What’s in it for me? A bite-sized Greek tragedy
It’s hard to imagine Western culture without Antigone. The roll call of thinkers influenced by Sophocles’s work runs to pages. The short version of that list is striking enough: it includes Kant and Hegel, Goethe and George Eliot, Richard Wagner and Virginia Woolf.
What accounts for this play’s extraordinary influence? For the critic George Steiner, the answer has to do with its timelessness. Whenever we’re confronted with conflicts between justice and law, he writes, we find ourselves returning to words, ideas, and images coined by Sophocles.
Creon, the hard-headed king of Thebes, stands for every regime that appeals to the security of the state to quash dissidents. Antigone, by contrast, stands for disobedience. She’s the voice of conscience who insists on justice even if it violates the law. That voice is echoed by Gandhi and Solzhenitsyn, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks – men and women who, like her, elevate moral righteousness over political expediency and calmly accept the costs of dissidence.
Sophocles, though, was a playwright, not a political theorist, and Antigone is a tragedy, not a treatise. For audiences in fifth-century Athens, Creon’s insistence on preserving political order would have seemed commonsensical: the city-state was at the center of their lives, after all. Punishments for traitors were correspondingly harsh – it was forbidden to bury their bodies inside the city, for example. Creon’s aim, in other words, is understandable – noble even. But he’s too stubborn to see that it would be better served by allowing Antigone to bury her brother, and too proud to take the advice of the city's clear-sighted citizens. These flaws pervert his desired end and condemn him and those around him to their bloody fates.
That, citizens of democratic Athens thought, is the problem with tyrants (which is what Creon becomes). Their actions lead to evil outcomes even when their intentions are noble. The feedback mechanism that corrects the course of democratic governments is missing. Tyrants don’t listen to critics – they punish dissenters and double down on bad calls. That ultimately leads to the downfall of the societies they claim to be safeguarding. Freedom, in short, isn’t a luxury – it’s the failsafe that guarantees the moral and political integrity of states.
At the heart of this tragedy is an accidental tyrant – and the woman who resists him. By the time Creon sees his error, it’s too late: Thebes and its leading family have been ruined.
Part 1: “I will bury him even if it means death.”
The conflict that tore the city of Thebes apart is over. Peace, though, hasn’t healed the wounds of war. Before the city can move forward, it needs to reckon with its recent past.
Sophocles doesn’t give us a full account of the Theban civil war. He didn’t need to: Athenian theatergoers were familiar enough with the mythology that forms the backdrop to the play.
We need some context, however, before we can jump into the drama.
The old king of Thebes, Oedipus, is a tragic hero. According to Greek myth, he fulfills a terrible prophecy: he unknowingly kills his own father and marries his mother, bringing disaster to his city and his family. When he learns what he’s done, he blinds himself with a dagger. “Why should I have eyes,” he asks in one of Sophocles’s earlier plays, when “nothing I saw was worth seeing?” Banished from the city, he becomes a wandering outcast.
Oedipus’s incestuous marriage to his mother, Jocasta, produced four children – two girls and two boys. After his banishment, his two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, take turns sharing the throne of Thebes. They both desire absolute power, though, and soon come to blows. In the struggle that ensues, Eteocles gains the upper hand and sends his brother into exile. Polynices returns with an army of mercenaries at his back, sparking the Theban civil war. Eteocles’s forces triumph, but not before the two brothers have killed each other in a battle outside the city’s gates. Power now passes to Creon, the uncle of both Oedipus and his children.
All of Oedipus’s children play a role in the play’s opening act. His daughters, Antigone and Ismene, are physically present. Their fallen brothers, meanwhile, are there in spirit, haunting the scene. It’s their fate that the two women are discussing when we first meet them.
