Chorus
Whoever craves the longer length of life, not content to desire a moderate span, him I will judge with no uncertainty: he clings to folly. For the long years lay in deposit many things nearer to pain than joy; but as for your delights, you will find them nowhere, when someone’s life has fallen beyond the fitting period. The Helper comes at last to all alike, when the fate of Hades is suddenly revealed, without marriage-song, or lyre, or dance: Death at the end.
Chorus
Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came. For when he has seen youth go by, with its easy merry-making, what hard affliction is foreign to him, what suffering does he not know? Envy, factions, strife, battles, and murders. Last of all falls to his lot old age, blamed, weak, unsociable, friendless, wherein dwells every misery among miseries.
Chorus
In such years is this poor man here, not I alone. Like some cape that fronts the north which is lashed on every side by the waves of winter, so he also is fiercely lashed evermore by the dread disasters that break on him like the surf, some from the region of the setting sun, some from that of its rising, some in the realm of its noon-time rays, some from the gloom-wrapped hills of the North.
Antigone Look, the stranger, it seems, is coming here to us. Yes, without attendants, father, with tears streaming from his eyes.
Oedipus Who is he?
Antigone The very man who was in our thoughts from the first. Polyneices has come to us.
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