Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/269

Rh violent and insubordinate. Creon seems to be searching for a loophole to escape, subject only to the determination of an obstinate autocrat not to unsay what he has said. After Hæmon leaves him, he cries desperately that he sticks to his decision. Both the maidens must die! "Both," say the chorus—"you never spoke of Ismênê!" "Did I not?" he answers, with visible relief—"no, no; it was only Antigone!" And even on her he will not do the irreparable. With the obvious wish to leave himself breathing time, he orders her to be shut in a cave without food or water "till she learns wisdom." When he repents, of course, it is too late.

There are several similarities between this, perhaps the sublimest, and the Electra, perhaps the 'least sublime, of Sophocles's plays. The strong and the weak sister stand in exactly similar contrast; indeed in the passages where Antigone defies Creon and where she rejects Ismênê's claim to share her martyrdom, we seem to have a ring of the old 'harshness.' There are marks of early date also. The question ;—"What man hath dared?"—when the real sinner is of course a woman, is a piece of well-worn dramatic effect which the Attic stage soon grew out of. The love of antithesis, always present in Sophocles, is dominant in the Antigone—"Two brothers by two hands on one day slain"; or finer:

The claims of the dead form, in fact, a note common to this play and the Electra. They repeat the protest already uttered by Æschylus in the Choëphoroi, against treating wrong done merely as it affects the convenience