First Stasimon: the Ode to Man

The chorus, alone onstage, sings the first stasimon — the most famous of all Greek choral odes. Many wonders there are, but nothing more wondrous than man. The ode opens with a sailor crossing the surging sea, white-foamed wind at his back, and unfolds as a catalogue of what humans have done to make the world bear them. He furrows the earth and turns the plow with his yoked team. He traps the birds of the air, the beasts of the forest, the brood of the briny flood. The savage bull and the mountain stag are tamed by his infinite art. The shaggy, rough-maned steed bears the bit at his hand.

The ode rises through speech and wind-swift thought and the civic wit to live by counsel — all these he has taught himself. Provision against the arrowy rain. Provision against the freezing winter sky. Provision for everything. Even grim plague he has learned to endure. He is safe, whatever befalls. Then a single line breaks the rhythm: yet for death he has found no cure. The catalogue of mastery has run into the one limit, and the ode acknowledges it without elaboration.

The closing stanza adds the second limit. If man honors the laws of the land and reveres the gods of the state, proudly his city shall stand. But a cityless outcast I reckon whoever departs from the path of right. The ode does not name Antigone or Creon; it does not have to. It is a hymn to human cleverness that ends by warning what cleverness is for. As the last lines fade the chorus looks up — what strange vision meets my eyes? — and the guard enters with Antigone bound between two men. The cleverness the ode celebrated is about to meet, in person, the law it has just warned against breaking.