Antigone has asked Ismene to meet her outside the city, away from the prying eyes of its inhabitants. She’s in a state of despair, her thoughts jumbled, and her words hurried. As Ismene puts it, she’s as “clear as fog at sea.” What’s caused her pain? Antigone says that she’s never seen such misery and madness; it’s monstrous, she cries. What is, her sister asks her. Antigone’s answer echoes through the rest of the play: this “shame and dishonor.”
Eteocles has been buried with all the proper rites – a funeral with full honors befitting a man now celebrated as a hero for his role in repulsing an invasion. His brother, Polynices, meanwhile, has been denied any form of burial – a punishment worse than that handed out to traitors. Creon has ordered that his body be left exposed on a hillside for vultures to peck at and promised to execute anyone who goes against his will.
That’s why Antigone wants to speak with Ismene: she’s decided to defy the king and bury Polynices. It’s time, she says, that Ismene “showed her colors.” Will she do what’s right?
Ismene is in a bind. She wants to honor her brother – like Antigone, she sees it as a duty owed to family. But she also believes that the law must be obeyed, “even if it hurts us.” These words take us to the heart of the ethical dilemma that Sophocles set out to explore. Do unjust laws command respect? Yes, says Ismene, who, like many ancient Greeks, believes that obedience to the law is non-negotiable. To let individuals decide which laws to follow and which to disregard is to rip up the social contract. It’s a recipe for anarchy – a word that, for the Greeks, conjured up images of a barbaric life-and-death struggle between isolated individuals.
Ismene says she’ll pray for her brother, but that’s all she can do. To do more, she argues, would be to “take up arms against the city.” Antigone rejects this argument – for her, it’s a cover for cowardice. What we do, she says, is a choice. Nothing can stop us doing what’s right; we’re always free to act. We can be punished for those actions, but that’s the price of our freedom.
“I will bury him,” Antigone concludes, “even if it means death.”
For her, justice is bigger than the city. To give the dead a proper burial is a religious commandment. Antigone isn’t an anarchist. Yes, the laws of cities and kings matter a great deal, but those laws are only valid if they conform to the eternal laws of the gods.
Part 2: “Give me a friend of this city and I’ll pay him full honor, in life and death.”
Greek plays had small casts. Every role in Antigone, for example, would have been played by a rotating cast of just three actors. But there’s always a fourth voice on stage: the chorus, a group of up to fifty singers who play the part of the city’s inhabitants. Think of it as a gossipy, singing-and-dancing cross-section of the townsfolk giving us their take on the day’s events.
Thebes, we learn from the chorus, is relieved. Victory against Polynices’s invading army proves the gods are on the city’s side. Now that that war is over and the city is safe, it sings, it’s time to forget old grievances and move on. It’s at this point that we first meet the king.
Creon is in a philosophical mood when we encounter him. A man’s character, he muses, is only revealed when he rules and makes laws. Only then will he be tested in public eyes. Rulers, he adds, tend to make two mistakes. The first is that they hold their tongues and fail to do what’s right because it’s unpopular. The second (and graver) error they make is favoring friends and family over the well-being of the city.
This, too, is an idea that would have been familiar to Athenian audiences. Humans are political animals, the idea runs, and they can only fulfill their true natures inside the polis – the city-state. Outside of this political arrangement, we’re little better than savage animals fighting over scraps. In this sorry state of nature, humans are selfish and vicious and every man is an enemy to the next. Outside the polis, in short, there’s neither friendship nor family. It stands to reason, then, that if we value friends and family, we must put the city-state first, since that’s what makes these relationships possible. The city, Creon says, is a lifeboat: “We have no friends at all unless we keep her sailing right side up.”
The citizens of Thebes want to forget old grievances and move on. That’s all well and good, but what should a city do with the memory of a man who set out to drown it in blood? “Give me a friend of this city,” Creon says, “and I’ll pay him full honor, in life and death.” Eteocles fought for Thebes, so he’ll be honored. The traitor Polynices, though, deserves no grave. No – better to make him a “spectacle of utter shame” and “let the birds and dogs feed on his limbs.”
