NOTES TO ‘ANTIGONE’

P. 128

How our father perished: there is no reference here to the events of Oedipus at Colonus, and a later speech of Antigone (p. 150) even more explicitly contradicts them. There were, in fact, varying versions of the legend, and in the present play Sophocles is using the oldest tradition, by which Oedipus died at Thebes, perhaps shortly after his wife’s suicide.

P. 149

Ill-starred marriage: the marriage of Polynices to the Argive princess, the token of the alliance that made possible his fatal attack on Thebes.

P. 150

O but I would not have done the forbidden thing: the following nine lines, possibly a spurious interpolation, are rejected by some editors as being both logically and psychologically inappropriate. On the supposition that Antigone, in her last despair, gives utterance to an inconsistent and even unworthy throught, the passage seems to me to be dramatically right.

P. 156

O Thou whose name is many: believing the solution of their troubles to be now in sight, the Chorus invoke Iacchus (alias Bacchus, Dionysus, and other ‘many names’) as being (1) particularly connected with Thebes, (2) giver of healing and release.

P. 158

I attended your husband: it is not by an oversight that the Messenger’s narrative places first the attention given by Creon to the body of Polynices, and second his attempt to release Antigone. Though the king left the stage declaring his intention to save the woman’s life, it is the wrong done to the dead that lies heaviest on his conscience. We misread the intention of the tragedy if we place at its centre the ‘martyrdom’ of Antigone; for the Athenian audience its first theme is the retribution brought upon Creon for his defiance of sacred obligations, a retribution in which Antigone and Haemon incidentally share.

The following alternative rendering of the ‘Danae’ Chorus (p. 151) may be found more acceptable for dramatic performance. The mythological complexities of the original have here been considerably simplified in order to bring out the essential theme of the ode – precedents for the fate of Antigone.

So, long ago, lay Danae

Entombed within her brazen bower;

Noble and beautiful was she,

On whom there fell the golden shower

Of life from Zeus. There is no tower

So high, no armoury so great,

No ship so swift, as is the power

Of man’s inexorable fate.

There was the proud Edonian king,

Lycurgus, in rock-prison pent

For arrogantly challenging

God’s laws: it was his punishment

Of that swift passion to repent

In slow perception, for that he

Had braved the rule omnipotent

Of Dionysus’ sovereignty.

On Phineus’ wife the hand of fate

Was heavy, when her children fell

Victims to a stepmother’s hate,

And she endured a prison-cell

Where the North Wind stood sentinel

In caverns amid mountains wild.

Thus the grey spinners wove their spell

On her, as upon thee, my child.