You live! And I died long ago, when I gave my life to serve the dead.
CREON

These girls, I swear, are crazed: one mad by birth, the other by attainment.

ISMENE

Yes, my lord, for when misfortune comes, he sends our reason packing out of doors.

CREON

And yours went flying fast when you chose damnation with the damned.
ISMENE

Yet, with her gone, what portion had I left?

CREON

Do not mention her. She does not still exist.

ISMENE

You would not kill your own son's bride?

CREON

Let him sow his seed in other furrows.

ISMENE

A match like theirs will not repeat itself.

CREON

I shudder at the jades who court our sons.

ANTiGONE

My darling Haemon, how your father heaps disgrace on you!

CREON

Damn you and damn your cursed marriage!

LEADER

You would not tear your own son's bride from him?

CREON

Let us say that Death is going to come between.

LEADER

I fear, I fear it's fixed. Her death is sealed.

CREON

Yes, let us both be quite assured of that.
Guards, take them away and lock them up.
No more roaming. They are women now.
The breath of Hades pressing close to kill
Can make the bravest turn, and turn the bravest will. [ANTIGONE and ISMENE are led away. CREON stays]

SECOND CHORAL ODE

[The CHORUS cries out in an ode which begins by being both a lament for the past victimization of the House of Oedipus and an omen for the present, and then goes on to warn all those who think they can live their lives apart from the universal providence of Zeus.]

Strophe I

Happy the man who has not sipped the bitter day,
Whose house is firm against divine assault.
No planted curse creeps on and on
Through generations like the dark and driven surge
Booming from the bosom of the sea while Thracian gales
Churn perpetually the ooze in waves that throw
Down upon the headlands swept and carded by the storm Their thunderous mass.

Antistrophe I

Now do I see the house of Labdacus struck down,
In all its generations victimized by some
Pursuing deity. Its useless dead.
Its never-ending doom. And now once more the sun
Gone down in blood: the final hope of Oedipus
Felled to the root, put out in smoke and Hades' dust,
And all because of headlong folly and the reckless speech
Of a frenzied heart.

Strophe II

O Zeus, what creature pits himself against thy power? Not Sleep encumbrous with his sublet net
And not the menstrual of the tireless moon.
Thou in ancient splendors still art young
When worlds are old on Mount Olympus.
Everything past, everything present,
And everything still to come Is thy domain
No mortal thing however vast can steal Outside thy grasp.

Antistrophe II

Hope, eternally gadding, alights on many with nothing But bliss, but just as blithely brings to others Delusions and seething ambition.
No man can tell
What has come stealthily creeping over his life Until too late
Hot ashes and pain Sear his feet . . . Once long ago A sage famously said: "If evil good appear
To any, the gods are near. Unscathed he'll go, And then they'll bring him low." [HAEMON is seen approaching]

LEADER

Here Haemon comes, your youngest son,
Driven perhaps by pangs of grief
For Antigone his sentenced bride:
A bitter groom, a marriage marred.

CREON

We shall see in a moment, and without the need of seers.

THIRD EPISODE

[HAEMON enters. The men stare warily at each other for a few seconds] CREON

Son, do you come provoked against your father for the death warrant of your would-be bride, or still my loving son, whatever I may do?

HAEMON

Father, I am your loving son and you the wise preceptor of my ways, whom I must follow.
No marriage I could make would ever match the good of your abiding counsel.

CREON

Well spoken son!
Just what a right-minded son should feel: unremitting deference to his father's will. Such is a parent's prayer, to see grow up a race of filial sons to deck his home:
Ready always to avenge their father's wrongs, and of course to give his friends the selfsame honor that the father gives. But a man who raises a batch of worthless boys, what has he hatched for himself but nuisances, and jubilant sneers from the ill-disposed!

