Antigone. Sophocles. Cambridge, UK. 1906.
Sponsored by Perseus Project, Tufts University.
Funding provided by Tufts University.
Antigone. Sophocles. Cambridge, UK. 1906.
Sponsored by Perseus Project, Tufts University.
Funding provided by Tufts University.
Greek (R. C. Jebb, 1906) (OCR draft) (Greek) (Greek (R. C. Jebb, 1906))
Provisional text from uncorrected OCR; expect errors.
mvp-comment-152-1 ταῦτα 1 μόλις φέροντες 2 καὶ πάλαι 3
mvp-comment-152-2 πόλεως ἄνδρες 4
mvp-comment-152-3 ἐρρόθουν 5
mvp-comment-152-4 ἐμοί 6
mvp-comment-152-5 κάρα σείοντες 7
mvp-comment-152-6 ὑπὸ ζυγῷ 8
mvp-comment-152-7 λόφον 9
mvp-comment-152-8 δικαίως 10
mvp-comment-152-9
equal poise’ (
New Crat. 371).—
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
,
289-290. mvp-comment-170-1 ἀλλὰ ταῦτα.. ἐμοί But this explains the murmurs I have long been hearing from men in the city against me;' i. e. Those murmurs have become explicit in this act. Οη ταῦτα, see Essay on Language § 17. p. 25; and for the dative ἐμοί, at me, ib. § 12. p. 18. μόλις φέροντες, which some have connected with ταῦτα (ταῦτα μόλις φέροντες, 'Bearing my edict ill'), seems to be used absolutely, sc. τὸ ἐμὸν ζυγόν, with an allusion to the metaphor in what follows. Cp. Thuc. 5. 80, θυμῷ ἔφερον, sc. τὸν πόλεμον ἢ τὰ πράγματα.