Shelter from the storm: Antigone 117-125

Beauty walks a razor’s edge

στὰς δ᾽ ὑπὲρ μελάθρων φονώσαισιν ἀμφιχανὼν κύκλῳ 
λόγχαις ἑπτάπυλον στόμα 
ἔβα, πρίν ποθ᾽ ἁμετέρων 
120αἱμάτων γένυσιν πλησθῆναί τε καὶ στεφάνωμα πύργων 
πευκάενθ᾽ Ἥφαιστον ἑλεῖν. τοῖος ἀμφὶ νῶτ᾽ ἐτάθη 
125πάταγος Ἄρεος, ἀντιπάλῳ δυσχείρωμα δράκοντος.

[117] He paused above our dwellings; he gaped around our sevenfold portals with spears thirsting for blood; but he left [120] before his jaws were ever glutted with our gore, or before the Fire-god's pine-fed flame had seized our crown of towers. [125] So fierce was the crash of battle swelling about his back, a match too hard to win for the rival of the dragon.

Seven-gated Thebes

Jebb notes the oddness here, as has been noted here for the second strophe, of a "blurred" transition from figure to proper sense, and calls it "thoroughly Sophoclean":

The words φονώσαισιν ἀμφιχανὼν... λόγχαις once more merge the image of the eagle,—as at v. 115,—in literal description of a besieging army, save in so far as the figurative “ἀμφιχανών” suggests a monster opening its jaws. The word was perh. suggested by Il. 23.79 “ἐμὲ μὲνκὴρ ι ἀμφέχανε στυγερή” (hath gaped for me—i.e. ‘devoured me’). These transitions from clear imagery to language in which the figure is blurred by the thought of the object for which it stands, are thoroughly Sophoclean: cp. n. on O. T. 866.

Further along in the strophe, many translators choose to not include the names of gods that are in the Greek. Jebb has "Fire-god" -- literally it's "piney Hephaestos." He and others also literalize Ares. Jebb has "clash of battle" where "clash of Ares" (πάταγος Ἄρεος) would seem closer to the text.

Grene drops the divine names for literal reference.

But before his jaws would be sated
with our blood, before the fire,
pine fed, should capture our crown of towers,
he went hence—
such clamor of war stretched behind his back,
from his dragon foe, a thing he could not overcome.

Fitts-Fitzgerald:

But before his jaws were sated with our blood,
Or pine fire took the garland of our towers,
He was thrown back; and as he turned, great Thebes––
No tender victim for his noisy power––
Rose like a dragon behind him, shouting war. 

Curiously, all three keep the figure of the dragon for Thebes, but the effect is different. Fitts-Fitzgerald's dragon is an animated simile and vocal where Jebb's is more like a metonymic mascot name.

We can't ignore the issue of the war "at the back of" the attacking army (or eagle). If the Theban defenders were in the city, how did they (the dragon) rise behind the enemy? Perhaps something (the beam of Helios?) caused the Argives to turn and run, so that the defenders opened the gates and pursued them.* 

So, with help from Nicholas P. Gross's commentary and begging the indulgence of the gods and skilled craftsmen of translation:

He stood having gaped around the roofs of the seven-gated mouth [stoma or στόμα is singular - the multiple as one] with bloodthirsting spearheads. Before the jaws could glut our blood or
piney Hephaestos seize our crown of towers, they left [no agency is identified], and the clashing Ares of the dragon stretched round the back of the Eagle, a near-equal hard conquest.

Sophocles uses ἀντιπάλῳ in the final line. Literally the word means "wrestle against," but in use it came to mean a situation in which two are "nearly matched or balanced." It's odd to use it with δυσ-χείρωμα, "hard conquest." In a few lines we have an impending attack, which suddenly ceases, and a counterattack, ending with a conquest in which the two clashing forces were nearly as one. The Argives get rendered visually, the Thebans more aurally.

In this ode rich in language in which, as Jebb notes, "the figure is blurred by the thought of the object for which it stands" so that gaping eagles and clashing Ares are jarred by actual spearheads, it would be interesting to ask our modern translators why they suppress metonymies like Hephaestos and Ares. As we've seen, the language of the ode is destabilizing -- one can't know from moment to moment whether to expect prosaic literal language, strong metaphor, weak metonymy, or a combination of these (as in φονώσαισιν...λόγχαις - "blood-thirsting spearheads").

