Creon: "Never the same rights or treatment for a traitor as for a patriot!"
Teiresias: "How precious, above all wealth, is good counsel."
Antigone is perhaps the most classical of the Greek tragedies or
goat-songs. It is certainly one of the most famous. It is not just, however, the story of the tragedy of Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, but it is also king Creon's tragedy as well. Both are tragic figures; both stubbornly believe they are right; both believe they have rights; but these
rights are
antagonistic [perhaps a pun was deliberately intended by Sophocles in Ancient Greek with the name of the play], and completely incompatible and contradictory with and to each other, and therein lies the unfolding of the tragedy. Once king Creon has announced his edict and Antigone has actually defied it, the tragedy is set in motion. It is played out like a game of chess on the stage, fatalistically and deterministically leading to the trial and sentence of Antigone, her execution and subsequent suicide, followed by the suicide of Haemon, son of Creon, and betrothed to Antigone, and the suicide of Euridyce, queen and wife to Creon, and then the censure, and impeachment of Creon by the gods, placing huge psychological stress upon him, unfit to rule anymore this leads him to be banished both by the elders and by his own personal choice from Thebes and sent into exile. Indeed the characters have choices at every point in the unfolding of the play, indeed they are advised at every point in every scene to make the
right choice: Ismene, sister of Antigone advises her to be moderate, Haemon directly tells Creon he is wrong, Tiresias, the blind prophet advises king Creon to apologise fully and make sacrifices to the gods. But both ignore these. Therein they are fated.
Antigone is a political play. Antigone represents the struggle of individual and human rights versus those of the state. She represents honour. The play is about the right of everyone to be able to enjoy religious freedom, the freedom to practice their religion without interference from the state. It is about the kinds of freedom that an individual should enjoy even in the most extreme of circumstances. Antigone finds partisans in modern society because of this. She is their heroine: Creon is seen as an undemocratic, unsympathetic autocrat. Besides what right anyway does he have to rule, to be king of Thebes? Has he usurped the throne? Or was Greece a patriarchal society in which women could not succeed to the throne? Perhaps it was. Why isn't either Antigone or her sister Ismene queen and ruler of Thebes after the death of their brothers? Those latter questions aside what rights as a ruler does Creon have? Does he enjoy a divine right as king to rule. When making and before promulgating the decree that he did, did he sufficiently consult the elders of the city [the chorus], his council and parliament? Does law by decree override those of the freedoms of ancient family custom and religion? And why do the gods ultimately support individual freedom? Or do they? These are the constitutional questions that Antigone raises. Antigone is a thinking person's play, a parable It was play in which Sophocles asks his audience to think about their democratic rights and responsibilities and to think about the importance of their customs and religion, all in the manner as a good play should do.
Oedipus' dysfunctional family is cursed. Thebes, the tragic city, is cursed because its royal family are all relatives or direct descendants of Oedipus, and Thebes and its royal family must consequently suffer the fate given to it by the gods. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons and daughters.
Antigone is often described as a feminist heroine, as she stands up in the play against the dominant male authority in the person of Creon, but this is a mistaken interpretation. She is simply a woman who stubbornly believes that it is her sisterly duty to bury her brother with the proper rites no matter that in the eyes of the state he was a traitor and had allied himself with Thebes' arch-enemies, and that his proper burial had been explicitly forbidden by decree by Creon, her uncle the king. Indeed Greek women of her time were expected to fulfill this duty of formal burial for members of their family, and to perform the necessary rites. In the time of Ancient Greece, if the dead did not receive their funeral rites, their souls would wander the earth forever thereafter. Every member of the audience in 5th century bc in Greece would have immediately understood and have sympathised with this duty that Antigone insisted that she had.
The tragic dramas of ancient Athens were political in nature, and related to the rise of democracy in that society. Antigone is one of the more renowned plays of that time. The central question in this play: is loyalty to one's family more important than loyalty to the city state? Indeed does the state have any right at all to interfere in family matters? What are the limits to the power of the state?
Another big question in this play, whose tragedy is it? Is it a tragedy about Antigone herself, or Creon, who has more stage time, and who suffers just as much being cursed by a prophet and at the hands of the gods with loss of his own family, his wife and son at the end of the play?
Additional matters and questions
Sophocles in this play and in his Electra describes in some detail about the burial practice and rituals in 5th century Athens.
The endings and tragedies in Shaespeare's Romeo And Juliet and Sophocles' Antigone are in several ways strikingly similar. Was Shakespeare influenced by Sophocles?
The role of the gods, fate and the blind prophet [Tiresias] in Greek drama.
References
Tyrrell Translation [relatively faithful to original Greek]
Structure
Play Tyrrell Translation
1904 - Richard C. Jebb
, prose: full text
1938 - Dudley Fitts
and Robert Fitzgerald
, verse: full text
1946 - Jean Anouilh, (modern French translation)
Antigone Jean Anouilh
Sophocles
YouTube Films, TV and Audiomedia
Juliet Stevenson as Antigone
Antigone by Sophocles (497 BC - 406 BC), translated by Francis Storr (1839 - 1919).
Antigone [Librivox Francis Storr translation]
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Assumptions and the creation of meaning: reading Sophocles' Antigone
Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood
The Journal of Hellenic Studies
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The Family in Sophocles' "Antigone" and "Electra"
Christina Elliott Sorum
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Andrew Hunwick
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Scott Scullion
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Bonnie Honig
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Articles in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies
Was Antigone Murdered?
William M. Calder III
A Reconstruction of Sophocles’ Polyxena
William M. Calder III
Sophokles’ Political Tragedy, Antigone
William M. Calder III
An Alternative Date for Sophocles’ Antigone
R. G. Lewis
The Revolt of Images: Mutual Guilt in the Parodos of Sophokles’ Antigone
Johan Tralau
