Upon his sword and plunged it in his side.
What, we may ask, caused Haemon to commit suicide? We admit that his love for Antigone and the grief which he felt at her loss were essential causative factors; but we also feel that there was present in his heart an overwhelming fear that if he survived he would slay his father. We think that it was partly in order to avoid this horrible deed that he killed himself, just as in Homer,[83] Phoenix, through fear of parricide, fled from his home, his country and his kindred. The fact that even for Kreon the execution of Antigone was not merely repugnant to sentiment but was actually a source of conscience-conflict may be inferred from the extraordinary manner in which he caused her to die. He tells the Chorus[84]:
Where human footstep shuns the ground
I’ll hide her in a cave-like vault,
With so much provender as may prevent
Pollution from o’ertaking the whole city.
He places Antigone in a cave and leaves with her a little food. In his effort to avoid kin-bloodshed he proposes to starve the girl to death! Nature and Fate can take the guilt. This procedure of Kreon cannot have been entirely due to the aversion which human nature, even in very primitive societies, felt towards the shedding of kindred blood.
In Sophocles, Kreon is more devoted to the city than to his kindred. Otherwise he would have permitted the burial of the dead Polyneices without waiting for the compulsion of circumstances. Yet we feel that if the rebellious subject who sought to bury Polyneices had not been akin in blood to Kreon, he would have been immediately executed.[85] Hence we suggest that the starving to death of Antigone without bloodshed, in order to avoid pollution, implies a latent fear in the mind of Kreon lest her execution might be a judicial murder, for it was when the victim was a kinsman that the religious aspect of execution was most formidable and that the least doubt about its justice produced the greatest scruples. It is of course open to us to suppose that we have in this story a fusion of ideas which are derived from different atmospheres, and that in course of time pollution ideas became grafted upon an earlier story which represented the peculiar nature of this execution of Antigone as entirely due to human psychology and tribal custom. But, in the absence of any evidence for the existence of such a legend in early times, we may conclude that the act of Kreon is presented in this drama as an act which is open to the suspicion of being a judicial murder. For such murder there was no penalty in law or custom while the perpetrator remained in power, and the avenger was impotent to avenge. Teiresias the prophet takes this view of the matter and forebodes a terrible reckoning. He includes this execution in his recital of the crimes of Kreon when he says[86]:
Not many courses of the racing sun
Shalt thou fulfil, ere of thine own true blood