Oh Haemon, don't lose your balance for a woman's sake! Don't hug a joy that's cheap and cools: an evil woman for your bed and board.
No wound is worse than counterfeited love.
She is poison. Spit her out.
Let her go and find a mate in Hades.
Why, I've just caught her in an open act of treason-she alone of all the city.
I will not break my word to Thebes. She dies. So let her plead to Zeus the sanctity of kindred ties.
How can I, if I nurse sedition in my house, not foster it outside?
No. If a man can keep his home in hand, he proves his competence to keep the state.
But one who breaks the law and flouts authority, I never will allow.
Unswerving submission to whomsoever the state has put in charge is what is asked: in little things as well as great, in right and wrong.
And I am confident that one who thus obeys, will make a perfect subject or a perfect king: the kind of man who in the thick of flying spears never flinches from his post but stands dauntless at his comrade's side. But as for anarchy, there is no greater curse than anarchy. It topples cities down, it crumbles homes, it shatters allied ranks in broken flight which discipline kept whole: For discipline preserves and orders well. Let us then defend authority and not be ousted by a girl. If yield we must, then let it be to men, And never have it said we were worsted by a woman.

LEADER

What you say (unless my wits have run to seed) sounds reasonable and makes good sense.

HAEMON

Yes, Father, reason: the gods' greatest gift to man. I would not dream of criticizing yours or saying you were wrong, even if I could. But other men can reason rightly too.

As your son, you see, I find myself marking every word and act and comment of the crowd, to gauge the temper of the simple citizen, who dares not risk your scowl to speak his mind. But I from the shadows hear them: hear a city's sympathy for this girl, because no woman ever faced so unreasonable, so cruel a death, for such a generous cause.
She would not leave her brother where he fell, for carrion birds and dogs to maul. "Should not her name be writ in gold?" they say, and so the whisper grows.

You know, my Father, how I prize your well-being and your name. For sons and father's crown each other's glory with each other's fame. So I beg you Father, don't entrench yourself in your opinion as if everyone else were wrong.
The kind of man who always thinks that he is right, that his opinions, his pronouncements, are the final word, is usually exposed as hollow as they come.
But a wise man is flexible, has much to learn without a loss of dignity. See the trees in floodtime, how they bend along the torrent's course, and how their twigs and branches do not snap, but stubborn trees are torn up roots and all.
In sailing too, when fresh weather blows, a skipper who will not slaken sail, turns turtle, finishes his voyage beam-ends up.

So let your anger cool, and change your mind. I may be young but not without some sense. Let men be wise by instinct if they can, but when this fails and nature won't oblige, be wise by good advice.

LEADER

Sire, the young man speaks good sense: worth listening to. And you, son, too, should listen. You both speak to the point.

CREON

You mean that men of my years have to learn to think by taking notes from men of his?

HAEMON

In only what is right.
It is my merit not my years that count.

CREON

Your merit is to foment lawlessness.

HAEMON

You know I do not plead for criminals.

CREON

So this creature is no criminal, eh?

HAEMON

The whole of Thebes says "no."

CREON

And I must let the mob dictate my policy?

HAEMON

See now who is speaking like a boy!

CREON

Do I rule this state, or someone else?

HAEMON

A one man state is no state at all.

CREON

The state is his who rules it. Is that plain?

HAEMON

The state that you should rule would be a desert.

CREON

This boy is hopelessly on the woman's side.

HAEMON

I'm on your side. Are you a woman then?

CREON

You reprobate! At open loggerheads with your father!

HAEMON

On the contrary: you at loggerheads with open justice!

CREON

My crime, of course, the discharge of my rule?

HAEMON

What rule-when you trample on the rule of heaven?

CREON

Insolent pup! A woman's lackey!

HAEMON

Lackey to nothing of which I am ashamed.

CREON

Not ashamed to be the mouthpiece for that trollop?

HAEMON

I speak for you, for me, and for the holy spirits of the dead.

CREON

The dead? Precisely-you'll never marry her alive.

HAEMON

Well then, dead--one death beckoning to another.

CREON

So it's come to that-you threaten me?

HAEMON

One cannot threaten empty air!

CREON

My word, what wisdom! How you'll regret dispensing it!

HAEMON

If you weren't my father, I'd say your mind had gone.

CREON

You woman's slave! Don't come toadying to me!

