Ismene now enters, in obedience to a summons from Creon. She does not defend herself against his charge of having been an accomplice in the deed, but only piteously entreats that she may be allowed to share her sister's fate. But Antigone at once rejects her offer. "You have chosen life," she says (almost in the last words of Socrates to his judges), "but I have chosen death,"—
"Thou dost live. My soul long since
Hath died to render service to the dead."
Creon cuts short their dialogue by bidding his guards lead them both within the palace.
The Chorus mourn, in the strain which follows, over the doom of ancestral guilt—the sorrows upon sorrows which have extinguished the last faint gleam of light which had shone upon the house of Labdacus. Bright delusive hopes, high aspirations, mortal day-dreams, the glory of man and the pride of life—what are they, compared with the resistless decree of Zeus?
"A potentate through time, which grows not old."
"Shall judgment be less strong than sin?
Shall man o'er Jove dominion win?
No! Sleep beneath his leaden sway
May hold but things that know decay;
The unwearied months with godlike vigour move,
Schlegel gives more thoroughly the force of the two Greek verbs;—
"Nicht mitzuhassan, mitzulieben bin ich da."
