on that, Creon. They named the play after her, Owen Bennett Jones recently wrote on the Islamic State in the LRB, "Every time a Jihadi movement has won power it has lost popularity by failing to give the people what they want: peace, security and jobs, " When I read that I thought about poor King Creon, I have always felt disturbed by the vice of fate in this play which steadily traps and crushes, It was Creon's hubris which caught my attention this time, Doesn't he have a mandate I imagine him simply incredulous, Why this dissent Subsequently I read a number of secondary pieces, though as I feared Creon is a symbol, whereas Antigone remains human, though her plight is classconscious according to some, whereas others view matters as a collision of opposed ideas.
JeanPierre Vernant and Pierre VidalNaquet explored such in their Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece,
Rather, it is between two different types of religious feeling one is a family religion, purely private and confined to the small circle of close relatives, the philoi, centered around the domestic hearth and the cult of the dead the other is a public religion in which the tutelary gods of the city eventually become confused with the supreme values of the State.
Who would have guessed that a few hundred years after the Enlightenment such rituals and disputation would remain foregrounded My views on progress and positivism have been eroded greatly over the course of my adult life.
A chill remains in the air and yet a glimmer of hope persists, even now, I hope to always harbor such impossibilities Of all the Greek theatre, few works remain, Antigone is one of the most famous short pieces we still have, It is deserving: this tragedy is a powerful, deep, immense, great work: you had to be Sophocles to do this to us, It's enormous it's beautiful
it's intense! Antigone is a strong contender in the Plays That Keep You Awake at Night competition, The background of the story reads, no surprise, like a Greek tragedy: Antigone is the orphaned daughter of Jocasta and Oedipus the mother and father/brother team from Oedipus Rex who has now lost both her brothers as well they killed each other fighting over who got to rule Thebes.
Uncle Creon, the new king, decreed that the “traitor” brother is to go unburied, The conflict is that Antigone plans to ignore Creons decree and bury her brother anyway, while Creon says if she does, hell have her killed,
While the conflict seems simple enough, it involves two competing arenas, political and religious, Politically, Antigone represents the aristos, the old ruling families, who arent as loyal to law as they are to their own families, and Creon represents the demos, or the voting masses, whose primary focus is the interest of the state and the rule of law.
In the religious arena, Antigone wants to honor the gods laws by burying her brother, while Creon ignores the gods laws in favor of his own decrees.
So whos right What is the balance of power between individuals and the state The laws of man and the laws of gods Governing with firmness and listening with reason
The good news is that Sophocles gives each character a leg to stand on, but only one.
Antigone is right to honor the gods laws but wrong to disobey the kings decree, and Creon is wrong to disregard the gods laws but right to expect the laws of the land to supplant individual wishes.
Im guessing Sophocles would argue that the plays success comes from the tension between these ideas as played out by two flawed characters, On the one hand, Antigone is a strident vigilante who doesnt care that shes breaking the law, And on the other hand, Creon is an insecure blowhard who doesnt care that hes breaking custom and the will of the gods by leaving his nephews corpse to be eaten by birds.
Neither character is easy to side with, but each has a point,
However, the bad news is that Sophocles clearly sides with Creon through the airtime he gives Creon far more than he gives Antigone, through the choruss support who are supposed to state the opinion of the audience, and through the plot itself, which gives Creon the realization of his mistakes and the cathartic “Woe is me” ending.
Creon, not Antigone, follows the tragic hero trajectory, Antigones real tragedy is simply that shes a member of a spectacularly dysfunctional family, While the plot vindicates Antigones position, Sophocles undermines her character at every turn, and for some reason this drives me bonkers, Obviously nobody would read Pride and Prejudice and SPOILER ALERT say, “Poor Wickham got short shrift! Jane Austen was clearly in the bag for Darcy.
How unfair!” because those characters exist only as the author created them, Wickham is a scoundrel because Jane Austen created a scoundrel, However, the characters in this play existed before Sophocles and therefore outside Sophocles, so I dont think Im a lunatic for being irritated that Sophocles was manipulative in his treatment of them.
In his reallife zeal to promote the interest of the polis, Sophocles weakens Antigones position by characterizing her as imbalanced and unnatural, which makes the didactic focus of the story political.