HAEMON

Go on-make remarks and never listen to an answer!

CREON

Is that so? Then by Olympus be quite sure of this:
You shall not rant and jeer at me without reprisal.
Off with the wretched girl! I say she dies
In front of him, before her bridegroom's eyes.

HAEMON

She shall not di~{Ion't think it-in my sight or by my side.
And you shall never see my face again.
I commit you raving to your chosen friends.

[HAEMON rushes out.]

LEADER

Gone, your Majesty, but gone distraught.
He is young, his rage will make him desperate.

CREON

Let him do or dream up acts as murderous as a fiend's, these girls, he shall not snatch from death.

LEADER

You do not mean to kill them both?

CREON

You are right. Not the one who did not meddle.

LEADER

What kind of death do you plan?

CREON

I'll take her down a path untrod by man.
I'll hide her living in a rock-hewn vault,
With ritual food enough to clear the taint
Of murder from the City's name.
I'll leave her pleading to her favorite god,
Hades. He may charm her out a way to life.
Or perhaps she'll learn though late the cost
Of homage to the dead is labor lost.

[CREON walks away into the palace]

THIRD CHORAL ODE

[The CHORUS, apprehensive of the fate of the young lovers, sings of the desperately destructive power of love. Their words also veil a condemnation of men like CREON, who overvalue the so-called masculine qualities of the soul and fail to realize the duality of male and female within the person.]
Strophe I

Love, unquelled in battle
Love, making nonsense of wealth
Pillowed all night on the cheek of a girl
You roam the seas, pervade the wilds
And in a shepherd's hut you lie.
Shadowing immortal gods
You dog ephemeral man--
Madness your possession.

Antistrophe I

Turning the wise into fools
You twist them off their course
And now you have stung us to this strife
Of father fighting son . . . Oh, Love,
The bride has but to glance
With the lyrical light of her eyes
To win you a seat in the stars
And Aphrodite laughs.

[End of Choral Ode and beginning of Choral Dialogue which continues through FOURTH EPISODE]

FOURTH EPISODE[ANTIGONE is led in under guard]

LEADER

And now you turn on me
Unman my loyalty
Loose my tears to see
You Antigone
Pass your wedding bower
Death's chamber, pass
So easily.

Strophe I

[ANTIGONE and the CHORUS chant alternately]

ANTIGONE

See me, friends and citizens,
Look on this last walk-The sun's light snuffed out with my dower and Death leading me to Acheron
Alive, where all must sleep.
No wedding march, no bridal song
Cheer me on my way,
I whom Hades Lord of the dark lake weds.

CHORUS

Yet you walk with fame, bedecked
In praise towards the dead man's cave.
No sickness severed you
No sword incited struck.
All mistress of your fate you move
Alive, unique, to Hades Halls.

Antistrophe I

ANTIGONE

Oh, but I have heard what happened
To that Phrygian girl, poor foreigner
(The child of Tantalus), who clings
Like ivy on the heights of Sipylus
Captured in stone, petrified
Where all the rains, they say, the flying snow,
Waste her form away which weeps
In waterfalls-- I feel her trance,
Her lonely exodus, in mine.

CHORUS

And she a goddess born of gods
While we are mortals born of men.
What greater glory for a woman's end
To partner gods in death
Who partnered them in life!

Strophe II

ANTIGONE

Ah! Now you laugh at me.
Thebes, Thebes, by all our father's gods
You my own proud chariot city
Can you not wait till I am gone?
And you sweet Dirce's stream and Theban groves
You at least be witnesses to me with love
Who walk in dismal passage to my heavy tomb
Unwept, unjustly judged
Displaced from every home
Disowned by both the living and the dead-- Strophe III CHORUS

Perhaps you aimed too high
You dashed your foot on Fate
Where Justice sits enthroned.
You fall a plummet fall
To pay a father's sin. Antistrophe II

ANTIGONE

You touch my wounds, my memories
Make fresh again my tears: the triple curse
That haunts the House of Labdacus:
The spilt and tainted blood, the horrid bed,
My fated mother sleeping with her son
To father me in incest . . . Parents here I come,
Home at last, not wed, no broken spell.
Brother when you made
Your blindfold match, you made
Your death and mine-mine to come.

