7
,. Guide to Sophocles)
'-----.
A Student Edition with Commentary,
Grammatical Notes, & Vocabulary I
JOAN V. O'BRIEN
Southern Illinois University Press
CARBONDALE AND EDWARDSVILLE
FejJer & Simons; Inc.
LoNDON AND AMSTERDAM
Creon's Lament
( 1284 - 1353 ]
i
I IN
INTRODUCTION
THE FINAL portion of the play (for which Commentary and
Grammatical Notes are provided below), the focus is entirely on
~ing Creon..!'nd his responsibility for the corpse that he carries
(i.e .• his son's) and for the corpse that soon confronts him (i.e.,
his wife's). .
Significantly, Cr. returns without An.'s body, and no one men-
tions her either in this final kommos or in the earlier scene when
the messenger reports the deaths of Hae. and An. The poet and
his characters enter into a remarkable conspiracy of silence about
An. during the last two episodes. The spectator has to infer that
the person who dies with Hae. is An. Only feminine modifiers
of a suppressed antecedent identify the second victim as An. (1221
ff.). And the audience is left to surmise that her body suffers the
same indignity as her brother's. Such is the supreme irony in a
play whose whole action grows out of An.'s refusal to leave her
brother's body unburied. She lies at play's end in a climate of
total neglect. I
What led the poet to allow this strange neglect? What madc
him focus all eyes on Cr.'s disintegration instead of alternating
the focus as he did in the first three quarters of the play? I suggest
that the poet's ironic imagination" induced him 'to take the gam-
114
 ~~\~
c 's Lament (~'"e~' ~'n-t';
-rno-v~ , Guide to Sophocles' ANTIGONE I
ble-a successful one, 1 believe-!.hat the inspiration of the heroine
favors that sense. Yet, this is admittedly against the n
would dominate the conclusion despite his characters' utter neglect . . . onnal Ii
of her body, her memory, and the principle for which she died. . .
reading of the line. Soph. avails himself of the ambigu't I Y of I
rtIt

The gamble succeeds because An.'s integrity in her catastrophe gu a (J

ge An. IS freely taking herself
.
away-these gJJard. 'h
. aVe no
'Ill. \

is continuously heightened in the spectator's imagination by its power over her-and yet there IS a transcendent power th AS
contrast with the ki?g's unmasking. Both An. and Cr. suffer ,<r.
. I h . b
She knows that In one very rea sense s_ e IS eing led aw ay S
at d.....
Y;
OIJ
..II1~e...
I~

catastrophe that entails external event and internal despair. It is ~ s~\~'"
in their respective manners of coping with their .despair that~ \ ~
wholeness inspires, whereas his emptiness mere,iy instructs and c.... \V":;l
evokes the sympathy one reserves for a moral midget.
In the case of An., her brother's rotting body elkits from her
the act which results in her living death, entombment in "the
ever-guard.ing prison" (892?(fnt~rnal.despairfollows external event. (\
She expenences that terrible isolation of one with no .external nil
support: famil~ ?ead,. Ism., rejected, fiance silent, finally even the oj'<-
j \if
assurance of divine aid withdrawn. This final dark night brings
her to the depths of despair out of which she achieves what Kierke-
gaard calls "the_movement of infinite resignation'?(937-c43)'
o city of my fathers in the land of Thebes
a ancestral gods!
I go forth now and brook no more delay.
Look at me, you princes of Thebes,
Observe the last daughter of the king's household.
Sec what I suffer-and from whose hands-
because I revered reverence!
She has regained her pride in the fullness and integrity of her
being. She does not exemplify the eternal feminine figure who
foregoes the political for the human and religious. She is the true
citizen. male or female, whose phil;a leads her to sec and perform
her moral duty despite the consequences. She is in charge of her
own destiny and yet submissive to the greater power of the gods.
The line "I go forth now and brook no more delay" (939) elucidates
this. The usual translation of this line ("I am, led forth now and
am no longer (merely) about to be led away") docs not convey
the ambiguity inherent in the sentence. Commentators take ago/hoi
dl in its normal passive sense but it can also have a middle sense:
"I go away." The second half of the line, with its proud assertion,
is led away by that power she alludes to in her last line (t;;, 'nurbj""t
sebisiisa, "revering reverence," 943)· The final movement to I<:~
r~c..\;:S
recovery seems to have come from those very gods whose aid .""
could not feel (9 23- 24).
<Cr. too faces cat~l~ophe as external event an~ as inner dCllpair,
When the seerTireslas threats finall enetrate hIS ar bm
lie c (1095 ff.). The man has no inner resources with which
rt-I one. to meet the subsequent assaults of his son's bestial death and hi.
wife's accusatory suicide)Stripped of all the trappings of om",
and deserted by his bombastic rhetoric, he stands there naked.
one of T. S. Eliot's "hollow men." Some critics argue th~
pities the man because-~e has at last .shown his humanity. If 10. rt,ul"\
it is mankind's empty SIde that he displays, the tendency in all ,-,'
r
or;;; to bury authentic human possibilities under the death 1l1;U~
of inauthentic pome,.
""'So, Hae.'s metaphor of the writing tablet which, when opened.
. devoid of contents (707-9) becomes the perfect symbol for hi.
IS ' , II
father. We have seen its aptness in Cr.'s relationshIp with -rae.
and ;;"ith his nieces (see .Intro., chap. 5). Why does It apply til
his other relationships? Precisely, I believe, because his words, and
actions, throughout the play have shown him to be so ~CVOI~ IIf I1de.
the human dimension extolled in the Ode on Man. 1 he Clio. IY
boasted there that Man has taught himself the tempe.r that make- on
. . ( - 56) ThIS crowns h.. Nl
communal hfe possible asrynomous orgas, 355- . ' h h \,!Q(\
At&· other achievements over the animal world (34 1 ~.).\Dyt Cr. ~
hi " th lorics of communI ~
reversed the direction. Far from ac ievrng e g h 'IY ; fOI'l
life he has destroyed the fundamental balance between umam
and the animal. His inhumane neglect ~f th~ putrif~~~~:r~:
gives domination back to the carrion-eatmg blrdslM sied
. ib f bi d "( f) as the Cho. sugge .
"ensnare the nimble tn e o rr s 34 2.,
but birds mangle the remains of a :nan., . . h the divine
So it is hardly surprising that hIS relatIOnshIp ":It. I 0 awry-
, . ' f Delphi IS a s
world in the person of Tireslas, the pnest 0 '

