As Sophocles has shown us in that great drama which some not without reason consider the supremest excellence of Greek tragedy, the heroism of Antigone carries her to heights of dauntless strength in this cause of divine charity. To scatter a few handfuls of dust upon her brother’s body which lies unburied on the Theban plain, she gladly lays down her own life, she flouts the man-made law of a weak and odious tyrant, resisting him to his very face, calmly as in stern duty bound without vaunt or show of audacity, appealing against the petty and precisian tribunals of a day to the eternal judgement-seat of powers more ancient and more awful than the throne of Zeus himself, casting away her plighted troth to Hæmon as though it were a trifle, and less than a trifle of no account, going gladly and serenely to her tragic doom. This contempt of human ordinances, this icy despising of human passions, of love itself, give the figure of Antigone something statuesque, something superbly cold in the very loveliness of her nobility, and remind us, although in her utter detachment even she, the purest Greek maiden, is far far below the Spanish mystic, of S. Teresa, who in pages that are chilly as ice, yet glow like fire, descants upon the nullity of human affections and the inflexible demand of the eternal law. So in the grand yet hard enthusiasm of Antigone there is no room for sentiment. The only touches which might seem some concession to human weakness but serve to make the absence of romantic sympathies more notable and more terrible. In a passage of the Kommos she bewails her own virgin knot untied, yet she has no more than some six words to throw away upon her betrothed: ὦ φίλταθ᾿ Αἷμον, ὧς σ`ἀτιμάζει πατήρ.
When we consider the steadfastness and inflexible purity of her purpose we shall to some extent realise how tremendous was the ideal that inspired her, and we are able to appreciate what price it seemed fitting to a Greek should be paid for the just and ritual performance of the last duties to the dead.
Pausanian tells us that Lysander’s honour was for ever smirched, not because he put to death certain prisoners of war, but because “he did not even throw handfulls of earth upon their dead bodies.”[9] It will be remarked that to the ancient Greek even this symbolism of inhumation sufficed, if
