grand central figure, standing out in bold relief against the darkness of the canvas—
"Death's purpose flashing in her face."[1]
'Antigone' has been said to be the poetry of what Socrates is the prose; that is, she is in fiction what he is in history—a martyr in the cause of truth. The death of both was as truly a martyrdom as that of any Christian who suffered for his faith in the persecutions of Nero or Diocletian. Both chose to obey God rather than man. Both appealed from the law of the land, and from the sentence of an earthly judge, to those laws which are "neither written on tablets nor proclaimed by heralds," but engraven in the heart of man. More than two thousand five hundred years have passed since the day when Antigone made her noble protest; but time has only justified her cause, and her voice still speaks to us across the lapse of years:—
"No ordinance of Man shall override
The settled laws of Nature and of God;
Not written these in pages of a book,
Nor were they framed to-day, nor yesterday;
We know not whence they are; but this we know,
That they from all eternity have been,
And shall to all eternity endure."[2]
It was outraged nature which made this appeal through the mouth of Antigone. Creon had, by his
- ↑ Conington's translation of Horace's "deliberata morte ferocior," applied to Cleopatra.
- ↑ Thompson's Sales Attici, 65.
