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Antigone (Sophocles)

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Antigone (Greek: Ἀντιγόνη) is a tragedy by Sophocles written before or in 442 BC. It is chronologically the third of the three Theban plays but was written first. The play expands on the Theban legend that predated it. It picks up where Aeschylus' play Seven Against Thebes leaves off.

Plot

The play is set in Thebes in the aftermath of the self-banishment of its king, Oedipus. Oedipus had left the throne of Thebes to his two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, whom he expected to take turns ruling for one year each. Instead, Eteocles refused to relinquish power to his brother. Civil war ensued as Polynices, exiled by his brother, returned with an Argive army, in what became known as the Seven Against Thebes campaign, as depicted in Aeschylus' play of the same name. Antigone begins after both brothers have died in single combat, each apparently slain by the other's hand. The new king, Creon, the brother of their mother Jocasta, has issued a decree: since Polynices fought against Thebes and betrayed his motherland, his body will be exposed rather than buried, and will not be given proper funeral rites. Eteocles, meanwhile will be buried with full military honors.

In the opening scene, Antigone and Ismene, sisters of the dead brothers, discuss the proclamation. Antigone believes it to be against the will of the gods, which she describes as "the unwritten and unfailing statutes of heaven. For their life is not of today or yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth" (ll. 454–7). She confides her plan to bury Polynices, but Ismene is more timid and refuses to take part, although she agrees with Antigone's motive.

When Creon is informed that someone has given Polynices burial rites, he orders the body to be uncovered and stealthily guarded. Antigone is caught returning to her brother's body and is brought before the furious king. She proudly accepts her death as she sees no wrong in honouring her unwept, "unburied brother. Ismene claims that she too took part in the crime, but Antigone tells her to stay out of the matter since she chose to have no part in the actions.

Antigone's cousin and fiancé, Creon's son Haemon, arrives and announces that the whole city thinks Antigone has done the right thing. Although he claims to be 'neutral' on the matter himself, he tells his father that he is on the side of the state. Creon responds by attacking Haemon's masculine pride, accusing him of being influenced by a woman. Finally, Haemon states that Antigone's death will cause another. Creon scoffs, assuming this to be a threat on his own life, but his son tells him it is not Creon who will die. Enraged, Creon decides to let Antigone starve to death in a sealed cave. The Chorus persuades him to let Ismene go, as she is innocent.

The blind prophet Tiresias then arrives. He tells Creon that his actions are not right. Creon sneers, claiming that prophets have always loved gold. Tiresias tells him that soon he will pay "corpse for corpse, and flesh for flesh", and that his actions are causing a miasma (pollution). Faced with this terrible prophecy, Creon is torn and comes to the conclusion that Polynices must be buried and Antigone must not be killed. In Aristotelean terms, this is Creon's anagnorisis (discovery of the truth).

However, Creon's anagnorisis comes too late. Haemon makes his way to save Antigone, but she has already committed suicide in the cave, hanging herself as her mother Jocasta had done, and Creon finds Haemon leaning over Antigone's body. Haemon threatens Creon, before stabbing himself and taking his own life. Creon's wife, Eurydice, also kills herself in grief over the death of her son.

Creon, having lost his family, lets himself be taken away. His hamartia (tragic mistake) has taken from him everything that he loved.

Historical context

Antigone was written at a time of national fervor. In 440 BCE, shortly after the play was released, Sophocles was appointed as one of the ten generals to lead a military expedition against Samos Island. It is striking that a prominent play in a time of such imperialism contains no political propaganda, no impassioned apostrophe, makes not a single contemporary allusion or passing reference to Athens, and betrays no patriotic interests whatsoever. Rather than become sidetracked with the issues of the time, Antigone remains completely focused on the characters and themes within the play, and thus remains timeless.

Notable features

The play is notable for being one of the few to show the inside of the palace. Usually in Greek tragedy all action takes place outside of the house or palace depicted on the skene (the backdrop of the stage); deaths take place inside, unseen by the audience. In this play, however, the play is set inside the palace.

The chorus in Antigone is interesting as well in several ways. It departs significantly from the chorus in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, the play of which Antigone is a continuation. The chorus in Seven Against Thebes is largely supportive of Antigone's decision to bury her brother. Here, the chorus is composed of old men who are largely unwilling to see civil disobedience in a positive light. The chorus also represents a typical difference in Sophocles' plays from those of both Aeschyles and Euripides. A chorus of Aeschylus almost always continues or intensifies the moral nature of the play, while one of Euripides frequently strays far from the main moral theme. The chorus in Antigone lies somewhere in between; it remains within the general moral and the immediate scene, but allows itself to be carried away from the occasion or the initial reason for speaking.