Antistrophe III

CHORUS

Pious is as pious does
But where might is right
It's reckless to do wrong.
Self-propelled to death
You go with open eyes.

Epode

ANTIGONE

Unwept, unwedded, unloved I go
On this last journey of all.
Eye of the blessed sun--
I shall miss you soon.
No tears will mourn me dead.
No friend to cry.
[End of Choral Dialogue. CREON has etrered]

CREON

Listen you! Panegyrics and dirges go on forever if given the chance. Dispatch her at once, I say. Seal up the tomb. Let her choose a death at leisure--or perhaps, in her new home,
An underground life forlorn. We wash our hands of this girl--except to take her from the light.

ANTIGONE

Come tomb, my wedding chamber, come!
You sealed off habitations of the grave!
My many family dead, finished, fetched in final muster to Persephone. I am last to come, and lost the most of all, my life still in my hands. And yet I come (I hope I come) toward a father's love, beloved by my mother,
And by you, my darling brother, loved. Yes, all of you, Whom these my hands have washed, prepared and sped with ritual to your burials. And now, sweet Polyneices, dressing you, I've earned this recompense though richly honored you the just will say.

No husband dead and gone, no children lisping "mother" ever could have forced me to withstand the city to its face.
By what law do I assert so much? Just this:
A husband dead, another can be found, a child replaced, but once a brother's lost (mother and father dead and buried too)
No other brother can be born or grows again. That is my principle, which Creon stigmatized as criminal, my principle for honoring you, my dearest brother.

So taken, so am I led away: a virgin still, no nuptial song, no marriage-bed, no children to my name. An outcast stripped of sympathy,
I go alive toward these sepulchers of death. What ordinance, what law of heaven broken, what god left for me to cast my eyes toward, when sacraments must now be damned as sacrilege?
And if these things be smiled upon by heaven, why, when I'm dead I'll know I sinned.
But if I find the sin was theirs, may Justice then mete out no less to them than what injustice now metes out to me-my doom.

LEADER

See how she goes, headlong driven By the capricious gusts of her own will!

CREON

Putting to disgrace her loitering guards. Who shall be paid their just rewards.

ANTIGONE

Ah, Death comes nearer with those words!

CREON

There is no comfort I can offer Nor this damnation can I alter.
ANTIGONE

See me, Thebes, I am going, now going!
See me, divine ancestral Thebes!
Cast but a glance, you her princes,
On this last and lonely royal scion,
See what I suffer from these men
For reverencing the rights of man.
[ANTIGONE is led away]

FOURTH CHORAL ODE

[The CHORUS, in an attempt to comfort ANTIGONE, recall situations of fate similar to her own. First there was Danae, shut up by her father in a brazen tower because an oracle had foretold that she would bear a son who would kill him. Zeus, however, had access to her prison and impregnated her in a shower of gold. The resulting offspring, Perseus, did indeed later kill his grandfather (accidentally). Next, there was Lycurgus, son of Dryas king of Thrace: punished by Dionysus for insulting him and abolishing the cult of the vine in his kingdom. Lastly, there was Phineus, who, suspicious of his two sons by his first wife (daughter of Boreas, the north wind), prompted his second wife to blind them in a fit of jealousy. *1

Sfrophe I

Hidden from the sun
Housed behind brass doors
Dana~e's beauty too was locked away
Her nuptial cell a tomb
And she, my child, yes she
A royal daughter too:
The rare receptacle of Zeus's golden seed.
0 Destiny, marked mysterious force!
No mound of coins
No panoplies of war
No ramparts keep you out
And through the dark sea looming No ship escapes.

Antistrophe I

The savage son of Dryas
That Edonian king
Was pent by Dionysus in a prison
Clamped within a rocky cavern.
There his jeering changing
Changing into howling
Faded into echoes till he came at last
To know the godhead whom his madness
Baited when he tried
To quench the god-possessed
Flaring Bacchantes
And offended all the Muses Who love the flute.

