Stasimon 4
[Episode]
Still the same tempest of the soul
Chorus
grips this girl with the same fierce gusts.
930
Creon
Then because of this her guards will have reason to lament their
slowness.
Antigone
Ah, no! That command verges close on death.
Creon
I cannot console you with any hope
that your doom is not to be fulfilled in that way.
935
Antigone
O city of my fathers, land of Thebes, and you gods, our ancestors! I am led away now;
there is no more delay!
Look at me, you who are Thebes’ lords—look at the only remaining daughter
of the house of your kings. See what I suffer, and at whose hands,
because I revered reverence! Antigone is led away by the
guards.
940
[Choral 1]
So too endured Danae in her beauty
to change
Chorus
the light of the sky for
brass-bound walls, and in that chamber, both burial and bridal, she was
held in strict confinement. And yet was she of esteemed lineage, my
daughter,
945
and guarded a
deposit of the seed of Zeus that had fallen in a golden rain. But
dreadful is the mysterious power of fate—there is no deliverance from it
by wealth or by war, by towered city, or dark, sea-beaten ships.
950
And Dryas’s son, the Edonian king swift to rage, was
tamed in recompense for his frenzied insults, when, by the will of
Dionysus, he was shut in a rocky prison. There the fierce and
swelling force of his madness trickled away.
955
That man came to know the god whom in his
frenzy he had provoked with mockeries. For he had sought to quell the
god-inspired women and the Bacchanalian fire,
960
and he angered the Muses who love the flute.
965
[Choral 2]
And by the waters of the Dark
Rocks, the waters of the twofold sea, are the shores of Bosporus and the Thracian city
Salmydessus,
Chorus
where Ares,
neighbor of that city, saw the accursed, blinding wound inflicted on the
two sons of Phineus by his savage wife. It was a wound that brought
darkness to the hollows, making them crave vengeance
970
for the eyes she crushed with her bloody hands
and with her shuttle for a dagger.
975
Wasting away in their misery, they
bewailed their miserable suffering
and their birth from their mother stripped of her
marriage. But she traced her descent from the ancient line of the
Erechtheids, and in far-distant caves she was raised amidst her
father’s gusts. She was the child of Boreas,
980
running swift as
horses over the steep hills, a daughter of gods. Yet she, too, was
assailed by the long-lived Fates, my child.
985