The character of the sentry is also unusual, as he speaks like a lower-class person, in more natural language, rather than the stylized poetry of the other characters. He has been compared with similar characters in the works of Shakespeare by Brown, Kitto, and others.

Significance and interpretation

Antigone deals with two main questions: 1) whether Polynices ought to be given burial rituals, and 2) whether someone who buried him in defiance of state ought to be punished. Antigone buries Polynices at the very beginning, and so the play is consumed mainly with the second question. Once Creon has discovered that Antigone buried her brother against his orders, the ensuing discussion of her fate is devoid of arguments for mercy because of youth or sisterly love from the Chorus, Haemon or Antigone herself. All of the arguments to save her center on a debate over which course adheres best to strict justice. Once the initial premises behind the characters in Antigone have been established, the action of the play moves steadily and inevitably towards the outcome. Because Creon is the person and king that he is, he will naturally decree that the body of the disloyal brother remain unburied, and will naturally demand absolute obedience to his decree. Antigone, being the person that she is and holding her views, will naturally defy the decree. Creon will naturally demand that the unknown criminal be arrested and brought before him, etc. Because the action is so self-sustained, most interpretation of the play centers around the text itself.

The problem of the second burial

An important debate still discussed regarding Sophocles' Antigone is the issue of the second burial. When she poured dust over her brother's body, Antigone completed the burial rites and thus fulfilled her duty to him. Having been properly buried, Polynices' soul could proceed to the underworld whether or not the dust was removed from his body. However, Antigone went back after his body was uncovered and performed the ritual again, an act that seems to be completely unmotivated by anything other than a plot necessity so that she could be caught in the act of disobedience, leaving no doubt of her guilt.

Several scholars have attempted to solve this problem. Sir Richard Jebb suggests that the only reason for Antigone's return to the burial site is that the first time she forgot the Choaí (libations), and "perhaps the rite was considered completed only if the Choaí were poured while the dust still covered the corpse. This argument is slightly tautological in that it explains Antigone's return to the body based on a presumption about a ritual that is based on Antigone's return to the body.

Gilbert Norwood explains Antigone's performance of the second burial in terms of her stubbornness. His argument says that had Antigone not been so obsessed with the idea of keeping her brother covered, none of the tragic deaths of the play would have happened. This argument has the property that it states that if nothing had happened, nothing would have happened, and doesn't take much of a stand in explaining why Antigone returned for the second burial when the first would have fulfilled her religious obligation, regardless of how stubborn she was.

Tycho von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff justifies the need for the second burial by comparing Sophocles' Antigone to a theoretical version where Antigone is apprehended during the first burial. In this situation, news of the illegal burial and Antigone's arrest would arrive at the same time and there would be no period of time in which Antigone's defiance and victory was to be appreciated.

J. L. Rose maintains that the solution to the problem of the second burial is solved by close examination of Antigone as a tragic character. Being a tragic character, she is completely obsessed by one idea, and for her this is giving her brother his due respect in death and demonstrating her love for him and for what is right. When she sees her brother's body uncovered, therefore, she is overcome by emotion and acts impulsively to cover him again, with no regards to the necessity of the action or its consequences for her safety. This argument is supported by the language of the text- when Antigone finds Polynices' body disgraced, she "cried aloud with the sharp cry of a bird in its bitterness,-even as when, within the empty nest, it sees the bed stripped of its nestlings."

Relation to Electra

The Antigone shows similarities to Sophocles' other play Electra. The interaction between Antigone and Ismene and Electra and Chrysothemis shows parallels: both consist of the protagonist attempting to persuade a reluctant sister to perform an action which she is afraid to do because of fear of retribution.

Themes

State control

A well established theme in Antigone is the right of the individual to reject society's infringement on her freedom to perform a personal obligation. This is seen through Antigone's refusal to let Creon dictate what she is allowed to do with her family members. She says to Ismene about Creon's edict, "It is not for him to keep me from my own.” This theme brings up the issue of whether Antigone's will to bury her brother is based on rational thought or instinct, a debate whose contributors include greats like Goethe.

Natural law

One important issue in the play is the clash of values between Creon and Antigone. Creon advocates obedience to man-made laws while Antigone stresses the higher laws of duty to the gods and one's family. The play is thus one of the most commonly cited supports in Greek tragedy for the supremacy of Natural Law. Creon, the dramatic hero, realizes only after he loses the lives of all his family that he was mistaken to place the law of the state above the law of the gods.