Strophe II

Once in primitive Thrace near Salmydessus
Where twin black doom-ridden crags
Sever two seas, along the vicious
Lonely shores of the Bosporus,
War-loving Ares
Witnessed a nightmare scene:
The bride of Phineus, jealous, frenzied,
Plunging the dagger of her spindle
Into the princely eyes of his two sons . .
Saw their vacant scream for vengeance
Plead in pools of socket-bloody staring.

Antistrophe II

Wasting in agony, doomed so cruelly
They lamented their mother's fatal mating
From which even her noble birthline
From Erechtheus could not save her—
And she a daughter cradled
By Boreas in the caverns
Born amid her father's tempests
Bolting like a colt from heaven
Over the uplands--child of the gods--

Even she, Antigone, they had her,
The ageless gray-grim Fates they struck her down.

FIFTH EPISODE

[The blind prophet TIRESIAS, led by a boy, announces his arrival in a quavering, chanting voice]

TIRESIAS

Rulers of Thebes, here we come: one pair of eyes for two
On a single road, and the blind man led by another.

CREON

What news, venerable Tiresias?

TIRESIAS

I shall tell you, and you must listen hard.

CREON

Have I ever failed to listen to you?

TIRESIAS

And therefore have you safely piloted the state

CREON

Gladly do I own my debt to you.

TIRESIAS

Then beware, you're standing once again upon the razor's edge.
CREON

How so? Your words and aspect chill.

TIRESIAS

Listen, I'll read the signs and make them plain. I was sitting by my ancient chair of augury, the haunt of every kind of bird, When suddenly a noise not heard before assaults my ears:
A panic screeching and a pandemonium deafening jargon: beaks and bloody talons tearing-I could tell it-pinions whirring, all shocked me as a portent. At once I kindled sacrifice to read by fire, but Hephaestus fanned no leaping flame. Instead, a sort of sweat distilled from off the thigh fat, slid in smoke upon the sputtering fire. The gallbladders burst and spurted up.
The grease oozed down and left the thighbones bare. These were the signs I learnt from off this boy, omens of a ruined sacrifice: he is my eyes as I am yours.

See it-how the city sickens, Creon, these the symptoms, yours the fanatic will that caused them: Dogs and crows all glutted carrying desecrated carrion to the hearths and altars--carrion from the poor unburied son of Oedipus. Burnt offerings go up in stench. The gods are dumb. The birds of omen cannot sing. But obscene vultures flap away with crops all gorged on human flesh.

Think, son, think! To err is human, true, and only he is damned who having sinned will not repent, will not repair.
He is a fool, a proved and stubborn fool.
Give death his due, and do not kick a corpse.
Where is renown to kill a dead man twice?
Believe me, I advise you well. It should be easy to accept advice so sweetly tuned to your good use.

CREON

Old man, you pot away at me like all the rest as if I were a bull's-eye, And now you aim your seer craft at me. Well, I'm sick of being bought and sold by all your soothsaying tribe. Bargain away! All the silver of Sardis, all the gold of India is not enough to buy this man a grave; Not even if Zeus's eagles come, and fly away with carrion morsels to their master's throne. Even such a threat of such a taint will not win this body burial. It takes much more than human remains to desecrate the majesty divine -Old man Tiresias, The most reverend fall from grace when lies are sold
Wrapped up in honeyed words-and all for gold.I TIRESIAS
Creon! Creon! Is no one left who takes to heart that…

CREON

Come, let's have the platitude!

TIRESIAS

That prudence is the best of all our wealth.

CREON

As folly is the worst of all our woes?

TIRESIAS

Yes, infectious folly! And you are sick with it.

CREON

I'll not exchange a fish-wife's set-to with a seer.

TIRESIAS

Which is what you do when you say I sell my prophecies.

CREON

As prophets do--a money-grubbing race.

TIRESIAS

Or as kings, who grub for money in the dung.

