But, take good heed, Midst all your spoil to hold the gods in awe. For our great Father counteth piety Far above all. This follows men in death, And fails them not when they resign their breath.[142]
And the chorus sings at the end of the Antigone:
Wise thought hath the first place in happiness Before all else, and piety to Heaven Must be preserved. High boastings of the proud Bring sorrows to the height to punish pride:— A lesson men shall learn when they are old.[143]
In the Ajax Athena says:
Then, warned by what thou seest, be thou not rash To vaunt high words toward Heaven, nor swell thy port Too proudly, if in puissance of thy hand Thou passest others, or in mines of wealth. Since Time abases and uplifts again All that is human, and the modest heart Is loved by Heaven, who hates the intemperate will.[144]
There is an extraordinary passage in the Oedipus Coloneus where Oedipus is made to say, when his strength fails him and he cannot go to the altar to sacrifice, but must send one of his daughters: “For I think that one soul suffices to pay this debt for ten thousand, if it come with good will (purity) to the shrine.”[145] Piety, reverence, and purity, these to Sophocles are the highest qualities of man.
For the poet the moral order was unchanging, dependent not upon caprice but having a divine source and a divine sanction; the laws of heaven are therefore superior to those of man, and man’s obedience to the higher law is made his duty and the means of his consecration. In an ode in Oedipus the King, which is called forth by the king’s harshness and by the suspicion that he is not wholly guiltless, as well as by the queen’s bold contempt for Apollo’s oracle, the chorus sings:
O may I live Sinless and pure in every word and deed Ordained by those firm laws, that hold their realm on high! Begotten of Heaven, of brightest Ether born, Created not of man’s ephemeral mould, They ne’er shall sink to slumber in oblivion. A Power of God is there, untouched by Time.[146]
That is, the chorus here pray that they may always show their piety and reverence by obeying the divine laws. This sentiment is repeated more than once in the extant tragedies; as when Odysseus warns Agamemnon not to refuse burial to the body of Ajax: “’Tis not he, ’tis the law of heaven that thou would’st hurt.”[147] Through this belief Sophocles justified Antigone in her decision to defy the edict of the state, for Creon had ordained that her brother Polynices might not be buried, since he had attacked Thebes. But Greek belief regarded it as a sacred duty of the next of kin to bury their dead, and this duty Antigone could not but fulfil, although she knew that death would be her lot. When Creon asks her if she did indeed dare to transgress his edict, she replies:
I heard it not from Zeus, nor came it forth From Justice, where she reigns in the Underworld. They too have published to mankind a law. Nor could I think thine edict of such might That one who is mortal thus could overrule The infallible, unwritten laws of Heaven. Their majesty begins not from today But from eternity, and none can tell The hour that saw their birth.[148]