Exodos: the dead

The messenger arrives at the palace gates and gives the great speech of the exodos. Creon's party had first stopped to bury Polyneices properly — washed the corpse, laid it on fresh-cut branches, lit a pyre, piled up a great mound of native earth. Then they went on to the cave. As they approached they heard a wailing voice from inside. Creon, white, said: am I a prophet? That is my son's voice calling me. They forced the fallen rocks aside. Antigone had hanged herself with a noose of linen twined about her neck. Haemon was clasping her cold body, lamenting his dead bride and his father's cruelty.

Creon called to him. The boy looked up with tiger's eyes, spat in his father's face, drew his sword, and lunged. Creon sprang back; the blow missed. Haemon, enraged with himself, fell on his own sword and drove it home. Yet still breathing, he reached for the maiden in his limp arms and her pale cheek turned crimson with his last gasping breaths. Two corpses, the messenger says, one in death — his marriage rites consummated in the halls of Death.

Eurydice has come out during the speech and overheard. She listens to the rest in silence and walks back inside without a word. Creon enters from the other side, carrying Haemon's body, already weeping — the fault was mine, mine only. The second messenger comes out and tells him his wife has stabbed herself at the household altar, cursing him with her last breath. Creon asks to be killed. The chorus refuses. From the doom Fate decrees, there is no refuge. The play ends with Creon led offstage, alive and destroyed, while the chorus speaks the last lines: chastisement for errors past brings wisdom to age at last. The wisdom has come; the things it could have saved are gone.