CREON

You realize this is treason--lese majesty?

TIRESIAS

Majesty? Yes, thanks to me you are savior of Thebes.

CREON

And you are not without your conjuring tricks. But still a crook.
TIRESIAS

Go on! You will drive me to divulge something that

CREON

Out with it! But not for money, please.

TIRESIAS

Unhappily for you this can't be bought.

CREON

Then don't expect to bargain with my wits.

TIRESIAS

All right then! Take it if you can. A corpse for a corpse the price, and flesh for flesh, one of your own begotten.
The sun shall not run his course for many days before you pay. You plunged a child of light into the dark; entombed the living with the dead; the dead Dismissed unmourned, denied a grave-a corpse Unhallowed and defeated of his destiny below. Where neither you nor gods must meddle, you have thrust your thumbs. Do not be surprised that heaven--yes, and hell--have set the Furies loose to lie in wait for you, Ready with the punishments you engineered for others.

Does this sound like flattery for sale? Yet a little while and you shall wake to wailing and gnashing of teeth in the house of Creon. Lashed to a unison of rage, they'll rise, those other cities, whose mangled sons received their obsequies from dogs and prowling jackals from some filthy vulture flapping to alight before their very hearths to bring them home-desecration reeking from its beak.

There! You asked, and I have shot my angry arrows.
I aimed at your intemperate heart. I did not miss.
Come, boy, take me home.
Let him spew his choler over younger men.
He'll learn a little modesty in time, a little meekness soon.

[TIRESIAS is led out by his boy. CREON stands motionless, visibly shakein]

LEADER

There's fire and slaughter for you, King! The man has gone, but my gray hairs were long since shining black before he ever stirred the city to a false alarm.

CREON

I know. You point the horns of my dilemma. It's hard to eat my words, but harder still to court catastrophe through overriding pride.

LEADER

Son of Menoeceus, be advised in time.

CREON

To do what? Tell me, I shall listen.

LEADER

Go free the maiden from her vault. Then entomb the lonely body lying stark.

CREON

You really mean it-that I must yield?

LEADER

Must, King, and quickly too. The gods, provoked, never wait to mow men down.
CREON

How it goes against the grain to smother all one's heart's desire! But I cannot fight with destiny.

CHORUS

Quickly, go and do it. Don't trust to others.

CREON

Yes, I go at once.
Servants, servants~n the double!
You there, fetch the rest. Bring axes all and hurry to the hill.
My mind's made up. I'll not be slow to let her loose myself who locked her in the tomb.
In the end it is the ancient code~h my regrets!-that one must keep: To value life then one must value law. [CREON and servants hurry away in all directions]

FIFTH CHORAL ODE

[The CHORUS sings a desperate hymn to Bacchus, begging him to come and save the city of Thebes and the stricken House of Oedipus] Strophe I

Calling you by a hundred names
Jewel and flower of Semele's wedding
Son of Zeus and son of thunder
Singer of sweet Italy!
Calling you in world communion
In the bowery lap of Dio's glades
Close by Ismenus's quicksilver stream:
You the Bacchus haunting Thebes
(Mother of the Bacehanals)
Hard by the very fields where once The dragon's teeth were sown. Antistrophe I

Bacchus and your nymphs Bacchantes
Dancing in the hills and valleys:
Dots of fire and wreathing torches
Curling smoke above the crested
Forks (Castalia fled Apollo
Plunging into the spring-fed pool there)
Calling you from the slopes of Nyssa
Dripping ivy down to the seashore
Green with vineyards, while your Maenads
Storm ecstatic shouting "Bacchus" On your march to Thebes.

Strophe II

Calling you to your favorite city
Sacred city of your mother
(Ravished by a lightning bolt)
Calling you to a city dying-People shadowed by the plague
Calling you to leave the high-spots
Leaping fleet-foot down to cross
The moaning waters. Oh come quickly Hurry from Parnassus.