Given this unstable poetic environment, changing Hephaestos to "fire" and Ares to "war" seems odd. Perhaps where anything goes, one seeks literal language to cling to, shelter from the storm.

*Euripides' Phoenissae offers very much this sort of scenario, except the stampede occurs after the single-handed combat of Eteocles and Polyneices. These two fight and die by each other's hand. The Argives have laid down their arms during the contest, the Thebans have not. Perceiving their advantage, the Thebans pursue and slaughter the Argive army.

Eagle's wing, horsehair helmets: Antigone 110-116

ὃς ἐφ᾽ ἡμετέρᾳ γᾷ Πολυνείκους 
ἀρθεὶς νεικέων ἐξ ἀμφιλόγων 
ὀξέα κλάζων 
ἀετὸς εἰς γᾶν ὣς ὑπερέπτα, 
λευκῆς χιόνος πτέρυγι στεγανός, 
115πολλῶν μεθ᾽ ὅπλων 
ξύν θ᾽ ἱπποκόμοις κορύθεσσιν.

[110] He set out against our land because of the strife-filled claims of Polyneices, and like a screaming eagle he flew over into our land, covered by his snow-white wing, [115] with a mass of weapons and crested helmets.

The second part of the Antigone's first ode continues the bifurcated agency begun in the first strophe. The "he" who set out is the "Man" that came to Thebes - the entire armed force of Argives. But this "he" came because of the strife-filled claims (νεικέων) of Polyneices (Πολυνείκους). Two agents, then, driving one action.

It is difficult to think of another poet who puts pressure upon grammar, particularly upon grammatical number, the way Sophocles does here. First, there's the giant collective noun, reduced to the third person singular pronoun (ὅς). "He" comes to Thebes because of the νεικέων -- the plural claims or quarrels, of the singular Polyneices, whose name contains this same word. (Πολυνείκους means "many quarrels," or "much strife.")

The attention shifts back to the "Man" now likened to a screaming eagle with a snow-white wing. Normally the term for birds' wings occur in the plural (or, in Greek, the dual*), since they naturally come in twos. This eagle has only one, and it's στεγανός -- closely, or tightly covered, watertight.

We take that to be the white shield of the army, but the moment we take the total army as one bird, and the totality of shields as one tight white wing, this singular collective entity is "with many weapons and horsehair-crested helmets."

It's as if there's a struggle going on within the grammar of the ode -- strife between a totalizing imposition of a collective singular upon numerous individuals, and an actor, or agent, that refuses to remain singular, but diverges into "Man" / "Eagle" / "wing" which has multiple armaments yet is caused by "many quarrels" who happen(s) to be one man.

If this seems surreal, consider that it's in seeming violation of certain norms of poetic figure. If something is imagined to be One though it is many, poets usually sustain their inspired images by elaborating their figure in a consistent form. Sophocles clearly doesn't want to do this - no sooner do we take the army to be singular and birdlike and single-winged than it is toting many weapons and horsehair helmets -- we're back to a literal language and plurality of real armed forces that we do not have to "take" as anything other than itself.

The effect is of rough-hewn power, neither elegant, nor clever, nor cute. I find it disconcerting, slightly surreal, and haunting. Whatever else the first ode of the Antigone is doing, the poetics of the song are claiming attention by defamiliarizing grammatical and poetic expectancies. Interpretation of what this could mean will be taken up later. For now the attempt is to describe a certain textual strangeness.

[update] *Sophocles did use the dual number, as I was happy to learn after posting the above:

11. Antigone's name means "Against the Family." "Against" carries both the sense of "close to" and "opposed to." When Antigone first speaks she is yet without a name but her language stresses closeness. She addresses her sister with a hyperbole whose overstatement of filial closeness is further enhanced by her use of the dual number. Beside the singular and plural, Greek has a set of inflections for expressing pairs, most often, common pairs like two oxen or two eyes. Antigone encloses Ismene with language that makes them such a natural pair, and Ismene acknowledges this with dual forms of her own. Source.

