threatens to slay himself if his bride is killed.  Antigone is immured, but at last, moved by the advice of the Chorus and the dire predictions of the seer Tiresias, Creon changes his mind and hastens with men and tools to liberate the virgin.  When he arrives at the tomb he sees his son in it, clinging to the corpse of Antigone, who had hanged herself.  Horrified, the king begs his son to come out of the tomb, but Haemon seizes his sword and rushes forward to slay his father.  The king escapes the danger by flight, whereupon Haemon thrusts the sword into his own body, and expires, clasping the corpse of his bride.

If we thus make Haemon practically the central figure of the tragedy, it resembles a romantic love-story; but in reality Haemon is little more than an episode.  He has a quarrel with his father (who goes so far as to threaten to kill his bride in his presence), rushes off in a rage, and the tomb scene is not enacted, but merely related by a messenger, in forty lines out of a total of thirteen hundred and fifty.  Much less still have we here a story of romantic love.  Not one of the fourteen ingredients of love can be found in it except self-sacrifice, and that not of the right kind.  I need not explain once more that suicide from grief over a lost bride does not benefit that bride; that it is not altruistic, but selfish, unmanly, and cowardly, and is therefore no test whatever of love.  Moreover, if we examine the dialogue in detail we see that the motive of Haemon’s suicide is not even grief over his lost bride, but rage at his father.  When on first confronting Creon, he is thus accosted:  “Have you heard the sentence pronounced on your bride?” He answers meekly:  “I have, my father, and I yield to your superior wisdom, which no marriage can equal in excellence;” and it is only gradually that his ire is aroused by his father’s abusive attitude; while at the end his first intention was to slay his father, not himself.  Had Sophocles understood love as we understand it, he would have represented Haemon as drawing his sword at once and moving heaven and earth to prevent his bride from being buried alive.

But it is in examining the attitude of Antigone that we realize most vividly how short this drama falls of being a love-story.  She never even mentions Haemon, has no thought of him, but is entirely absorbed in the idea of benefiting the spirit of her dead brother by performing the forbidden funeral rites.  As if to remove all doubt on that point, she furthermore tells us explicitly (lines 904-912) that she would have never done such a deed, in defiance of the law, to save a husband or a child, but only for a brother; and why? because she might easily find another husband, and have new children by him, but another brother she could never have, as her parents were dead.[303]

WOMAN AND LOVE IN EURIPIDES