Stasimon 6
[Episode]
Look, here is the King himself approaching, his hands
grasping a monument plainly signing that his—if we may say it—and no
one else’s,
Chorus
was the madness of this error.
1260
[Choral 1]
Ah, the blunders of an unthinking
mind, blunders of rigidity, yielding death! Oh, you witnesses of the
killers and the killed, both of one family!
Creon
What misery arises from my reasonings! Haemon, you have
died after a young life, youngest and last of my sons! O God! You have
departed not by your foolishness, but by my own!
1265
[Choral 2]
Ah, how late you seem to see the
right!
1270
Creon
God, I have mastered the bitter lesson! But then, then, I think, some god
struck me on my head with a crushing weight, and drove me into savage
paths,
—ah!—and overthrew my
joy to be trampled on! Ah, the labors men must toil through!
1275
Messenger
My master, you have come, I
think, like one whose hands are not empty, but who has a ready store:
first, you carry that burden visible in your arms;
second, you will soon look upon further
sufferings inside your house.
1280
[Choral]
What worse suffering is still to follow upon these sufferings?
Messenger
Your wife is dead, true mother of that corpse, poor lady, by wounds newly
cut.
[Choral 1]
O harbor of Hades, hard to
purify!
Creon
Why, why do you ruin
me? Herald of evil, of grief, what word do you say? Ah, you have done in
a dead man anew! What are you saying, boy? What is this you report to
me
1285
God no!—what new slaughter, my wife’s doom, is heaped
upon this ruin?
1290
Chorus
The sight is at hand. It is no longer hidden inside.
Creon
There I see a new, a
second evil! What destiny, ah, what, can still await me? I have just now
taken my son in my arms, and now I see another corpse before
me!
1295
Oh, tormented mother! Oh,
my son!
1300
Messenger
By the altar, with a
sharp-whetted sword, she struck until her eyes went slack and dark.
Before that she bewailed the noble fate of Megareus who died earlier,
and then the fate of this boy, and also, with her last breath,
she called down evil fortune upon you,
the slayer of her sons.
1305
