Antigone

Two brothers have killed each other at the gates of Thebes. The new king decrees that one, who defended the city, will be buried with honour; the other, who attacked it, will be left to rot, food for dogs and birds, and anyone who buries him will be put to death. Their sister buries him anyway.

Antigone is the first great drama of civil disobedience, and one of the most argued-about works ever written: conscience against the state, divine law against human law, family against city, a young woman against a powerful man. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called it “one of the most sublime and in every respect most excellent works of art of all time”, and read it as the collision of two rights. It has been staged in every century since as a play about resistance — under the Nazis, under apartheid, in the age of terrorism.

Background

After Oedipus discovered his crimes and left Thebes (see Oedipus the King), his two sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, agreed to rule in alternate years. Eteocles refused to give up the throne; Polyneices, exiled, raised an army in Argos — the “Seven against Thebes” — and attacked the city. The attack failed, but the two brothers killed each other in single combat at the seventh gate. Their uncle Creon, Jocasta’s brother, became king.

Sophocles wrote Antigone around 441 BCE, more than a decade before Oedipus the King; the “Theban plays” were not composed as a sequence.

Synopsis

At dawn, after the night the Argive army fled, Antigone brings her sister Ismene outside the palace to tell her the news: Creon has decreed that Eteocles shall be buried with all honours, but that Polyneices, the traitor, shall be left unburied and unmourned, and that anyone who disobeys will be stoned to death. Antigone will bury him. Will Ismene help? Ismene is horrified: they are women, weak, subject to the stronger; they have already lost father, mother and brothers; she will obey those in power. Antigone turns on her with contempt: “I will bury him myself. It will be good to die doing this… I shall lie with him, loved one with loved one, a holy criminal. I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living.” Ismene urges her at least to keep it secret; Antigone tells her to shout it from the rooftops.

The chorus of Theban elders sings of the victory over the Argives. Creon enters and delivers his inaugural speech: no man can be known until he has been tested in power; whoever puts friend above fatherland is worthless; the city is the ship on which we all sail, and only on it can we have friends. Eteocles, who died for the city, will be honoured; Polyneices, who came to burn it, will be left unburied as a lesson.

A guard arrives, terrified, with comic reluctance: someone has sprinkled dust on the corpse and performed the rites, leaving no trace. Creon suspects bribery and threatens the guards with death unless they find the culprit. The chorus sings the great ode to man: “Many things are wonderful, but nothing more wonderful than man” — he crosses the stormy sea, ploughs the earth, snares birds and beasts, has taught himself speech and thought and the temper of the city; he has a remedy for everything except death. But his cleverness can lead to evil as well as good; honoured is the one who keeps the laws of the land and the justice sworn by the gods.

The guard returns, dragging Antigone. They had cleared the dust from the rotting body and sat upwind on a hill; at noon a whirlwind came; when it passed, there was the girl, crying out like a bird over an empty nest, pouring libations and heaping dust. Creon asks her if she knew of his decree. She did — and broke it deliberately:

It was not Zeus who published this decree, nor Justice who lives with the gods below… nor did I think your decrees so strong that you, a mortal, could override the unwritten and unfailing laws of the gods. They are not of today or yesterday; they live forever, and no one knows when they first appeared.

She would rather die than leave her mother’s son unburied; if she seems foolish to Creon, perhaps it is a fool who judges her foolish. Creon is outraged — by a woman’s defiance most of all: “I am no man, she is the man, if she can do this and go unpunished.” He condemns her — and, suspecting Ismene, has her brought too. Ismene, now willing, claims a share in the deed; Antigone refuses to let her die for what she did not do: “You chose to live, and I to die.” Ismene asks Creon how he can kill his own son’s bride — Antigone is engaged to Creon’s son Haemon. “There are other fields for him to plough,” says Creon.

Haemon comes to his father. He begins respectfully, then reports what the city is whispering: everyone thinks Antigone deserves not death but a golden crown. He urges his father to listen: a wise man bends, like trees in a flood that bend and are saved, while the stiff are torn up by the roots. Creon is enraged that a young man should teach him, and that his son is “the slave of a woman”. “Is the city not held to be the ruler’s?” “You would rule a desert beautifully alone.” Haemon leaves, saying Creon will never see his face again. Creon decides to spare Ismene, but Antigone will be walled up alive in a rock-cut tomb with a little food, so the city will not be polluted by her death.

Antigone is led away to her living tomb. In a long lament with the chorus, she mourns that she will die unmarried, without bridal song; she compares herself to Niobe turned to stone. In a famous and controversial passage, she says that she would not have done this for a husband or a child — another husband or child could be found — but since her parents are dead, no other brother could ever be born to her. (Goethe wished the passage were spurious; many scholars now defend it.) Creon orders her taken away.

The blind prophet Tiresias comes to Creon. The birds are shrieking and tearing each other; the sacrifices will not burn; the altars are polluted by dogs and birds that have fed on Polyneices’s corpse. Creon has erred — he has put the living in a tomb and kept the dead from one. “Yield to the dead; do not stab the fallen.” Creon accuses him of being bribed. Tiresias, angered, prophesies: before long Creon will pay corpse for corpse, with one of his own blood; the Furies are lying in wait for him.

