The seer described minutely, I myself will slay
And liberate my country.”
The fame of Antigone was secured by Sophocles. Thebes seems to have been always noted for the beauty of its women, from Semele, the bride of Zeus, to the tall yellow-haired ladies admired by Dicæarchus, and Æschylus suggests the loveliness of Antigone as Euripides suggests her youthfulness. But through Sophocles we know her unadorned as the embodiment of loyalty and courage. On the sunny morning that followed the defeat of the Argives, when the eye of golden day had at last arisen over Dirce’s stream, she buried her brother and defied Creon’s edict, which forbade burial to an enemy of the country, in a noble speech of justification:—
“Not Zeus hath published this decree, not Zeus for me,
Neither hath Justice, house-mate with the gods below,
Laws like to this defined for men. Nor did I think
Within these edicts, these of thine, such strength inhered
That, being a mere mortal, thou could’st override
Th’ unwritten and unfailing statutes of the gods.
For not of yesterday nor of to-day their life,