Antigone: First ode and some interpretive obscurity

The first choral ode of Sophocles' Antigone does a good deal of work. It presents the elders of Thebes who evoke the action that immediately preceded the play's opening. The people's fear of assault, the white-shielded army at the gates, the fate of Capaneus, all would remind an Athenian audience of Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes:

Here is a snippet of Aeschylus's first chorus, anticipating ruin at the hands of a massive Argive army at the city's seven gates:

Ah, ah, you gods and goddesses, raise your war cry over our walls to drive away the onrushing evil!
The army of the white shield, ready for battle, rushes at full speed against the city.
Who then will rescue us, which of the gods or goddesses will help? (89-91)

Here's Sophocles' first chorus, looking back upon the same event:

Shaft of the sun, fairest light of all that have dawned on Thebes of the seven gates, you have shone forth at last, eye of golden day, advancing over Dirce's streams! [105] You have goaded with a sharper bit the warrior of the white shield, who came from Argos in full armor, driving him to headlong retreat.

Sophocles' chorus is steeped in golden light - the shining beam of Helios appears thrice in the first lines, each time using the root φα, as in φαίνω, the root of light, of brightness, of that which causes anything to come into appearance:

ἀκτὶς ἀελίου, τὸ κάλλιστον ἑπταπύλῳ φανὲν 
Θήβᾳ τῶν προτέρων φάος, 
ἐφάνθης ποτ᾽, ὦ χρυσέας 

followed by the eye of golden day,

ἁμέρας βλέφαρον, 

The movement from light to shining appearance to the eye is fully coherent and augurs clarity and illumination. Yet the next lines don't quite fulfill the expectation. First, there is some uncertainty about the action: it seems the sharp bit, or bridle, of Helios has turned away the Argives:

You have goaded with a sharper bit the warrior of the white shield

We could spend some time working out precisely how the bit of Helios (presumably driving his chariot) goaded the "warrior" from Argos. Normally bits curb one's own horses, rather than goading enemy armies. Translators are not of one accord on the actual syntax.

Wyckoff:

                           O golden day's 

eye, coming over Dirce's stream,

on the Man who had come from Argos with all his armor

running now in headlong fear as you shook his bridle free.

It's unclear what verb would serve to represent the "shaking free."

Grene offers:

You drove in headlong rout

the whiteshielded man from Argos,

complete in arms;

his bits rang sharper

under your urging.

Here the "bits" belong to the fleeing Argives.

Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald do away with bits and bridles altogether:

O marching light

Across the eddy and rush of Dirce’s stream,

Striking the white shields of the enemy

Thrown headlong backward from the blaze of morning!

Here the light itself is marching, like the Argive army, and strikes that army, causing not blindness, but a muscular act in which an army is thrown headlong backward.
This might seem an odd translator's decision, given that the Greek text clearly contains the word χα^λι_νός, which can mean bit or bridle, or, anything that curbs or restrains, or, a strap, thong, fang of a serpent. And it is ὀξυτέρῳ, i.e., sharp.

So a very simple noun for an everyday object somehow becomes problematic when coupled with a ray of the sun. We get no clear imitation of an action, rather, a set of alternatives that seem to include light, mythological horses, goading and curbing, army and bridle. The collective noun translated as army or enemy is φώς, that is, "man."

The trouble lies in discerning the causation. The ode begins with the clarity of golden sunlight, but the moment it speaks of an action leading to the rout of the man/Argives, the nature of that action proves difficult to grasp. Helios's beam somehow turned away the "man," but sheds very little light on how that feat has been managed.

Before we proceed to complain of Sophocles' word choice, syntax, or dismal handling of simple metaphor, we probably should read on. In so doing, the ode will present other interpretive difficulties. For now, a strong brilliance of light and the act of routing an army are somehow involved in an obscure causal relation. Even if that relation were clear, it would still be necessary to decide on the reliability of the elders who are singing the allegation.

The abyss of translation

From a translation of Sophocles' Antigone by Wm. Blake Tyrrell and Larry J. Bennett:

From the first line, the translator confronts the abyss separating Sophocles' Greek from English. Our translation, "O common one of the same womb, dear head of Ismene" uses eleven words for five of the original. An endearment like "dear heart, Ismene" would be more readily understood than "head of Ismene" but with a false familiarity: the Greeks spoke of the head, not the heart, as the center of love and affection. 

Richard Jebb's translation, "Ismene, my sister, mine own dear sister," forfeits the slight delay in discovering the identity of the addressee and dilutes the hyperbolic expression of kinship.(2) Elizabeth Wyckoff's "My sister, my Ismene" and Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald's "Ismene, a dear sister" further diminish the urgency perceptible in the words of kinship. Kinship is emphasized in Andrew Brown's "Sisters, closest of kindred, Ismene's self"and in Richard Emil Braun's "Ismene? Let me see your face," although "Ismene's self" is no more English idiom than the literal "head of Ismene," and looking upon Ismene's face is not in the Greek. 