Creon is shaken. The chorus urges him to free Antigone and bury Polyneices. He yields at last: “It is hard, but I will give up my resolve.” He rushes out with his men.

A messenger reports what happened. They first buried Polyneices with full rites. Then they went to Antigone’s tomb, and heard Haemon’s voice wailing inside. At the back of the vault they found Antigone hanged by the neck in a noose made from her veil, and Haemon clinging to her waist, mourning his bride. Creon called to his son; Haemon looked at him with wild eyes, spat in his face, drew his sword — lunged at his father and missed — and then, in anger against himself, drove the sword into his own side, and, dying, embraced Antigone, “lying corpse with corpse, having won his marriage rites, poor boy, in the house of Death”.

Creon’s wife Eurydice, who has listened silently, goes back into the palace. Creon enters carrying his son’s body, lamenting his own folly: “My own blind will has killed you.” A messenger brings the final blow: Eurydice has stabbed herself at the altar, cursing her husband with her last breath as the killer of her sons. Creon, broken, begs to be led away: “Lead me away, a rash, useless man, who killed you, my son, unwillingly — and you, my wife… Everything in my hands is twisted.” The chorus closes: “Wisdom is by far the greatest part of happiness… Great words of the proud are paid for with great blows, and in old age they teach wisdom.”

Characters

• Antigone — daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta; fierce, uncompromising, devoted to the dead and to the gods’ laws.
• Ismene — her sister; cautious, conventional, loving; she chooses to live.
• Creon — the new king; a ruler who believes in order, law, and the city above all; rigid, proud, increasingly tyrannical.
• Haemon — Creon’s son, engaged to Antigone; the voice of the city and of reasonable compromise.
• Tiresias — the blind prophet, who sees the gods’ anger.
• Eurydice — Creon’s wife, who speaks only a few lines and dies cursing him.
• The Guard — the play’s comic, self-interested everyman.
• The Chorus — elders of Thebes, cautious, wavering.

Themes

Divine law and human law

Antigone appeals to the “unwritten and unfailing laws of the gods” (agrapta nomima) — that the dead must be buried, that kin must be honoured. Creon appeals to the law of the city, without which there is anarchy. This is the play’s central conflict and the ancestor of every debate about natural law versus positive law, conscience versus the state — and of Thomas Aquinas‘s claim that “an unjust law is no law at all”. See Morality and Power.

Family and city

Antigone belongs to the private world of the household (oikos), the family and its dead; Creon to the public world of the city (polis). Hegel saw in this the deepest tension of Greek ethical life: family piety and citizenship, the “divine law” of women and the dead and the “human law” of men and the state.

Two unbending wills

Both protagonists are rigid. Antigone will not compromise and scorns her sister; Creon will not listen to his son or the prophet until it is too late. Haemon’s image of the trees that bend in the flood and survive, and those that resist and are uprooted, applies to both. Is Antigone a heroine of conscience or, like Creon, a fanatic?

Gender

Creon is obsessed with being defeated by a woman: “while I live, no woman shall rule me.” Antigone, acting in public, defies the gender order of Athens. Feminist philosophers — Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler (Antigone’s Claim, 2000) — have made her central to theories of kinship, law and gender.

The ode to man

The chorus’s hymn to human ingenuity, sung just after Antigone’s first, secret burial, celebrates everything humanity can master — except death; and warns that cleverness can lead to evil. Placed in this play, it asks whether Creon’s state-building reason or Antigone’s reverence for the dead is the true wisdom. Heidegger’s reading of the word deinon (“wonderful/terrible”, “uncanny”) in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) made it one of the most discussed passages in philosophy.

Interpretations

• Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit and Aesthetics): the collision of two equally justified ethical powers — family and state — each one-sided; tragedy is the destruction of their one-sidedness. “Both are right; both are wrong.”
• Kierkegaard (Either/Or): a modern Antigone, who would carry her father’s secret guilt within her.
• Goethe: disliked Antigone’s speech ranking a brother above a husband or child.
• Lacan (Seminar VII, 1960): Antigone as the figure of pure desire, who goes beyond the limit.
• Martha Nussbaum (The Fragility of Goodness, 1986): both Creon and Antigone simplify ethical life to escape conflict; the play teaches that genuine values can conflict irreconcilably.
• Political readings: Anouilh’s Antigone (Paris, 1944, under occupation); Brecht’s (1948, after the Nazis); Athol Fugard’s The Island (1973), performed by prisoners on Robben Island; Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017), about a British Muslim family and a brother who joined ISIS.

Lines to carry

• “I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living.”
• “Many things are wonderful, but nothing more wonderful than man.”
• “The unwritten and unfailing laws of the gods… not of today or yesterday; they live forever.”
• “I was born to join in love, not hate.” — Antigone (synechthein, symphilein)
• “You would rule a desert beautifully alone.” — Haemon
• “Great words of the proud are paid for with great blows.” — the Chorus

Using Antigone in conversation

• On civil disobedience: the unwritten laws above the king’s decree — from Antigone to Martin Luther King Jr.
• On rigidity: Haemon’s trees in the flood — bend or be uprooted.
• On leadership: Creon, who mistook obedience for order.
• On tragic conflict: Hegel’s “right against right” — when both sides have a genuine claim.