Antigone
by Sophocles · Ἀντιγόνη
Assigned by 7 of the 9 reading lists
- Written
- c. 441 BCE
- Form
- Tragedy
- Language
- Greek
- Length
- Short · 60 ppunder 120 pages
- Difficulty
- Moderate2 of 5 for a first-year reader
We recommendThe Three Theban Plays, translated by Robert FaglesPenguin Classics, 1984Vivid and speakable, with Bernard Knox's introductions; the edition most courses assign.
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Oedipus' two sons have killed each other in the fighting over Thebes, and the new king Creon rules that the defender Eteocles be buried with honours while the attacker Polynices is left for the dogs and birds. Antigone, sister to both, refuses. She buries the body, is caught, and tells Creon to his face that his edict cannot override the unwritten laws of the gods. He walls her up alive in a cave. His son Haemon, who is engaged to her, and the prophet Tiresias both warn him and fail, and by the time he relents Antigone has hanged herself. Haemon and Creon's wife Eurydice kill themselves too, and Creon survives with nothing.
Why it's on the list
This is the play that put conscience against the state and refused to make it easy. Hegel read it as the collision of two partial rights, family against city, each valid and each blind, and that reading has shaped two centuries of argument about civil disobedience, natural law and the claims a political order can make on a person. Antigone herself has been claimed by nationalists under occupation, by opponents of dictatorship in Latin America and South Africa, by feminist philosophers reading her as the figure the political order cannot digest, and by anyone who has had to bury someone a government did not want buried. Programs assign it because it is short, ferocious and genuinely undecided: the play gives its heroine the better argument and shows her to be frightening, and gives Creon the worse argument and lets him be almost reasonable for a while.
Key themes
- Justice
- Two kinds of law are set against each other, the decree of a ruler in a crisis and the unwritten obligations that Antigone says are older than any decree and have no known beginning.
- Power and authority
- Creon's first speech is a plausible account of civic duty. What destroys him is his inability to be contradicted, especially by a woman and by his own son.
- Family and inheritance
- Antigone's obligation is to a brother's corpse, and she argues that a brother is irreplaceable in a way a husband or child would not be, which is the most disturbing speech she makes.
- Women and men
- Creon repeatedly frames the conflict as a question of being ruled by a woman, and Ismene's cautious sisterhood shows what compliance looked like as an alternative.
- God and faith
- Burial is a religious duty, and the gods act here only through pollution and Tiresias. The divine side of the quarrel is silent until it is too late for Creon.
Overview
Antigone was produced around 441 BCE, probably fifteen years before Oedipus the King and more than thirty before Oedipus at Colonus, even though in the story it comes last. The three plays are not a trilogy and were not written as one. Sophocles wrote them decades apart, for different competitions, and they do not agree with each other in every detail.
The play is about fourteen hundred lines, roughly ninety minutes in performance, with a chorus of Theban elders and originally two or three actors taking all the speaking parts. That constraint matters: Antigone and Tiresias were probably played by the same man, and Antigone leaves the stage more than four hundred lines before the end, which means the last quarter of the play belongs entirely to Creon.
Most readers arrive expecting a heroine and a tyrant. What Sophocles wrote is harder. Creon’s opening address to the elders is a reasonable statement of the principle that a city’s survival comes first and that no friend of the city’s enemy can be a friend of his. Antigone is fearless, contemptuous, unwilling to explain herself twice, and cruel to her sister. The play does not soften either of them. By the end Creon is the one asking for pity, and the chorus has to tell us what to think, which in Sophocles usually means nobody is sure.
What happens
Before dawn, outside the palace. Antigone tells Ismene what Creon has decreed and asks for help with the burial. Ismene refuses: they are women, the dead are dead, and the living have to obey. Antigone cuts her off and goes alone.
Creon addresses the elders and states his policy. A sentry arrives, terrified, to report that someone has sprinkled dust over the body. Creon accuses the guards of taking bribes and orders the corpse uncovered again.
