223-330.
mvp-comment-136-1
The half-comic or rustic character of the watchman in this play is an extension of the common character of the
messenger, whose natural rudeness of speech and thought brings into greater prominence the horror or pathos of the events he describes. The grotesqueness disappears when he speaks of the action of Antigone in 407-440. The employment of this artifice by Sophocles arises from the same motive to which Shakespeare gave a far wider range in such creations as the
gravediggers in Hamlet, and the
rural fellow in Antony and Cleopatra. The Messenger in the Trachiniae, the Corinthian in the Oedipus Tyrannus, Menelaus in the Ajax, the pretended Shipmaster in the Philoctetes, afford the same sort of contrast to the more tragic personages: and the superstition of the Coloniatae may be compared with the cowardice of the Phrygian slave in the Orestes of Euripides.
223-330.
mvp-comment-136-2
The vulgarity of the common-place Athenian of the fifth century в.с. takes the form of misplaced subtlety of wit. Cp.
Shak. Hamlet, 5. 1
,
We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. The age is grown so picked, that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.
324.
mvp-comment-188-1
κόμψευε . . δόξαν 'Ay do, refine now on the word "opinion."" This does not seem to be one of the cases where viv with the imperative mood should be changed to vuv, as there is a sufficient reason for the emphatic particle.
325.
mvp-comment-189-1
ἐξερεῖτε
You shall tell the world. Cp. Pind. Pyth. 2. 22, Ιξίονα φαντὶ ταῦτα βροτοῖς λέγειν ἐν πτερόεντι τροχῷ .. τὸν εὐεργέταν ἀγαναῖς ἀμοιβαῖς 332 ff. The chorus, in their first stasimon, express, in a veiled manner, their emotions at what has occurred. Not being able to say what they really think, that Creon's rash edict has already recoiled on his own family, they descant on the wonderful range of human enterprize, adding that where boldness and resource are combined with justice, they confer glory, but only bring ruin where they are subservient to wrong. The elders do not decide who in the present instance is the transgressor. The ode consists of two strophes and antistrophes, in which glyconic rhythms are mixed with lyrical dactyls, iambi, and trochees, in different proportions, the scheme being as follows:- ICC CC CI CICIC α'. } Iamb. Dact. Troch. Glycon. The two long syllables at the beginning of l. 8 of a form the transition from the dactyls to the trochees. There is a sensible change to a lighter and less simple movement at the beginning of β'. The resolved trochees in B' 5 mark a climax of feeling.