Antistrophe II

Come you master of the dancing
Fiery-breathing pulsing stars
Steward of the midnight voices
Son of Zeus, 0 Prince appear!
Bring your train of Maenads raving
Swirling round you, round you dancing
Through the night, and shouting "Bacchus
Giver of all blessings, Bacchus!" Bacchus, oh come!

[There is a pause, while the strains of the CHORUS die away. A MESSENGER enters]

EPILOGUE

MESSENGER

Men of the House of Cadmus and of Amphion, how rash it is to envy others or despair!
The luck we adulate in one today, tomorrow is another's tragedy.
There is no stable horoscope for man. Take Creon: he if anyone, I thought was enviable. He saved this land from all our enemies, attained the pomp and circumstance of king, his children decked like olive branches round his throne. And now it is undone, all finished.
And what is left is not called life but death alive
His kingly state is nothing to him now with gladness gone:
Vanity of vanities--the shadow of a shade.

LEADER

What fresh news do you bring of royal ruin?

MESSENGER

Death twice over, and the living guilty for the dead.

LEADER

Who struck and who is stricken? Say.

MESSENGER

Haemon's gone. Blood spilt by his own hand.

LEADER

By his own hand? Or by his father's?

MESSENGER

Both. Driven to it by his father's murdering.

LEADER

Oh Prophet, your prophecy's come true!

MESSENGER

So stands the case. Make of it what you will.

LEADER

Look, I see Eurydice approach, Creon's unhappy queen.
Is it chance or has she heard the deathknell of her son?

[EURYDICE staggers in, supported by her maids]

EURYDICE

Yes, good citizens, all of you, I heard:
Even as I went to supplicate the goddess Pallas with my prayers.
Just as I unloosed the bolt that locks the door, the sound of wailing struck my ears, the sound of family tragedy.
I was stunned-and fell back fainting into my ladies' arms.
But tell me everything however bad; I am no stranger to the voice of sorrow.

MESSENGER

Dear Mistress, I was there. I shall not try to glaze the truth; for where is there comfort in a lie, so soon found out?
The truth is always best In attendance on your Lord, I took him deep into the plain where Polyneices lay abandoned still-all mauled by dogs. And there with humble hearts we prayed to Hecate, goddess of the Great Divide. to Hades too, and begged their clemency. Then we sprinkled him with holy water, lopped fresh branches down and laid him on a funeral pyre to burn away his poor remains. Lastly, we heaped a monument to him, a mound of his native earth, then turned away to unseal the vault in which there lay a virgin waiting on a bed of stone for her bridegroom--Death.

And one of us, ahead, heard a wail of deep despair echoing from that hideous place of honeymoon. He hurried back and told the King, who then drew near and seemed to recognize those hollow sounds. He gave a bleat of fear. --'Oh, are my heart's forebodings true? I cannot bear to tread this path.

My son's voice strikes my ears. Hurry, hurry, servants, to the tomb, And through those stones once pried away peer down into that cadaverous gap and tell me if it's Haemon's voice. Oh, tell me I am heavenly deceived!"

His panic sent us flying to the cave, and in the farthest corner we could see her hanging with a noose of linen round her neck, and leaning on her, hugging his cold lover lost to Hades, Haemon, bridegroom, broken, cursed the father who had robbed him, pouring out his tears of sorrow.

A groan agonized and loud-broke from Creon when he saw him. "You poor misguided boy!" he sobbed, staggering forward, "What have you done? What were you thinking of? And now, come to me, my son. Your father begs you." But the boy glared at him with flaming eyes, spat for answer in his face, and drawing a double-hilted sword, lunged but missed as his father stepped aside and ran. Then, the wretched lad, convulsed with self-hatred and despair, pressed against that sword and drove it home, halfway up the hilt into his side.
And conscious still but failing, limply folded Antigone close into his arms Choking blood in crimson jets upon her waxen face. Corpse wrapped in love with corpse he lies, married not in life but Hades. Lesson to the world that inhumane designs Wreak a havoc immeasurably inhumane.

[EURYDICE is seen moving like a sleepwalker into the palace]
LEADER

What does her exit mean? The Queen has gone without a word of comfort or of sorrow.