Civil disobedience

The contrasting views of Creon and Antigone with regards to laws higher than those of state inform their different conclusions about civil disobedience. Creon demands obedience to the law above all else, right or wrong. He says that "there is nothing worse than disobedience to authority" (An. 671). Antigone responds with the idea that state law is not absolute, and that it can be broken in civil disobedience in extreme cases.

Citizenship

The concept of citizenship appears most clearly in the values clash between Creon and Antigone. Creon defines citizenship as utmost obedience to the will of the state, and thus condemns Antigone to death when he feels that she has abandoned her citizenship by disobeying him. Antigone allows more room for individualism within the role of the citizen. The debate over citizenship, however, extends beyond just the argument between Creon and Antigone.

Creon's decree to leave Polynices unburied in itself makes a bold statement about what it means to be a citizen, and what constitutes abdication of citizenship. It was the firmly kept custom of the Greek that each city was responsible for the burial of its citizens. Herodotus discussed how members of each city would collect their own dead after a large battle to bury them. In contrast with the Persians who would leave their dead unburied, the Greeks considered burial a sign of recognition of citizenship and affiliation. In Antigone, it is therefore natural that the people of Thebes did not bury the Argives, but very striking that Creon prohibited the burial of Polynices. Since he is a citizen of Thebes, it would have been natural for the Thebans to bury him. It is important to note, for this reason, that Creon's edict is directed at the Thebans themselves. Creon is telling his people that Polynices has distanced himself from them, and that they are prohibited from treating him as a fellow-citizen and burying him as is the custom for citizens.

In prohibiting the people of Thebes from burying Polynices, Creon is essentially placing him on the level of the other attackers—the foreign Argives. For Creon, the fact that Polynices has attacked the city effectively revokes his citizenship and makes him a foreigner. As defined by this decree, citizenship is based on loyalty. It is revoked when Polynices commits what in Creon's eyes amounts to treason. When pitted against Antigone's view, this understanding of citizenship creates a new axis of conflict. Antigone does not deny that Polynices has betrayed the state, she simply acts as if this betrayal does not rob him of the connection that he would have otherwise had with the city. Creon, on the other hand, believes that citizenship is a contract; it is not absolute or inalienable, and can be lost in certain circumstances. These two opposing views- that citizenship is absolute and undeniable and alternatively that citizenship is based on certain behavior- are known respectively as citizenship 'by nature' and citizenship 'by law.'

Family

Antigone's determination to bury Polynices arises from a desire to bring honor to her family, not just to the gods. She repeatedly declares that she must act to please "those that are dead" (An. 77), because they hold more weight than any ruler. In the opening scene, she makes an emotional appeal to her sister Ismene saying that they must protect their brother out of sisterly love, even if he did betray their state. Antigone makes very few references to the gods, and so it is very easy to interpret much of her reasoning for honoring higher laws as referencing laws of family honor, not divine laws.

While he rejects Antigone's actions based on family honor, Creon appears to value family heavily himself as well. This is one of the few areas where Creon and Antigone's values seem to align. When talking to Haemon, Creon demands of him not only obedience as a citizen, but also as a son. Creon even goes so far as to say "everything else shall be second to your father's decision" ("An." 640-641). This stance seems extreme, especially in light of the fact that Creon elsewhere advocates obedience to the state above all else. While it is not clear how he would handle these two values in conflict, it is clear that even for Creon, family occupies a place as high if not higher than the state.

Portrayal of the gods

In Antigone as well as the other Theban Plays, there are very few references to the gods. Hades is the most commonly referenced god, but he is referenced more as a personification of Death. Zeus is referenced a total of 5 times in the entire play, and Apollo is referenced only as a personification of prophecy. This lack of mention portrays the tragic events that occur as the result of human error, and not divine intervention. There also is no reference to Mount Olympus in the entire play, and indeed the gods are portrayed as chthonic, as near the beginning there is a reference to "Justice who dwells with the gods beneath the earth." This conflicts with the other Athenian tragedians, who reference Olympus often.

Modern adaptations

Antigone was adapted into modern form by the French playwright Anouilh during the Second World War.

Translations

Secondary literature

  • Heidegger, Martin, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried & Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
  • Heidegger, Martin, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister", trans. William McNeill & Julia Davis (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).
  • Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1992).
  • Segal, Charles, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999, new edition).
  • Steiner, George, Antigones (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1984).

Notes



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