The ode to Colonus

Theseus has gone to make arrangements. The chorus, alone now with Oedipus and his daughter, sings the play's most famous ode — the song in praise of Colonus, the small Attic village just outside the walls of Athens. The ode is a quiet inventory of what the country produces, line by line.

It names the things of the place. The dense thickets of the grove where the nightingales hide and call from the wine-dark ivy. The narcissi that open in the dew at dawn, woven into wreaths for Demeter and Persephone. The golden crocus in the same wreaths. The unfailing springs of the river Cephisus, swelling the earth with new life, water clear as glass. Then the olive — the grey-leaved olive that gives the children of Athens their oil and their light, the tree that no enemy spear has been able to kill, that Zeus and Athena themselves watch over, planted by no human hand. Then the horses, trained on these very roads by Poseidon, who gave their masters the iron bit. Then the ships, given by Athena, that have made Athens what it is on the sea.

It is a love song to a place. Sophocles wrote it in his last year, in his nineties, about the village where he had been born, while the city it served was losing the Peloponnesian War and would surrender within two years. The ode is famous in Greek literature for the directness of its tenderness. Whatever other ambitions the play has, this song is not subtle. It is a man near death writing about his home. As the ode ends, Antigone, watching the road, sees a company coming. It is Creon, with his men. Oedipus tells her not to be afraid. If we are old, he says, this country's strength has no trace of old age in it.