The chorus sings the ode on man, the creature who sails the grey sea, breaks the earth with the plough, snares birds and fish, tames horses, and has found cures for everything except death.
The sentry returns with Antigone, caught in a dust storm pouring libations over her brother. She does not deny it. She tells Creon that his proclamation had no power to override the gods’ unwritten laws, and that she always knew she would die. Creon condemns her and, in a fit, Ismene too, who now claims a share in the act; Antigone refuses to let her have it. Creon releases Ismene.
Haemon enters, calm at first, arguing that the whole city is on Antigone’s side and that a man who will not bend breaks. The argument turns vicious. Creon calls him a woman’s slave; Haemon leaves saying his father will never see him again.
Creon spares Antigone the stoning he first threatened and orders her shut in a rock tomb with a little food, so the city’s hands stay clean. She is led out, lamenting the marriage she will never have and appealing to the strangeness of her family’s story.
Tiresias, led by a boy, tells Creon that the altars are fouled with carrion carried by dogs and birds, that the gods are refusing sacrifice, and that he will pay corpse for corpse. Creon insults him, then panics, and on the elders’ advice runs to free Antigone and bury Polynices.
He is too late. A messenger reports that Antigone had hanged herself with her own veil, and that Haemon, finding her, spat in his father’s face, ran on his own sword and died embracing her. Eurydice hears this, goes inside without a word, and kills herself cursing her husband. Creon comes back carrying his son’s body and asks to be taken away. The chorus closes on the lateness of wisdom.
How to read it
Read the whole play in one sitting, then reread three passages: Creon’s first speech, Antigone’s defence at lines 450 to 470, and the argument with Haemon. The play’s balance is visible only if you take Creon’s opening seriously before you know how he ends.
Read the choral odes slowly. They are not summaries. The ode on man is triumphant at exactly the moment the audience knows a law has been broken, and the ode on Eros arrives just before Haemon’s death, and both comment sideways on the action rather than explaining it.
Pay attention to the speech at lines 904 to 920, where Antigone argues that she would not have done this for a husband or a child, since those can be replaced and a brother cannot. Goethe found it so strange he hoped it was an interpolation, and it is the place to test whether you think she acts on principle or on something more particular than principle.
Do not import the Hegelian reading before you have read the play. Family against state is a useful frame, but Antigone speaks for the gods more than for kinship, and Creon speaks for himself at least as much as for Thebes.
Fagles is the classroom standard and reads well aloud. Anne Carson’s version is a provocation worth reading second, not first, and it is under copyright, so quote it sparingly and by name.
Questions it raises
- Does Antigone have an argument, or a piety that happens to be right?
- Creon has a city to hold together after a civil war. What should he have done with the body?
- Why does Sophocles remove Antigone from the stage so early and give Creon the ending?
- Ismene refuses and survives. Is her caution cowardice, or the ordinary condition of people under a bad decree?
- Antigone says a brother is irreplaceable and a husband is not. Does that reasoning undermine her appeal to universal law?
- The gods never speak. How do we know they are on her side, other than that the altars fill with carrion?
Highlights
Many things are terrible and wonderful, and nothing is more terrible and wonderful than man.
Polla ta deina. The Greek word deina means both awesome and dreadful at once, and the chorus sings this ode about human ingenuity immediately after learning that someone has defied the king.
I was not born to share in hatred, but to share in love.
Antigone's answer when Creon says her brothers were enemies and should be treated differently in death.
These laws are not of today or yesterday; they live always, and no one knows when they appeared.
Paraphrase of the core of her defence speech, where she sets the unwritten ordinances of the gods against Creon's proclamation.
A city that belongs to one man is no city at all.
Paraphrase of Haemon's line in the argument with his father, which turns a family quarrel into a political one.
Unburied, unwept, without a marriage song, I am led away on this last road.
Paraphrase of Antigone's lament as she is taken to the cave. Notice that she mourns the wedding she will not have, which is the only moment she asks for pity.
