Plays of Sophocles: Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone

Was quelled, her witchery laid; He rose our savior and the land’s strong tower. We hailed thee king and from that day adored Of mighty Thebes the universal lord. (Str. 2) O heavy hand of fate! Who now more desolate, Whose tale more sad than thine, whose lot more dire? O Oedipus, discrowned head, Thy cradle was thy marriage bed; One harborage sufficed for son and sire. How could the soil thy father eared so long Endure to bear in silence such a wrong? (Ant. 2) All-seeing Time hath caught Guilt, and to justice brought The son and sire commingled in one bed. O child of Laius’ ill-starred race Would I had ne’er beheld thy face; I raise for thee a dirge as o’er the dead. Yet, sooth to say, through thee I drew new breath, And now through thee I feel a second death. [Enter SECOND MESSENGER.] SECOND MESSENGER. Most grave and reverend senators of Thebes, What Deeds ye soon must hear, what sights behold How will ye mourn, if, true-born patriots, Ye reverence still the race of Labdacus! Not Ister nor all Phasis’ flood, I ween, Could wash away the blood-stains from this house, The ills it shrouds or soon will bring to light, Ills wrought of malice, not unwittingly. The worst to bear are self-inflicted wounds. CHORUS. Grievous enough for all our tears and groans Our past calamities; what canst thou add? SECOND MESSENGER. My tale is quickly told and quickly heard. Our sovereign lady queen Jocasta’s dead. CHORUS. Alas, poor queen! how came she by her death? SECOND MESSENGER. By her own hand. And all the horror of it, Not having seen, yet cannot comprehend. Nathless, as far as my poor memory serves, I will relate the unhappy lady’s woe. When in her frenzy she had passed inside The vestibule, she hurried straight to win The bridal-chamber, clutching at her hair With both her hands, and, once within the room, She shut the doors behind her with a crash. “Laius,” she cried, and called her husband dead Long, long ago; her thought was of that child By him begot, the son by whom the sire Was murdered and the mother left to breed With her own seed, a monstrous progeny. Then she bewailed the marriage bed whereon Poor wretch, she had conceived a double brood, Husband by husband, children by her child. What happened after that I cannot tell, Nor how the end befell, for with a shriek Burst on us Oedipus; all eyes were fixed On Oedipus, as up and down he strode, Nor could we mark her agony to the end. For stalking to and fro “A sword!” he cried, “Where is the wife, no wife, the teeming womb That bore a double harvest, me and mine?” And in his frenzy some supernal power (No mortal, surely, none of us who watched him) Guided his footsteps; with a terrible shriek, As though one beckoned him, he crashed against The folding doors, and from their staples forced The wrenched bolts and hurled himself within. Then we beheld the woman hanging there, A running noose entwined about her neck. But when he saw her, with a maddened roar He loosed the cord; and when her wretched corpse Lay stretched on earth, what followed—O ’twas dread! He tore the golden brooches that upheld Her queenly robes, upraised them high and smote Full on his eye-balls, uttering words like these: “No more shall ye behold such sights of woe, Deeds I have suffered and myself have wrought; Henceforward quenched in darkness shall ye see Those ye should ne’er have seen; now blind to those Whom, when I saw, I vainly yearned to know.” Such was the burden of his moan, whereto, Not once but oft, he struck with his hand uplift His eyes, and at each stroke the ensanguined orbs Bedewed his beard, not oozing drop by drop, But one black gory downpour, thick as hail. Such evils, issuing from the double source, Have whelmed them both, confounding man and wife. Till now the storied fortune of this house Was fortunate indeed; but from this day Woe, lamentation, ruin, death, disgrace, All ills that can be named, all, all are theirs. CHORUS. But hath he still no respite from his pain? SECOND MESSENGER. He cries, “Unbar the doors and let all Thebes Behold the slayer of his sire, his mother’s—” That shameful word my lips may not repeat. He vows to fly self-banished from the land, Nor stay to bring upon his house the curse Himself had uttered; but he has no strength Nor one to guide him, and his torture’s more Than man can suffer, as yourselves will see. For lo, the palace portals are unbarred, And soon ye shall behold a sight so sad That he who must abhorred would pity it. [Enter OEDIPUS blinded.] CHORUS. Woeful sight! more woeful none These sad eyes have looked upon. Whence this madness? None can tell Who did cast on thee his spell, prowling all thy life around, Leaping with a demon bound. Hapless wretch! how can I brook On thy misery to look? Though to gaze on thee I yearn, Much to question, much to learn, Horror-struck away I turn. OEDIPUS. Ah me! ah woe is me! Ah whither am I borne! How like a ghost forlorn My voice flits from me on the air! On, on the demon goads. The end, ah where? CHORUS. An end too dread to tell, too dark to see. OEDIPUS. (Str. 1) Dark, dark! The horror of darkness, like a shroud, Wraps me and bears me on through mist and cloud. Ah me, ah me! What spasms athwart me shoot, What pangs of agonizing memory? CHORUS. No marvel if in such a plight thou feel’st The double weight of past and present woes. OEDIPUS. (Ant. 1) Ah friend, still loyal, constant still and kind, Thou carest for the blind. I know thee near, and though bereft of eyes, Thy voice I recognize. CHORUS. O doer of dread deeds, how couldst thou mar Thy vision thus? What demon goaded