Third Stasimon: the ode to Eros
A short, bitter ode. Love, irresistible in fight, has set father against son.
Summary
The chorus, in the wake of the Haemon scene, sings a short ode to Eros. Love, irresistible in fight, all yield at a glance of your eye. Love who pillows all night long on a maiden's cheek and ranges over the uplands. All the god's subjects are mad; even the wisest heart falls straight into folly at the touch of his poisoned dart. The chorus reads the scene they have just witnessed through this lens. Eros has kindled the strife of kinsman with kin — by the eyes of a winsome wife, by the longing of her heart to win. The lines suggest, gently, that Haemon's outburst was not pure counsel but partly the love that overrides counsel.
The ode is shorter than the previous two and ends with the chorus admitting they themselves are swept aside from Justice as they gaze on this bride — Antigone, so young, so fair, hurried down to Death's bower to share the dead. The chorus is no longer pretending to neutrality. They are watching a young woman go to her death and they say so.
Creon then announces the sentence in detail, in a passage usually counted as the third episode's coda but functioning as part of the act-break. Antigone will not, in the end, be stoned. She will be taken to a desert place where no man treads, and in a rock-hewn cave — with just enough food to avoid the blood-guilt that an outright killing might bring on the state — she will be buried alive. There let her call on the King of Death, the one god she reveres — or learn, at last and too late, that it is wasted labor to reverence the dead. The cruelty is exact. Creon has found a way to kill her without anyone in Thebes having to say they killed her.
- Scene 1Antigone summons Ismene outside the palace before dawn. Their two brothers killed each other in the war; Creon has forbidden...
- Scene 2The elders of Thebes sing the dawn after the battle. The Argive invaders have been driven back; the brothers killed each other...
- Scene 3Creon's first speech of state. He proclaims the edict — Eteocles honored, Polyneices left for the dogs — and the chorus accepts...
- Scene 4The chorus sings the most famous ode in Greek tragedy. Man is wondrous in everything — sailing, plowing, hunting, building...
- Scene 5Antigone is dragged before Creon. She admits the act and argues that the gods' unwritten laws preceded his decree. Creon condemns...
- Scene 6The chorus sings the curse on the house of Labdacus. Once a god curses a bloodline, the disease runs generation by generation....
- Scene 7Haemon, Creon's son, comes to warn his father. The city sees Antigone as noble; no man is wise enough to stand alone; the trees...
- Scene 8A short bitter ode to Eros. Love has set Haemon against his father; even the wisest heart falls to the god's dart. Then Creon...
- Scene 9Antigone gives her last speech — farewell to the sun, no marriage song will be sung for her, Death is the groom she weds — and is...
- Scene 10The chorus, for the first time, gives Creon direct counsel. Free the girl. Build the tomb. Now. Creon obeys, runs out himself with...
- Scene 11The messenger reports it all. Antigone hanged herself in the cave; Haemon, finding her body, lunged at his father with a sword...