II6
 . 's Lamen l - ...
0VIllf arns him that he has sinned, Cr. responds with ,~ ')
......... Ihe ICer dWI charges of bribery that he used earlier (294 ~r \O"S
.. ~,. groun e55 d d h d' ~ , c.. Guide 10 Sophocles' ANTIGONE I
Iht .. rne b tious guard. He caul not en ure t e guar s ~\
1.1 apilU~ 'I~di~:~ to his edict; still less can he face the priest's So
..... of dl,? I both cases, with arms flailing, he reduces a ing corpse" greatly illuminates the tragic grandeur of the dead,
un buried heroine.
...,od<rnna~lOn. nonent into a greedy assailant. Delphi is no less
~1.meaJ1lnghoP~rdinary citizen. And as if to dramatize that point, \.. is
.......pl lhan t e .I h b . 1 if Z eus ' I.I\V.,u'
• , he prticst that he wil prevent t e. una even I
II< ",om k lift the remains to the Olym Ian throne (1039-43)'~ . 118
"'llid ICC ,to cycle is complete. If h umamty . .IS measured , as th e l . . ~\ , 1'1 e.S~
u:·1'le, dicates by one's relationships with the animal world e.-'1'f
()dtonJ"anm ,
..,d wilh divinity, but especially with one's fellowmen, Cr.'s tablet i ,

.. d<",id of contents.) .
'" Therefore, even Cr.'s admission of guilt lacks the promise of
w beginning. Emptiness cannot grow. It can only direct the
~I lOr's thoughts back to its opposite, i.e., to the heroine's phi/ia.
r :annat evoke "the pity and fear" that Aristotle required of
a l.-gic character. Instead, he comes the closest of any major
SofdlOcican character to exemplifying Aristotle's extremely bad
man who proceeds from happiness to misery, a structure which
may arouse sympathy ·(to philanthrapon) in us but neither pity nor
rw (Portirs 1453al-4)·
---rhu, Soph.'s structural technique is paratactical, his method
oonieally antithetical. The diptych arrangement allows him in a
r"" .ho,t scenes to depict authentic human conviction, nobly ac- ~ 0~
cepung its own autonomy within a structure of faith; this alongside 'J)~
rbe IClS tense, less interesting unveiling of the inauthentic king. ~I'" ~s-f'"'oJl"
"Anenrion must be paid" to the Willy Lomamand the Creons.
o;
~
rei Soph. docs not, like Arthur Miller, make Cr. his tragic figure
or cenicrpiece.i' Rather, the assignment of almost half of the play
'o,the unmasking of the kings illusions is the poet's sardonic re-
~lIndcr that life is like that: the ironic faith of life's tragic heroes
II. rare and, he suggests, brief experience that escapes the notice
~ the prosaic. Far more of life'is concerned with the sardonic
UOny embodied in the Creons. The young man in Eliot's Family
Rn""on speaks to life's Creons: "Yau are all people to whom nothing
hu happened, at most a continual impact of external events." The
plaYWright understood that the revelation of the non tragic "breath-

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