Robert Fagles' "My own flesh and blood--dear sister, dear Ismene" highlights the physicality of the kinship Antigone asserts with Ismene at the price of abandoning the Greek. "Ismene, my dear sister whose father was my father" (Grene) stresses the notion of the sisters' kinship shared through the father, an emphasis on father that not only is not in the Greek but imports father into words that denote kinship through the womb. Each version of line 1 promises a faithful translation, but they are not the same English, since the translator cannot escape imposing his or her layer of meaning upon Antigone of the written page.

Witness to a pure act: The end of the Hippolytus

εἴθε φθέγμα γηρύσαισθέ μοι

1075

καὶ μαρτυρήσαιτ᾽

. . . would that you could utter speech on my behalf 

and bear me witness!

This is the second of two afterthoughts on the last portion of the Hippolytus (the first is here). Given that the reading of a work of this richness is never really at an end, more may occur.

We have noted some of the many symmetries of the play -- mirrorings, both verbal and structural, between opening and end; the "bookended" goddesses, and more. The structural circularity gives the audience the formal equivalent of a closed system that is destined to ever repeat the antagonism between Aphrodite and Artemis, which can be translated into any number of conceptual formulae. E.g., the erotic desire to possess and be possessed vs. the aversive assertion of the independence of the integral self.

The play examines certain inherent dangers posed when either of these divine powers moves toward absolute plenitude. Examples include the speech of Hippolytus that rabidly wishes to silence and isolate all women, reaching a vision of wild beasts patrolling cities to ensure the end of the communal bonds and procreative sexuality of the human race. Likewise eros bends Phaedra to a desire that would mean the end of marriage, children, and social position; her solution is suicide and murder.

Given that each goddess's power in its pure form leads to absurdity and death, the play is driven of necessity to explore the virtue of sophrosyne as a means of mediating, reconciling the goddesses through the achievement of a complex balance allowing for love yet also for a freedom from it -- an oxymoronic sweet servitude, chosen subordination, independent agreement to bonds of love and obligation, etc.

In a sense the play then seeks to work out the probability of some viable synthesis or exchange of the properties of love and freedom, after demonstrating some quite extreme versions entailed by the divine fullness of each. Instead of witnessing some realized fusion of the goddesses, the audience gets a vivid rendering of a hanging, a chariot crash and a vow by Artemis that she will destroy Aphrodite's next human lover in an endlessly reversible contention of symmetrically opposed gods.

It would be understandable if the audience were to file out of the theater at this point persuaded that there's no way out of this cycle of creation and destruction. No synthesis can thrive, nothing can combine to progress, allowing for hope for change in the future. As circles tend to demonstrate, there really is nothing new, just the eternal recurrence of a pattern that can be called tragic fate. Even without violence, the correct model of a contented life is to have an end that matches the beginning. As Hippolytus says on the happy morning of his last day, using a buried metaphor of the rounded race course:

τέλος δὲ κάμψαιμ᾽ ὥσπερ ἠρξάμην βίου. 

May I end my life just as I have begun it!

To see whether this iron circle of human life is the only plausible view a reader of the Hippolytus can take away, let's briefly look at a few elements of the final scene. As noted above, the epilogue balances the prologue, but there are some interesting inflections. For example, while Aphrodite appears as herself and then as an immobile statue, Artemis appears, if at all, first as herself, and then to Hippolytus as voice and fragrance. The goddess of love, desire, sexual longing and friendship is associated with the eye while the goddess of independent selfhood is linked to hearing, to music and to smell.

In the final scene, Hippolytus is near death. Artemis explains that she is forbidden to shed tears. and is unable to help Hippolytus avoid the anger of Aphrodite:

πληροῦσα θυμόν. θεοῖσι δ᾽ ὧδ᾽ ἔχει νόμος:
οὐδεὶς ἀπαντᾶν βούλεται προθυμίᾳ1330τῇ τοῦ θέλοντος, 
ἀλλ᾽ ἀφιστάμεσθ᾽ ἀεί.

