at his best in the play Oedipus at Colonus, but that is a strange and wonderful place. The play centres on a holy
wood near Colonus, where Sophocles was born. In that wood the gods grant Oedipus his death; beyond it he
vanishes. Theseus, who accepted him, tells us that the grave where Oedipus is buried, in a place no man knows,
will have an infallible protective power between Athens and its borders. A great deal is made of the trees
themselves, the wood is almost a character.
Come praise Colonus' horses, and come praise
The wine-dark of the wood's intricacies,
The nightingale that deafens daylight there,
If daylight ever visit where,
Unvisited by tempest or by sun,
Immortal ladies tread the ground
Dizzy with harmonious sound,
Semele's lad a gay companion.Yeats has transformed his original, but not without tact, and much less wildly than most translations. His trees are
splendid.
... The self-sown, self-begotten shape that gives
Athenian intellect its mastery,
Even the grey-leaved olive tree
Miracle-bred out of the living stone;
Nor accident of peace nor war
Shall wither that old marvel, for
The great grey-eyed Athene stares thereon.What Sophocles stresses, and -what means less to a modern audience, is that Athenian olive trees have no rival in
Asia or in southern Greece, and that no enemy can destroy them. But when this play was produced the Spartans
and their allies were all round the walls of Athens; they were visible, very close to the sacred wood of Colonus.
Sophocles was dead by then, the play was posthumous. And of course the trees were cut down in the end.
He is supposed to have written about forty-one series of three plays, won competitions twenty-four times, and
never come lower than second place. He said of himself that his early style was full of Aeschylean grandeur, his
second period developed a style of his own, which he came to feel was artificial and without sweetness, but his last
period was suppler, better fitted to individual characters. No plays of his first twenty-five years in the theatre
survived; in the Ajax, and a few years later in the Antigone (probably 441 B.C.), he was already moving into his
final mastery.
In a way the Antigone is also the tragedy of Creon. Because Antigone insists after the Theban civil war on more
than one attempt to bury her brother, which in Greek feeling and in the speeches that Sophocles provides was her
absolute natural duty, the tyrant Creon condemns her to death. His own destruction begins from that moment, and
the end of the play is like an avalanche. It is not that we underestimate Creon; the thrilling figure of Antigone
belongs to a world of absolutes and consequences no political man could be at home in; Sophocles had little
sympathy with any other. If there was one supreme hour in the fifth century B.C., perhaps it was that of the
Antigone of Sophocles, which was composed while the Parthenon was being built.
Euripides