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
Antigone 2 - Greek Mythology Link
Creon 2 - Greek Mythology Link
Tiresias - Greek Mythology Link
Translations
Sophocles, Antigone, Perseus Tufts - Jebb Translation
The Internet Classics Archive - Antigone by Sophocles Jebb Translation
Antigone, by Sophocles, translated by Gilbert Murray Gutenberg
Antigone, by Sophocles, translated by Gilbert Murray Gutenberg
Tyrrell Translation [relatively faithful to original Greek]
http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/ant/ Tyrrell Translation
https---www.msu.edu-~tyrrell-antigone.pdf Tyrrell Translation
Structure
http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/ant/antigstruct.htm
Script Analysis 2010 - Final Plot Analysis for Antigone
http://goo.gl/LxaVJO
Script Analysis 2010 - Final Plot Analysis for Antigone
http://goo.gl/LxaVJO
Play Tyrrell Translation
1946 - Jean Anouilh, (modern French translation)
1994 - Hugh Lloyd-Jones, verse (Sophocles, Volume II: Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus, Loeb Classical Library No. 21, 1994; ISBN 978-0-674-99558-1)
Internet Archive Search antigone
Recapturing Sophocles' Antigone: Tyrrell, William Blake - Internet Archive
Sophocles; Peter Meineck; Paul Woodruff (2003). Theban Plays. Hackett Publishing. ISBN 1-60384-728-6.
Recapturing Sophocles' Antigone: Tyrrell, William Blake - Internet Archive
Sophocles; Peter Meineck; Paul Woodruff (2003). Theban Plays. Hackett Publishing. ISBN 1-60384-728-6.
Sophocles (2004). The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 978-1-55849-454-1.
Summaries
Summaries
Antigone Jean Anouilh
Sophocles
YouTube Films, TV and Audiomedia
Αντιγόνη (Antigone) (1961) - YouTube Irene Papas as Antigone Greek with English Subtitles
Juliet Stevenson as Antigone
Antigone by Sophocles (497 BC - 406 BC), translated by Francis Storr (1839 - 1919).
Antigone [Librivox Francis Storr translation]
Richard Seaford. (1990). The Imprisonment of Women in Greek Tragedy. The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 110, 76–90. https://doi.org/10.2307/631733 https://www.jstor.org/stable/631733
Academic Works and Papers
Ars tragica Sophoclea cum Shaksperiana Comparata by Lionel Horton-Smith
Review by: Chas. W. Bain
The Sewanee Review Vol. 5, No. 4 (Oct., 1897) , pp. 497-501
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27527958
David Stuttard (2 November 2017). Looking at Antigone. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-350-01712-2.
Assumptions and the creation of meaning: reading Sophocles' Antigone
Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood
The Journal of Hellenic Studies
Year: 1989 Volume: 109 Start page:134
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/632037
The Family in Sophocles' "Antigone" and "Electra"
Christina Elliott Sorum
The Classical World
Vol. 75, No. 4 (Mar. - Apr., 1982), pp. 201-211
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4349362
Tragédie et dramaturgie: les ambiguïtés dans l'Antigone d'Anouilh
Andrew Hunwick
Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France
96e Année, No. 2 (Mar. - Apr., 1996), pp. 290-312
Paul Allen Miller
Phoenix
Vol. 61, No. 1/2 (Spring - Summer, 2007), pp. 1-14
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20304635
Hegel's interpretation of Antigone
Sophocles's Enemy Sisters: Antigone and Ismene
Wm. Blake Tyrrell and Larry J. Bennett
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture
Vol. 15/16, (2008-2009), pp. 1-18
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41925300
The Two Burials in Antigone
W. H. D. Rouse
The Classical Review
Vol. 25, No. 2 (Mar., 1911), pp. 40-42
http://www.jstor.org/stable/694563
The Death of Antigone
Joseph S. Margon
California Studies in Classical Antiquity
Vol. 3, (1970), pp. 177-183
Dionysos and Katharsis in "Antigone"
Scott Scullion
Classical Antiquity Vol. 17, No. 1 (Apr., 1998), pp. 96-122
Published by: University of California Press
DOI: 10.2307/25011075
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25011075
Scott Scullion
Classical Antiquity Vol. 17, No. 1 (Apr., 1998), pp. 96-122
Published by: University of California Press
DOI: 10.2307/25011075
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25011075
Sophocles the Unphilosophical. A Study in the "Antigone"
D. A. Hester
Mnemosyne
Fourth Series, Vol. 24, Fasc. 1 (1971), pp. 11-59
Judith Butler; (2013). Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-51804-8.
