Antigone
Antigone
[1485]
I do not veil my tender cheek shaded with curls, nor do I feel shame, from maiden modesty, at the dark red beneath my eyes, the blush upon my face, as I hurry on, in bacchic revelry for the dead,
[1490]
casting from my hair its mantle and letting my delicate saffron robe fly loose, a tearful escort to the dead. Ah me! Oh, Polyneices! you were rightly named, after all; woe to you, Thebes!
[1495]
Your strife—not strife, but murder on murder— has brought the house of Oedipus to ruin with dire and grim bloodshed. What harmonious or tuneful wailing can I summon,
[1500]
for my tears, my tears, oh, my home! oh, my home! as I bear these three kindred bodies, my mother and her sons, a welcome sight to the Fury? She destroyed the house of Oedipus, root and branch,
[1505]
when his shrewdness solved the Sphinx's unsolvable song and killed that savage singer. Alas for you, father! What other Hellene or barbarian,
[1510]
what mortal from a noble line ever endured the anguish of such visible afflictions? Ah! poor girl, how piteous is your cry!
[1515]
What bird, perched on the high-leaved branches of oak or pine, will come to mourn with me, left motherless? With cries of woe,
[1520]
I lament before it comes the piteous lonely life, that I shall live for the rest of time, in streaming tears. On which of these
[1525]
shall I throw my offerings first, plucking the hair from my head? on the breast of the mother that suckled me, or beside the ghastly death-wounds of my brothers' corpses?
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Euripides. The Complete Greek Drama, edited by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr. in two volumes. 2. The Phoenissae, translated by E. P. Coleridge. New York. Random House. 1938.
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