Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none
More wonderful than man.

These lines are from the famous “Ode to Man” in the first stasimon (choral ode) of Sophocles’ tragedy *Antigone* (5th century BCE). After Creon has proclaimed that Polyneices must remain unburied and a sentry reports that someone has performed burial rites anyway, the Chorus reflects on the astonishing powers of human beings—our ingenuity, mastery of nature, and civic arts—while also hinting at the moral limits of that power. The ode functions as a thematic hinge in the play, preparing the audience to judge how human law, divine law, and human cleverness can collide in the conflict between Creon and Antigone.

The Chorus marvels at humanity as the most “wonderful” (or, in many translations, the most “strange/terrible”) of all things: humans tame animals, cross seas, cultivate the earth, and build political life through speech and law. Yet the praise is double-edged. The same capacities that make humans admirable also make them dangerous when unmoored from justice and reverence for higher law. In *Antigone*, this ambivalence points toward Creon’s tragic error: he treats his decree as supreme, trusting in human authority and rational control, but the play shows that human greatness becomes ruinous when it denies the divine and ethical constraints that should govern it.

1) “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.”
2) “Many are the wonders, but nothing walks stranger than man.”
3) “There are many strange and wonderful things, but nothing more strangely wonderful than man.”