Among the gods the custom is this: no god contrives to cross the will of another,but we all stand aside [ἀφεστήξω]

Nor can she stay with her devoted follower to the end. Gods can't abide the dying breath of mortals, she explains.

καὶ χαῖρ᾽: ἐμοὶ γὰρ οὐ θέμις φθιτοὺς ὁρᾶν
οὐδ᾽ ὄμμα χραίνειν θανασίμοισιν ἐκπνοαῖς:
ὁρῶ δέ σ᾽ ἤδη τοῦδε πλησίον κακοῦ.

Farewell: it is not lawful for me to look upon the dead or to defile (χραίνειν - touch lightly, taint) my sight with the last breath of the dying. And I see that you are already near that misfortune.

That is the goddess's last word. Her farewell mirrors Hippolytus's distancing himself from the statue of the goddess Aphrodite:

πρόσωθεν αὐτὴν ἁγνὸς ὢν ἀσπάζομαι. 

I greet her from afar, for I am pure. (102)

Artemis leaves as Hippolytus becomes immobile, a statue. We might reflect on the relation of gods to mortals and mortals to statues.

So far, this remains within the echoic symmetry of the play's beginning and ending. But it also sets up the final act of the play, in which Hippolytus frees his father from the blood taint of murder.

Would it not have been more in keeping with a world made of equal and opposite forces for Hippolytus to curse his father with his last breath? While he knows that holding back from vengeance will accord with Artemis's wish, there is nothing he, dying, stands to gain. Immortalizing his name in the pre-nuptial ceremonies of Athenian maidens has already been unconditionally granted by his divine companion.

As Hippolytus turns to his father and releases him from blood curse, he's using a power that could have punished Theseus with exile. Instead, he sustains and extends his life, in full knowledge of what his father has cost him.

 ἐπεί σε τοῦδ᾽ ἐλευθερῶ φόνου 

for of this murder I acquit you

There is no reward here, no reciprocity for Hippolytus. He acts in full knowledge of the seamless solitude that accompanies one who is about to enter Hades. His divine companion has already left:

μακρὰν δὲ λείπεις ῥᾳδίως ὁμιλίαν... 

Yet how easily you leave our long friendship!

The final act of Hippolytus -- a verbal act (ἀφίημι - send away, divorce, excuse, let loose, release) -- exiles taint from his father, who has tainted himself by believing in the taint that Phaedra had cast upon his son. The casting out of taint is a gratuitous gesture that is not eros, but rather a kind of freeing, liberating of the father, an act whose authority and power inheres in its being the last intention of the dying son.

In working toward this moment, the playwright has taken pains to remove every trace of interest, desire, vengeance and reward from Hippolytus's last word. He is staging an unforced act that is ἁγνός, that is, pure, autonomous, good-willed:

ὦ χαῖρε καὶ σύ, χαῖρε πολλά μοι, πάτερ. 

I wish you, father, plenteous joy as well!

We could call it a godlike act, but performed in the moment of imminent death, it is beyond the reach of any Greek god. Instead of gaining immortality for the soul of Hippolytus, it is recognizable as pure by the fact of his human mortality, which in its bare finality stands as guarantor of its authority. The fully self-possessed act arrives in the loss of self...

Such autonomy exists outside the order of necessity and fate. It is purely Greek in the clarity of its refusal to hold out any compensatory reward -- some afterlife*, or diminution of purgation, or prospective sainthood, or a better seat in the paradisal choir -- nothing of the sort is here. Nor is there anything supernatural in what Hippolytus does; no miracle overturns the laws of nature.

In the Greek sense, the audience here are martyrs, witnesses to a gratuitous act that is senseless within the existing moral framework of its occurrence. They witness an autonomy unimaginable in the world of necessity, fate, and divine hatred.

Theseus, the hero of that world of active strength and cleverness, could never dream of anything like this clear-eyed act of Hippolytus. Now, untainted, he witnesses a man -- ἀνδρός -- who fills him with wonder, not unlike the mutual gaze of Achilles and Priam in Iliad 24. Glimpsed in that astonishment is the pure potency of a human act elsewhere not encountered by the much-traveled hero of Athens.

~~~~

*Though outside this discussion, it's suggestive that Ovid (Meta. 15) tells a tale of Hippolytus gaining a curious second life in Italy under the name Virbius (but this release from Hades also, by some legends, causes the death of Aesclepius).

Virbius