queen
or even a dead one but an Athenian, a daughter of a human woman and the divine North Wind, a mixed parenthood that rarely
did a child any good.
This Cleopatra lived in Thrace, as far north in the Greek world as Alexandria was south. She was a respectable granddaughter
of the founder of Athens, married, a mother, cast out by a barbarian husband and his new wife. Her fate was to watch the blinding
of her two sons – and then to die with them, of hunger and thirst, inside a cold, dark cave.
There were many plays from classical Athens that told of this Cleopatra. If anyone would have known exactly how many it would
have been one of the men who ruled the Ptolemies’ catalogues. Only here in the new Greece, on the delta of the Nile, could
a studious reader discover all the many ways in which King Phineus of Thrace had married, unmarried and remarried; and how
his second wife had blinded the children of the first with the sharp shuttles of her weaving loom.
Sophocles, the greatest dramatist of Athens, three times told this same tale of the trials faced by his heroine in a distant
wilderness, twisting the elements of the plot this way and that way in order to show the whole in all its horror. He also
used the story in a fourth play,
Antigone
, one of the rare plays that still survives, one of the best known of all Greek plays, the tragedy of a Theban princess, the
daughter of Oedipus, the noble daughter who defied the law to give her rebel brother a sacred burial banned by the state and
is condemned for that to a prison cave and death by starvation.
So we can still read about the ex-celebrity Cleopatra of Athens and Thrace. But, like so many classical subjects, we have
to see her though her likeness to someone else, the now famous Antigone of Thebes. The doomed Cleopatra of the North Wind
is one of the examples shown to Oedipus’s own doomed daughter by her chorus of sympathetic attendants. The message is that
many other royal women havestood, inevitably briefly, against inescapable fate. Antigone, starving in darkness for giving her brother a decent burial,
is supposed to be comforted by that.
It hardly seems a great deal of comfort. This most ancient Cleopatra, born in a cave of the winds, died under the earth where
there was no wind, no air and no children who could see her die. Sophocles’s heroine, facing the same fate, hears of her example
and knows that she is not alone – in past or future. That is how drama is deepened and widened – by reference to other names
and other stories, some of which we still know, many that we do not, the past that is forever now, the now that never stops.
Sophocles’s
Antigone
is incomplete. It is corrupt, as scholars term a text altered by the errors of scribes. But that has never much mattered.
The global inheritors of Greece have kept it as much for its argument as its poetry. It has been a good place for a lost Cleopatra
story to hide. A matter of chance perhaps, but then survival, even in the best-catalogued library, owes often much to chance.
Antigone
teaches moral argument. It shows the conflict between obedience to man’s laws and the requirement (higher or not?) to obey
the laws of the gods. In the classroom the decision of Antigone to die for her beliefs seems a wonderful thing, civics, politics,
a whiff of future hopes. Antigone is brave and right. She stands up to state power. She poses questions which are with us
still. Whose side are we on, the obstinate woman who sticks by her principles or the legitimate ruler who demands obedience
to himself?
As Brentwood schoolboys we most certainly were on Antigone’s side. Or we said we were. When we read
Antigone
with our teachers we always knew where we stood. In theory there was no contest. Of course, if a real choice like that been
ours, we would probably (no,certainly) have left the body unburied and obeyed the king. Sophocles understood that even if his young readers
or even a dead one but an Athenian, a daughter of a human woman and the divine North Wind, a mixed parenthood that rarely
did a child any good.
This Cleopatra lived in Thrace, as far north in the Greek world as Alexandria was south. She was a respectable granddaughter
of the founder of Athens, married, a mother, cast out by a barbarian husband and his new wife. Her fate was to watch the blinding
of her two sons – and then to die with them, of hunger and thirst, inside a cold, dark cave.
There were many plays from classical Athens that told of this Cleopatra. If anyone would have known exactly how many it would
have been one of the men who ruled the Ptolemies’ catalogues. Only here in the new Greece, on the delta of the Nile, could
a studious reader discover all the many ways in which King Phineus of Thrace had married, unmarried and remarried; and how
his second wife had blinded the children of the first with the sharp shuttles of her weaving loom.
Sophocles, the greatest dramatist of Athens, three times told this same tale of the trials faced by his heroine in a distant
wilderness, twisting the elements of the plot this way and that way in order to show the whole in all its horror. He also
used the story in a fourth play,
Antigone
, one of the rare plays that still survives, one of the best known of all Greek plays, the tragedy of a Theban princess, the
daughter of Oedipus, the noble daughter who defied the law to give her rebel brother a sacred burial banned by the state and
is condemned for that to a prison cave and death by starvation.
So we can still read about the ex-celebrity Cleopatra of Athens and Thrace. But, like so many classical subjects, we have
to see her though her likeness to someone else, the now famous Antigone of Thebes. The doomed Cleopatra of the North Wind
is one of the examples shown to Oedipus’s own doomed daughter by her chorus of sympathetic attendants. The message is that
many other royal women havestood, inevitably briefly, against inescapable fate. Antigone, starving in darkness for giving her brother a decent burial,
is supposed to be comforted by that.
It hardly seems a great deal of comfort. This most ancient Cleopatra, born in a cave of the winds, died under the earth where
there was no wind, no air and no children who could see her die. Sophocles’s heroine, facing the same fate, hears of her example
and knows that she is not alone – in past or future. That is how drama is deepened and widened – by reference to other names
and other stories, some of which we still know, many that we do not, the past that is forever now, the now that never stops.
Sophocles’s
Antigone
is incomplete. It is corrupt, as scholars term a text altered by the errors of scribes. But that has never much mattered.
The global inheritors of Greece have kept it as much for its argument as its poetry. It has been a good place for a lost Cleopatra
story to hide. A matter of chance perhaps, but then survival, even in the best-catalogued library, owes often much to chance.
Antigone
teaches moral argument. It shows the conflict between obedience to man’s laws and the requirement (higher or not?) to obey
the laws of the gods. In the classroom the decision of Antigone to die for her beliefs seems a wonderful thing, civics, politics,
a whiff of future hopes. Antigone is brave and right. She stands up to state power. She poses questions which are with us
still. Whose side are we on, the obstinate woman who sticks by her principles or the legitimate ruler who demands obedience
to himself?
As Brentwood schoolboys we most certainly were on Antigone’s side. Or we said we were. When we read
Antigone
with our teachers we always knew where we stood. In theory there was no contest. Of course, if a real choice like that been
ours, we would probably (no,certainly) have left the body unburied and obeyed the king. Sophocles understood that even if his young readers
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