MESSENGER

I am troubled too. And yet I hope the reason is she shrinks from public sorrow for her son, And goes into the house to lead her ladies in the family dirge.
She will not be unwise. She is discreet.

LEADER

You may be right, but I do not trust extremes of silence or of grief.
MESSENGER

Let me go into the house and see.
Extremes of silence, as you say, are sinister.
Her heart is broken and can hide some sinister design.

[As the MESSENGER hurries into the palace through a side door, the great doors open and a procession carrying the dead body of HAEMON on a bier approaches, with CREON staggering behind]

CHORUS

Look, the King himself draws near, his load in a kind of muteness crying out his sorrow (Dare we say it?) from a madness of misdoing started by himself and by no other.

CHORAL DIALOGUE Strophe I

CREON

Purblind sin of mine!
There is no absolution
For perversity that dragged
A son to death:
Murdered son, father murdering.
Son, my son, cut down dead!
New life that's disappeared
Mind by no youthful foolishness
But by my folly.

CHORUS

Late, too late, your reason reasons right!

Strophe II

CREON

Yes, taught by bitterness.
Some god has cast his spell,
Has hit me hard from heaven,
Let my cruelty grow rank;
Has slashed me down, my joys
Trodden in the earth.
Man, man, oh how you suffer!

[Enter the MESSENGER]

MESSENGER

Sire, you are laden,
You the author loading:
Half your sorrow in your hands,
The other half still in your house
Soon to be unhidden.

CREON

What half horror coming?

MESSENGER

Your queen is dead:
Mother for her son;
The suicidal thrust:
Dead for whom she lived.

Antistrophe I

CREON

Oh, Death, pitiless receiver!
Kill me? Will you kill me?
Your mercy dwindles does it?
Must you bring me words
That crush me utterly.
I was dead and still you kill me.
Slaughter was piled high,
Ah then, do not tell me
You come to pile it higher:
A son dead, then a wife.

CHORUS

Look! Everything is open to full view.

[The scene suddenly opens by a movement of the ekkyklema* to reveal EURYDICE lying dead, surrounded by her attendants]

Antistrophe II

CREON

Oh, oh! A second deathblow.
Fate, my bitter cup
Should have no second brimming,
Yet the sight I see laid out
Compels a second sorrow:
My son just lifted up
A corpse, and now a corpse his mother.

MESSENGER

Her heart was shattered
And her hand drove keen the dagger.
At the altar there she fell
And darkness swamped her drooping eyes
As with cries she sobbed her sorrow
For her hero son Megareus
Long since nobly dead-And for this son her other,
Mingling with her dying gasp
Curses on you-killer.

Strophe Ill

CREON

My heart is sick with dread.
Will no one lance a two-edged sword
Through this bleeding seat of sorrow?

MESSENGER

She charged you, yes, With both their deaths
This lifeless thing, As double filicidal killer!

CREON

Tell me, how did she go?

MESSENGER

Self-stabbed to the heart; Her son's death ringing
New dirges in her head.

Strophe III

CREON

I killed her, I
Can own no alibi:
The guilt is wholly mine.
Take me quickly, servants,
Take me quickly hence.
Let this nothing be forgotten.

CHORUS

Good advice, at last,
If anything be good
In so much bad.
Such evils need quick riddance.

Antistrophe III

CREON

Oh, let it come! Let it break!
My last and golden day:
The best, the last, the worst
To rob me of tomorrow.

LEADER

Tomorrow is tomorrow And we must mind today.

CREON

All my prayers are that: The prayer of my desires.

LEADER

Your prayers are done. Man cannot flatter Fate, And punishments must come.

Antistrophe IV

CREON
Then lead me please away, a rash weak foolish man,
A man of sorrows, who killed you, son, so blindly
And you my wife—so blind. Where can I look?
Where hope for help, when everything I touch is lost.
And death has leapt upon my life?

CHORUS

Where wisdom is, there happiness will crown a piety that nothing will corrode. But high and mighty words and ways are flogged to humbleness, till age, beaten to its knees, at last is wise.