Fourth Stasimon: the late yielding

Tiresias has gone. The chorus, for the first time in the play, drops every hedge. That man has gone, my liege, foretelling woe. Since these locks of mine were black as a raven's, I have never known his warning to fail. Creon, shaken, admits as much — to yield is grievous, but the obstinate soul that fights with Fate is smitten grievously. He asks what he should do. The chorus answers in two short lines, the bluntest counsel they have given: go and free the girl from her rocky cell, and build a tomb for the unburied outlaw. This instant.

Creon yields. It is a wrench to sacrifice his heart's resolve, but Fate is ill to fight. He calls for his henchmen and axes; he will go himself. For all my resolve, my mind now sways this way. I was the one who bound her — I too will set her free. He runs out. The reversal the whole play has been pressing toward has finally come. The chorus, watching him go, allow themselves a moment of hope.

They sing a brief hymn to Dionysus, patron of Thebes. He is invoked under his many names — child of Zeus the thunderer, lord of Eleusis, lord of Castaly, lord of Nysa with its ivy and vineyards. They beg him to come in this hour. You see with what a plague our townsfolk sicken; we crave your ready help, whether you are descending from Parnassus or sweeping over the roaring straits. Save us, O save. The audience knows what the chorus does not yet know — that the runner is already too late, that Antigone has hanged herself in the cave, that the rocks the henchmen are about to reach contain not a girl who can be saved but a body and a lover already turning his sword on himself.