Antigone
[1555]
I do not say this to reproach or mock you, but in sadness: your own avenging curse, with all its load of swords and fire and ruthless war, came on your sons. Alas for you, my father!
Oedipus
[1560]
Ah me!
Antigone
Why do you groan?
Oedipus
My sons!
Antigone
You are in pain; but if you could look towards the sun-god's four-horse chariot and turn the light of your eyes on these corpses—
Oedipus
[1565]
The evil fate of my sons is clear; but she, my poor wife, tell me, daughter, by what fate did she die?
Antigone
All saw her weep and heard her moan, as she rushed forth to carry to her sons her last appeal, a mother's breast.
[1570]
But the mother found her sons at the Electran gate, in a meadow where the lotus blooms, fighting out their duel with spears, like lions in their lair, eager to wound each other,
[1575]
a murderous libation of blood already cold, owed to Hades, poured out by Ares. Then, taking from the dead a sword of hammered bronze, she plunged it in her flesh, and in sorrow for her sons fell with her arms around them. So the god who fulfills these sorrows has brought them all together on this day,
[1580]
father, for our house.
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Table of Contents:
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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