Kopff, E. (1976). Thomas Magister and the Text of Sophocles' Antigone. Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), 106, 241-266. doi:10.2307/284102 https://www.jstor.org/stable/284102
Kopff, E. (1976). Thomas Magister and the Text of Sophocles' Antigone. Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), 106, 241-266. doi:10.2307/284102 https://www.jstor.org/stable/284102
Wm. Blake Tyrrell and Larry J. Bennett
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture
Vol. 15/16, (2008-2009), pp. 1-18
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41925300
Antigone's Final Speech (Sophocles, Antigone 891–928)
Martin Cropp
Year: 1997 Volume: 44 Start page:137
Greece & Rome (Second Series)
Antigone's Laments, Creon's Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception
Bonnie Honig
Political Theory
Vol. 37, No. 1 (Feb., 2009), pp. 5-43
W. H. D. Rouse
The Classical Review
Vol. 25, No. 2 (Mar., 1911), pp. 40-42
http://www.jstor.org/stable/694563
Rosanna Lauriola
Hermes
135. Jahrg., H. 4 (2007), pp. 389-405
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40379138
Was Antigone Murdered? - Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies
Protagonist in Antigone
A Point in the Interpretation of the Antigone of Sophocles Charles Knapp
The Antigone of Sophocles in Greek and English
Pierre Simon Ballanche (1814). Antigone. pp. 3–.
Jean Rotrou (1820). Antigone. Les captifs, ou Les esclaves. Crisante. Iphigénie en Aulide. Clarice, ou L'amour constant. Bélisaire. Célie, ou Le vice-roi de Naples. La soeur. Variantes sur Crisante. T. Desoer. pp. 1–.
Antigone (2013)
Sophocles
2.Antigone (Scene 1 & Ode 1) by Sophocles3.Antigone (Scene 2 & Ode 2) by Sophocles
4.Antigone (Scene 3 & Ode 3) by Sophocles
5.Antigone (Scene 4 & Ode 4) by Sophocles
6.Antigone (Scene 5) by Sophocles
7.Antigone (Paean & Exodos) by Sophocles
Heroism in Sophocles’s Antigone
Willow Verkerk
Philosophy and Literature
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Kirkpatrick, J.
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Fletcher, J.
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Roisman, J.
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Porter, J.; Cousland, J.R.C.; Hume, J.R.
Mnemosyne, bibliotheca classica Batava. Supplementum. VOL 314, ; 2009, 335-344 -- E. J. BRILL -- 2009
COLEMAN, ROBERT. “THE ROLE OF THE CHORUS IN SOPHOCLES’ ‘ANTIGONE.’” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, no. 18 (198), 1972, pp. 4–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44698780.
COLEMAN, ROBERT. “THE ROLE OF THE CHORUS IN SOPHOCLES’ ‘ANTIGONE.’” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, no. 18 (198), 1972, pp. 4–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44698780.
Howenstein, M. S.
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Burns, T.
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Haines, S.
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Macedo, J.M.
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McNeill, D.
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Spangler, M.
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Miola, Robert S.
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Miola, R. S.
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Winship, G.
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Female Control of Funeral Rites in Greek Tragedy: Klytaimestra, Medea, and Antigone
Kerri J. Hame
Classical Philology
Vol. 103, No. 1 (January 2008), pp. 1-15
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/590091
Female Control of Funeral Rites in Greek Tragedy: Klytaimestra, Medea, and Antigone
Kerri J. Hame
Classical Philology
Vol. 103, No. 1 (January 2008), pp. 1-15
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/590091
Joan V. O'Brien (1978). Guide to Sophocles' Antigone: A Student Edition with Commentary, Grammatical Notes, & Vocabulary. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-0779-1.
Sophocles (2007). Antigone. Richer Resources Publications. ISBN 978-0-9797571-0-5.
Greek Ideas as to the Effect of Burial on the Future of the Soul
Frank B. Tarbell
Transactions of the American Philological Association (1869-1896)
Vol. 15 (1884), pp. 36-45
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935798
Rachel Kitzinger (2008). The Choruses of Sophokles' Antigone and Philoktetes: Dance of Words. BRILL. pp. 11–. ISBN 978-90-474-3286-9.
Greek Ideas as to the Effect of Burial on the Future of the Soul
Frank B. Tarbell
Transactions of the American Philological Association (1869-1896)
Vol. 15 (1884), pp. 36-45
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2935798
Rachel Kitzinger (2008). The Choruses of Sophokles' Antigone and Philoktetes: Dance of Words. BRILL. pp. 11–. ISBN 978-90-474-3286-9.
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
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