Fourth Episode: Antigone's lament; Tiresias arrives

Antigone is led toward the cave. She gives the longest lyric speech in the play. She takes one last fond, lingering look at the bright sun. Death drags her young life away and beckons her to Acheron's dark fold — an unwed bride. No youths have sung the marriage song for her, no maidens have strewn her bridal bed with meadow flowers. Death is the groom she weds. The chorus tries to console her with the thought that she goes great and glorious to the dead; she pushes it away. She names her father's incestuous bed, the family curse, the brother whose hand has dealt her this death-blow, and is led off.

Then Tiresias arrives, led by a boy — the blind prophet of Thebes, who has never yet brought the city a false word. He reports the signs. At the augury throne the birds were tearing each other with bloody talons; the sacrifice fires would not catch; from the thighbones a foul ooze dripped and sputtered in the ashes. The cause is plain: the altars are polluted by what the dogs and birds have brought back from Polyneices's body. The gods are rejecting the city's prayers. Yield, Tiresias says. There is no glory in killing twice the slain.

Creon does not yield. Prophets, he snaps, are all a money-getting tribe. Tiresias, provoked, gives the prophecy he has been holding back. The coursers of the sun shall not run their race many times more before Creon gives the fruit of his own loins in quittance of his murder — life for life. He has entombed a living soul; he has left a corpse unburied; the avenging spirits of Heaven and Hell are on his trail. He turns to his boy: lead me home. The blind prophet walks offstage. Creon, for the first time in the play, looks afraid.