It’s not a popular decision – everyone knows that the gods demand that the dead be buried, which is why even traitors are usually at least buried somewhere outside the city. But it’s the right call, Creon concludes. He can’t allow a criminal to be honored alongside a man of justice, and the gods will see it that way, too.
Part 3: “What greater glory could I win than to give my own brother a decent burial?”
Creon is a little smug, perhaps. He clearly likes playing the wise philosopher-king. But he’s no tyrant – not yet, anyway. He has said that a man’s character is revealed when he makes laws. That’s not quite right in his case. His character will be revealed when his laws are defied. Which brings us to our next scene: the showdown between Antigone and Creon.
We catch sight of something darker in Creon’s character when a guard reports that Polynices’s body has been covered up. He immediately accuses the hapless soldier of treachery – someone, he claims, has paid him to bury the traitor and deceive the king – before threatening to torture him. “Death,” he says menacingly, “will be too good for this man.” In the end, he releases the guard, instructing him to destroy the makeshift grave, watch over the site until the culprit returns, and then arrest the person.
Antigone – she, of course, is the person who has buried Polynices – does return. Finding her brother’s body uncovered, she cries out in grief. As the guards will later report to the king, in that moment she was like a bird returning to find its nest empty. Sorrow, though, turns to rage. Cursing whoever desecrated the grave, she covers the body with soil and pours wine from a bronze cup over his body. As she’s administering these last rites, Creon’s soldiers arrest her.
Antigone doesn’t deny her guilt when she’s brought before the king. “I knew it was forbidden,” she says flatly. So why did you violate the city’s laws? he asks. Because those laws are meaningless, she replies. Neither Zeus, the highest deity, nor any other god, issued this hateful order – an order that violates the eternal laws of morality. No man, she says, could frighten her into disobeying the will of the gods. Creon can condemn her to death: she’d rather die young than live a long life in shame and misery anyway. Nothing he can do to her could be worse than the pain of knowing that she’d left her brother to rot on that hillside.
Creon now turns to the chorus. Antigone, he says, is an “expert in arrogance.” She breaks laws and adds insult to injury by boasting about her actions. If she’s not punished, he’s not a man. She may be family, but she has to die. As the city’s people already know, placing family over the well-being of the city is the gravest error a ruler can make. The chorus reluctantly agrees.
Its mind, however, isn’t made up. When Antigone addresses the chorus, she says that Creon’s talk of serving the city hides his true aim: serving himself. He’s become prideful and hateful. That’s blinded him to truth. Whatever a man’s actions in this life, it’s up to the gods to bless or condemn him after his death – they alone have the power and right to judge us. The chorus agrees: for Thebans as for citizens in most Greek cities, these are self-evident truths. But the chorus can’t contradict Creon. In Antigone’s words, the king has locked the people’s tongues with fear so that he can better pursue the tyrant’s “greatest joy” – doing as he pleases.
This final act of defiance unlocks Creon’s character. Suddenly, we see the full extent of the chilling brutality we’d only glimpsed before. Antigone, he says, seems to love the dead more than the living. Executing her, as he plans to do, is a favor to her: it means she’ll be joining her beloved brother sooner rather than later. Really, she should thank him for his decision.
She does thank him, too, not for the verdict itself but for the fact that his decision has brought all this talking to an end. “Your moralizing repels me, every word you say,” she tells him, “so naturally all I say repels you, too.” In other words: Antigone and Creon are polar opposites who cannot be joined in common cause. No compromises are possible between them; they are opposing extremes. There’s nothing left to say. Antigone has accepted her fate, anyway. There’s no greater glory, she says, than giving her brother a decent burial.
Part 4: “Bend or break.”
Creon’s son, Haemon, now takes to the stage. He pleads for the life of Antigone – the woman he loves and plans on marrying. Creon, though, is unrelenting.
