Site Home > Philosophical Stages > Scene IV
CREON:
Why, old Tiresias! What brings you here?
TIRESIAS:
I will speak: I am the soothsayer, and you will learn.
CREON:
Well, I never have rejected your advice.
TIRESIAS:
That is how you've been steering the city straight.
CREON:
Yes, I know firsthand how helpful you are, and I can testify.
TIRESIAS:
Then know this: Once again, your fate stands on a knife edge.
CREON:
What is it? Your voice puts my hair on end!
TIRESIAS:
You'll see.
Listen to what I have read from the signs of my art.
I took my seat, the ancient seat for seeing omens
Where all the birds that tell the future come to rest
And I heard a voice I've never known from a bird:
Wild screeching, enraged, utterly meaningless.
They were clawing each other to death with their talons.
I was frightened. Immediately, I tried burnt sacrifice.
The altar had been blazing high, but not one spark
Caught fire in my offerings. The embers went out.
juice was oozing and dripping from thighbones,
Spitting and sputtering in clouds of smoke.
Bladders were bursting open, spraying bile into the sky;
And so the ritual failed; I had no omens to read.
Now, it was your idea
That brought this plague down on our city.
Every single altar, every hearth we have,
Is glutted with dead meat from Oedipus' child,
Who died so badly.
That is why the gods no longer hear our prayers.
And that is why
The birds keep back their shrill message bearing cries:
Because they have fed on a dead man's glistening blood.
Take thought, my son, on all these things:
It's common knowledge, any human being can go wrong.
But even when he does, a man may still succeed:
He may have his share of luck and good advice
But only if he's willing to bend and find a cure
For the trouble he's caused. It's only being stubborn
Proves you're a fool.
So, now, surrender to the dead man.
Stop stabbing away at his corpse. Will it prove your strength
If you kill him again?
Learning from good words is sweet when they bring you
gain.
CREON:
I hear you, old man: You people keep shooting arrows at me
Like marksmen at a target. Do you think I don't know?
I have a lot of experience with soothsayers.
You'll never put that man down in a grave,
Not even if eagles snatched morsels of his dead flesh
And carried them up to the very throne of Zeus.
I won't shrink from that. And don't you call it "pollution"
Or tell me I have to bury him to fend off miasma
Surely no human power could pollute a god.
You're terribly clever, old man, but listen to me:
Clever people tend to stumble into shameful traps
When they make a wicked speech sound good
For their personal gain.
TIRESIAS:
This is very sad:
Does any human being know, or even question…
CREON: (Interrupting.)
What's this? More of your great "common knowledge"?
TIRESIAS:
How powerful good judgment is, compared to wealth.
CREON:
Exactly. And no harm compares with heedlessness.
TIRESIAS:
Which runs through you like the plague.
CREON:
I have no desire to trade insults with a soothsayer.
TIRESIAS:
But you're doing it. You implied that I make false prophecies.
I haven't forgotten. It was by my powers that you saved the city.
CREON:
Cunning soothsayer! Yes, but you'd rather do what's wrong.
TIRESIAS:
You are provoking me. I have a secret we have not touched.
CREON:
Well, touch it then.
TIRESIAS:
So be it. But you must know this and know it well:
An ambush awaits you--slow, crippling avengers,
Furies sent by Hades and the gods above.
You'll hardly see the sun race around its course
Before you'll make a trade with your own boy's corpse
Your only child, born from your guts, traded for corpses.
My art made the following explicitly clear:
In the last depth of the tomb,
I saw Antigone there, hanging by the neck
On a noose she'd twisted from her own fine clothes.
Haemon was there, too, tumbled around her, hugging her waist,
Grieving for his marriage lost, gone under--
His father's doing--as he, in misery, kissed his bride.
The angry boy turned against himself. He took his blade
And leaned on it, drove it half through his lungs.
Then, still concious, he pulled the girl into the curve
Of his sagging embrace. He gasped and panted,
Spattered blood on her white cheek, a spurt of scarlet.
Then he was dead. His body lay with hers;
They'd brought their marriage off at last in the house of Death.
CHORUS:
Destroyer Love, you seize a good mind,
And pervert it to wickedness:
This fight is your doing,
This uproar in the family.
And the winner will be desire,
Shining in the eyes of a bride,
An invitation to bed,
A power to sweep across the bounds of what is Right.
For we are only toys in your hands,
Divine, unbeatable Aphrodite!
TIRESIAS:
You took one who dwells above and tossed her below,
You rejected a living soul and peopled a tomb with her.
And you took one who belongs down there and kept him
here,
Untouched by gods, unburied, unholy, a corpse exposed.
The dead are no business of yours; not even the gods above
Own any part of them. You've committed violence against
them.
You will be tangled in the net of your own crimes.
These are my arrows.
And I never miss.
(To his guide.)
CHORUS:
The man is gone, sir. His prophecies were amazing,
Terrible. Ever since my hair turned white
I'm quite certain he has never sung a prophecy,
Not once, that turned out to be false for the city.
Haemon is hung from the ceiling, Creon II stands there shocked
Creon II: MY SON
Creon I walks up to glass, stares at figure, and slowly, very slowly, raises his fingertips to touch those of Creon II, takes off mask.
CREON:
Let it come! Let it come!
I look for the light
Of my last day
Oh let it come
I never want to face another day!
Take me, hide me, blindfold me from these
And keep your distance. Everything I've touched
I have destroyed. I've nobody to turn to,
Nowhere I can go. My recklessness and pride
I paid for in the end. The blow came quick.
CHORUS:
All dead:
Those who believed one thing,
Those who believed the contrary thing,
And even those who believed nothing at all,
Were caught up in the web without knowing why.
Antigone is calm tonight,
She has played her part.
Creon:
No man has a mind that can be fully known,
In character or judgment, till he rules and makes law.