“O Love, our conqueror, matchless in might, Thou prevailest, O Love, thou dividest the prey: In damask cheeks of a maiden Thy watch through the night is set. Thou roamest over the sea; On the hills, in the shepherd’s huts, thou art; Nor of deathless gods, nor of shortlived men, From thy madness any escapeth. ANTISTROPHE “Unjust, through thee, are the thoughts of the just; Thou dost bend them, O Love, to thy will, to thy spite. Unkindly strife thou hast kindled, This wrangling of son with sire. For great laws, throned in the heart, To the sway of a rival power give place, To the love-light flashed from a fair bride’s eyes: In her triumph laughs Aphrodite. Me, even now, me also, Seeing these things, a sudden pity Beyond all governance transports: The fountains of my tears I can refrain no more, Seeing Antigone here to the bridal chamber Come, to the all-receiving chamber of Death.” In this ode we have the Greek tragic view of the passion of Love, as the destroyer and distractor of man’s peace and sanity. Love is one of the means whereby tragic fate fulfils its purposes of vengeance. The circumstances of this particular case are these: Of Antigone’s two brothers one had marched against his native city, and the other had taken arms in its defence. Both had fallen on the field of battle. Creon, the city’s tyrant, forbade any one, under pain of death, to give burial to the slain enemy. In this, of course, he was violating one of the most sacred laws of Greek religion. Now Antigone was betrothed to Creon’s own son, Hæmon; nevertheless her duty was to brave the tyrant’s decree and give the honours of formal burial to her dead brother. She did so. Creon thereupon pronounced her doom, and Hæmon in his despair slew himself upon the tomb in which she was immured. The whole story is but an episode in the doom of the house of Œdipus, father of Antigone. The Greek view of Love, then, is the antithesis of the romantic view of it. Where Love conflicts with duty it must be rigorously suppressed, as a source of folly, weakness, and wickedness. So much is this the case that Sophocles puts into the mouth of Antigone words which he had probably borrowed from Herodotus, and which give a view of the Great Passion so painfully unromantic that the modern commentator, who for all his prosiness is a thoroughly romantic person, is tempted to use the shears by which he commonly cuts his knots and call it an interpolation. “My duty,” says Antigone, “is to my brother first. You speak of my duty to my future husband, and my future children. I reply that a brother is more than a husband or children; _they can be replaced, a brother cannot_.”