Emone, ah! tutto io sento,
Tutto l' amor, che a te portava: io sento
Il dolor tutto, a cui ti lascio.
No such words are to be found in Sophocles upon the lips of the dying Antigone. She is all for her father and her brothers. The tragedy of Hæmon belongs to Creon, not to her. Her furthest concessions to the sympathies which might have swayed a weaker woman are found in this line,
ὦ φίλταθ' Αἷμον, ὥς σ' ἀτιμάζει πατήρ,
and in the passage of the Kommos where she bewails her luckless lot of maidenhood. For the rest, Sophocles has sustained her character as that of one "whom, like sparkling steel, the strokes of chance made hard and firm." This steely durability, this crystalline sparkle, divide her not only from the ideal raised by romance for womanhood, but distinguish her, as the daughter of Œdipus, from the general sisterhood even of Greek heroines.
The peculiar qualities of Antigone are brought into sharp relief by the milder virtues of Ismene, who thinks it right to obey Creon, and who has no spirit for the deed of daring, but who is afterwards eager to share the punishment of her sister. Antigone repels her very sternly, herein displaying the force of her nature under its less amiable aspect: "Have courage! Thou livest, but my soul long since hath died." The glory of the act is hers alone. Ismene has no right to share it when the risks are past, the penalty is paid. Antigone's repulsion of her sister seems to supply the key to her own heroism. "Œdipus," she says, "is dead; my brethren are dead: for them I lived, and in their death I died to life; but you—your heart is not shut up within your father's and your brother's grave; it is still warm, still eager for love and the joys of this world. Live, then. For me it would be no more possible to live such life as yours than for the clay-cold corpse upon the bier."
The character of Creon, darkened in its tone and shadow to the utmost with a view to affording a foil of another species for Antigone, was thought worthy of minute and careful treatment by Sophocles. In the Œdipus Tyrannus he is wronged rather than wronging. While suffering from the unjust suspicion and hasty language of the king, he pleads his cause with decent gravity and shows no sign of either arrogance or cowardice. At the end, when Œdipus has fallen, his own behavior is such as would not disgrace a generous as well as prudent prince. The neutrality for good or evil which distinguishes Creon in this play, marking him out in contrast with the fiery heat of Œdipus, the impious irony of Jocasta, is, to say the least, respectable. In the Œdipus Coloneüs he plays a consistently mean and odious part; his pragmatical display of rhetoric before the burghers of Colonus, when tested by his violent and cruel conduct towards Antigone, proves him to be a hollow-hearted and specious hypocrite. The light here reflected back upon his respectability in the Tyrannus is decidedly unfavorable. In the Antigone Creon becomes, if possible, still more odious; only our animosity against him is tempered by contempt. To the faults of egotism, hardness, and hypocritical prating, are now added the infatuation of self-will and the godless hatred of a dead foe. There is, indeed, a show of right in the decree published concerning the two brothers, one of whom had brought a foreign army against Thebes; but it would be sophistry to maintain that Creon was actuated by patriotic motives. The defeat and death of Polyneices were punishment enough. By pursuing his personal spite beyond the grave Creon insults the common instincts of humanity, the sympathies of the people, and the supposed feelings of the gods, who cannot bear to gaze upon abominations. The pathetic self-devotion of Antigone, the voice of the city, the remonstrances of Hæmon, and the warnings of Teiresias are all thrown away upon his stubborn and conceited obstinacy. He shows himself, in short, to be a tyrant of the orthodox sort. Like a tyrant, he is, moreover, absurdly suspicious: the guardian has, he thinks, been bought; Ismene must be hatching treason; Hæmon prefers a woman to his duty; Teiresias is plotting for the sake of gain against him. When it is just too late, he gives way helplessly and feebly, moved to terror by the dark words of the seer. Creon is, therefore, a mixed character, great neither for good nor for evil, weak through wilfulness, plausible in words and wavering in his determinations, a man who might have passed for excellent if he had never had to wield a kingdom's power. His own description of himself—μάταιον ἄνδρα—suits him not only in the utter collapse of his character and rain of his fortunes, but also in the height of his prosperity and fulness of his seeming strength.
Sophocles might fairly be censured for having made the misery of Creon the climax of a drama which ought to have had its whole interest centred in Antigone. Our sympathies have not been sufficiently enlisted on the side of Hæmon to make us care much about his death. For Eurydice it is impossible to rouse more than a languid pity. Creon, we feel, gets no more than he deserves; instead of being sorry for him, we are only angry that he was not swept away into the dustheap of oblivion sooner. It was surely a mistake to divert the attention of the audience, at the very end of the tragedy, from its heroine to a character which, like that of Creon, rouses impatient scorn as well as antipathy. That Sophocles had artistic reasons for not concluding this play with the death of Antigone may be readily granted by those who have made the crises of the Ajax, the Œdipus Tyrannus, and the Œdipus Coloneüs the subject of special study. He preferred, it seems, to relax the strained sympathies of his audience by a prolongation of the drama on an altered theme. Yet this scarcely justifies the shifting of the centre of interest attempted in the Antigone. We have to imagine that the inculcation of a moral lesson upon the crime of ἀσέβεια was the poet's paramount object.[142] If so, he sacrificed dramatic effect to ethics.
It should be noticed that Antigone, in whom the fate of the family of Laius is finally accomplished, falls an innocent victim. Her tragedy is no immediate consequence of the Œdipodean curse. While her brethren were wilfully involved in the doom of their house, she perished in the cause of divine charity. Finding that the immutable ordinances of Heaven clashed with the arbitrary volition of a ruler, she preferred to obey the law of conscience and to die at the behest of a pride-maddened tyrant. She is technically disobedient, morally most duteous. Thus the Antigone carries us beyond the region of hereditary disaster into the more universal sphere of ethical casuistry. Its tragic interest depends less upon the evolution of the law of ancestral guilt than on the conflict of two duties. By suggesting the casuistical question to his audience, while he freed his heroine from all doubt upon the subject, Sophocles maintained the sublime simplicity which distinguishes Antigone above all women of romance. The retribution that falls on Creon furnishes a powerful example of the Greek doctrine of Nemesis; but over Antigone herself Nemesis exerts no sway. In her action there was nothing unconsidered; in her doom there was nothing unforeseen.
FOOTNOTES:
[129] "Fain would I be a fair lyre of ivory, and fair boys carrying me to Dionysus's choir."