thee? OEDIPUS. (Str. 2) Apollo, friend, Apollo, he it was That brought these ills to pass; But the right hand that dealt the blow Was mine, none other. How, How, could I longer see when sight Brought no delight? CHORUS. Alas! ’tis as thou sayest. OEDIPUS. Say, friends, can any look or voice Or touch of love henceforth my heart rejoice? Haste, friends, no fond delay, Take the twice cursed away Far from all ken, The man abhorred of gods, accursed of men. CHORUS. O thy despair well suits thy desperate case. Would I had never looked upon thy face! OEDIPUS. (Ant. 2) My curse on him whoe’er unrived The waif’s fell fetters and my life revived! He meant me well, yet had he left me there, He had saved my friends and me a world of care. CHORUS. I too had wished it so. OEDIPUS. Then had I never come to shed My father’s blood nor climbed my mother’s bed; The monstrous offspring of a womb defiled, Co-mate of him who gendered me, and child. Was ever man before afflicted thus, Like Oedipus. CHORUS. I cannot say that thou hast counseled well, For thou wert better dead than living blind. OEDIPUS. What’s done was well done. Thou canst never shake My firm belief. A truce to argument. For, had I sight, I know not with what eyes I could have met my father in the shades, Or my poor mother, since against the twain I sinned, a sin no gallows could atone. Aye, but, ye say, the sight of children joys A parent’s eyes. What, born as mine were born? No, such a sight could never bring me joy; Nor this fair city with its battlements, Its temples and the statues of its gods, Sights from which I, now wretchedst of all, Once ranked the foremost Theban in all Thebes, By my own sentence am cut off, condemned By my own proclamation ’gainst the wretch, The miscreant by heaven itself declared Unclean—and of the race of Laius. Thus branded as a felon by myself, How had I dared to look you in the face? Nay, had I known a way to choke the springs Of hearing, I had never shrunk to make A dungeon of this miserable frame, Cut off from sight and hearing; for ’tis bliss to bide in regions sorrow cannot reach. Why didst thou harbor me, Cithaeron, why Didst thou not take and slay me? Then I never Had shown to men the secret of my birth. O Polybus, O Corinth, O my home, Home of my ancestors (so wast thou called) How fair a nursling then I seemed, how foul The canker that lay festering in the bud! Now is the blight revealed of root and fruit. Ye triple high-roads, and thou hidden glen, Coppice, and pass where meet the three-branched ways, Ye drank my blood, the life-blood these hands spilt, My father’s; do ye call to mind perchance Those deeds of mine ye witnessed and the work I wrought thereafter when I came to Thebes? O fatal wedlock, thou didst give me birth, And, having borne me, sowed again my seed, Mingling the blood of fathers, brothers, children, Brides, wives and mothers, an incestuous brood, All horrors that are wrought beneath the sun, Horrors so foul to name them were unmeet. O, I adjure you, hide me anywhere Far from this land, or slay me straight, or cast me Down to the depths of ocean out of sight. Come hither, deign to touch an abject wretch; Draw near and fear not; I myself must bear The load of guilt that none but I can share. [Enter CREON.] CREON. Lo, here is Creon, the one man to grant Thy prayer by action or advice, for he Is left the State’s sole guardian in thy stead. OEDIPUS. Ah me! what words to accost him can I find? What cause has he to trust me? In the past I have bee proved his rancorous enemy. CREON. Not in derision, Oedipus, I come Nor to upbraid thee with thy past misdeeds. (To BYSTANDERS) But shame upon you! if ye feel no sense Of human decencies, at least revere The Sun whose light beholds and nurtures all. Leave not thus nakedly for all to gaze at A horror neither earth nor rain from heaven Nor light will suffer. Lead him straight within, For it is seemly that a kinsman’s woes Be heard by kin and seen by kin alone. OEDIPUS. O listen, since thy presence comes to me A shock of glad surprise—so noble thou, And I so vile—O grant me one small boon. I ask it not on my behalf, but thine. CREON. And what the favor thou wouldst crave of me? OEDIPUS. Forth from thy borders thrust me with all speed; Set me within some vasty desert where No mortal voice shall greet me any more. CREON. This had I done already, but I deemed It first behooved me to consult the god. OEDIPUS. His will was set forth fully—to destroy The parricide, the scoundrel; and I am he. CREON. Yea, so he spake, but in our present plight ’Twere better to consult the god anew. OEDIPUS. Dare ye inquire concerning such a wretch? CREON. Yea, for thyself wouldst credit now his word. OEDIPUS. Aye, and on thee in all humility I lay this charge: let her who lies within Receive such burial as thou shalt ordain; Such rites ’tis thine, as brother, to perform. But for myself, O never let my Thebes, The city of my sires, be doomed to bear The burden of my presence while I live. No, let me be a dweller on the hills, On yonder mount Cithaeron, famed as mine, My tomb predestined for me by my sire And mother, while they lived, that I may die Slain as they sought to slay me, when alive. This much I know full surely, nor disease Shall end my days, nor any common chance; For I had ne’er been snatched from death, unless I was predestined to some awful doom. So be it. I reck not how Fate deals with me But my unhappy children—for my sons Be not concerned, O Creon, they are men, And for themselves, where’er they be, can fend. But for my daughters twain, poor innocent maids, Who ever sat beside me at the board Sharing my viands, drinking of my cup,