Antigone, he says coldly, is a “worthless woman” and worthless women are a “misery in bed.” No reason, then, to mourn her loss – let her find her husband among the dead. His hands are bound. There’s no greater crime on earth than anarchy. It destroys cities, rips up houses, and breaks the ranks of armies. Laws are everything; rulers cannot defend those who break them.
Haemon changes tack and appeals to his father’s self-interest. Rulers, he says, don’t last long without the consent of their subjects. Of course, no one in Thebes tells the king what they really think – they “dread his glance in the street,” after all, and keep their opinions to themselves. But Haemon has heard what people say behind closed doors. No woman, the townsfolk think, deserved death less than Antigone, especially not such a “brutal death” for such a “glorious deed.” The gods, they think, are on her side. It’s not too late, he adds, for the king to change his mind. After all, Haemon argues, it’s no disgrace for a man – even a very wise man – to learn new things and not be too rigid.
Haemon then turns to a natural metaphor. “You’ve seen trees in a raging winter torrent,” he says to his father. The flexible ones “sway with the flood and salvage every twig, but not the stubborn – they’re ripped out, roots and all.” Rulers, too, he concludes, must “bend or break.”
Haemon is flattering his father. The king isn’t wise – he’s arrogant. He demonstrates his lack of wisdom by rejecting his son’s wise words. Haemon, Creon thunders, is an upstart who doesn’t know the first thing about ruling a state. Listen to his subjects! Pah! The “city is the king’s – that’s the law!” Doesn’t he know that? Haemon replies that a man who believes that would make a splendid ruler for a desert island.
Creon is beyond reason by now. He denounces his son as the rotten accomplice of a rotten woman and threatens to have Antigone executed in front of Haemon. Furious, Haemon rushes out. The chorus warns his father that hot-headed young men are capable of anything. Hurt them once, they sing, and they may do something violent. Let him do what he likes, Creon replies, he’s made up his mind: he’ll seal Antigone in a rocky vault and leave her to pray to her gods. Either they’ll hear and save her, or she’ll learn that worshiping death is a waste of time.
Part 5: “God help me, I admit it all!”
Bend or break, Haemon tells his father, and the chorus echoes that advice. He ignores it. He hears the same advice once more before the end of the play. This time he’ll heed it.
It comes from an old blind soothsayer who has advised many rulers of Thebes – a man called Tiresias. The gods speak through Tiresias. They’re angered, he tells Creon, by his refusal to bury Polynices, and no longer accept prayers or sacrifices from the city. If he doesn’t release Antigone and give her brother a proper funeral, great evils will fall on Thebes and its king.
At first, Creon dismisses the sage and accuses him of being corrupt. Tiresias, he says, has been paid off to cloak the desires of political rivals in the garb of prophecy. The chorus, however, changes his mind. The old man’s never lied to Thebes before, they sing, so why doubt him now? He knows that, Creon says, but what should he do – should he “lay his pride bare” and go back on his word? Take the good advice you’ve been given, the chorus urges; free Antigone and raise a mound over Polynices’s body. Creon finally relents.
But it’s too late. When Creon and his men come to the vault in which Antigone was sealed up, they find that she’s fashioned a noose from her fine linen veil and hanged herself. Haemon throws himself at her feet and curses his father. When Creon comes to console him, he spits in his face and wordlessly draws his sword. The king dodges his blow. Haemon has no desire to strike again. Instead, he turns the sword on himself and leans into the blade with his full weight, burying it deep in his body. Unable to bear this tragedy, Haemon’s mother – Creon’s wife – takes a dagger and ends her life, too. With her dying breath, she calls down torments on the head of the man who murdered their son.
The drama ends with Creon alone on the stage. He laments his fate and the bloody punishment dealt to him by the gods. There’s no escape; he knows the blame is all his. “God help,” he cries, “I admit it all!” It’s the chorus, though, that has the last word:
“The mighty words of the proud are paid in full with mighty blows of fate, and at long last those blows will teach us wisdom.”