That was his point, and in keeping with Greek tragedy of theth century BC, but it still irks me,
I started reading the Theban Plays the other day, compiled by Penguin and translated by Robert Fagles, Thats the power combo for now, though I am told half the fun is rereading with different translations, This particular edition presents the three plays in the order in which they were written, starting with Antigone, which is the final play in terms of chronology.
While reading these classics true classics I guess, I find that I need to read the introduction in order to get a bit more of the context surrounding their writing and/or performance.
Robert Knox has been a faithful companion in that sense, Here are a few facts that I appreciated learning about this play spoilers ahead:
Creon has a “magnificent” speech at the beginning of the play, stressing that “loyalty to the city takes precedence over any private loyalty, to friend or family”.
This would be considered satire today, I think,, the Western world, we are laughing political candidates off if they go near this sentiment, But it looks as though the original audience would have agreed with him! So the speech does not have the “pompous ass” quality that we may ascribe to it.
The main point of contention in the play is the burial and proper rites denied Polynices, Creon has declared it illegal for anyone to show mercy to the corpse of Polynices, as he became a traitor to the city, coming back to attack the city on the side of the enemy.
Knox mentions that, once again, the audience would have been on the side of Creon!
“These vivid phrases would have recalled to them the destruction of Athens and the desecration of its temples by the Persian invaders inthey would have had no second thoughts about denying burial to the corpse of any Athenian who had fought on the Persian side.
Denial of burial in their homeland to traitors, real or supposed, was not unknown in Greece, Themistocles, for example, the hero of the Persian War, was later driven from Athens by his political enemies, who accused him of proPersian conspiratorial activity, Hounded from one Greek city to another he finally took refuse in Persiancontrolled territory, where he died, ”
A point that stood out to me as absurd was Antigones weird insistence that she would not have risked death by giving burial rites to her husband and child, as they are replaceable, and that a brother is far more valuable to her as he cannot be replaced.
Apparently, the inspiration of this sentiment could be sourced to the work of Sophocles friend Herodotus, Histories,
“Darius the Great King had condemned to death for treason a Persian noble, Intaphrenes, and all the men of his family, The wife of Intaphrenes begged importunately for their lives offered one, she chose her brothers, When Darius asked her why, she replied in words that are unmistakably the original of Antigones lines, ”
However, as Knox points out, this makes less sense in the play, The wife of Intaphrenes is saving the life of her brother who is still alive, whereas Antione is just being spiteful Polynices is already dead!
A great introduction to Sophocles.
Next is Oedipus the King, I will get my tweed jacket and cigar and make sure my beard is nice and trimmed before getting to that one, Things are about to get Oedipal, I first read Antigone when I took a course in college dedicated to the early Greek plays, I find it weathers well, but then that should be no surprise since it has already weathered more thanyears,
Twice I was taken by the presence of phrases we still use commonly today, Is this the possible first use of “bit the dust”
Here, there, great Ares like a war horse wheeled
Beneath his car down thrust
Our foemen bit the dust
And this of “stand your ground”
Such a man would in the storm of battle stand his ground.
The story revolves around the girl Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, whose brothers have fought and slain one another in battle, The brother on the nonvictorious side, Polyneices, is laid out to be eaten by dogs and scavenger birds, and Creon, the king, makes it a crime for anyone to bury him.
Antigone, heeding the laws of the Gods over the rule of one man, defies the king and attempts to bury her brother,
What ensues is tragedy, Creons insistence that he, and he alone, rules in Thebes, costs everyone in the play dearly, including himself,
His son, Haemon, pleads with him to listen to reason and be swayed by those who see the other side of the question, but he is stubborn and closes his eyes and ears.
Haemons words are powerful, especially now, when I find so many people have their ideas set in stone and refuse to entertain the possibility of being wrong about anything.
Haemons plea:
The wisest man will let himself be swayed
By others wisdom and relax in time,
See how the trees beside a stream in flood
Save, if they yield to force, each spray unharmed,
But by resisting perish root and branch.
Finally, there was a stanza that jumped out at me as being so true of our own time and made me stop and think that little really changes over time:
Of evils current upon earth
The worst is money.
Money tis that sacks
Cities, and drives men forth from hearth and home
I was surprised how much of the mythology I have retained from my school days and my subsequent readings of Bulfinchs and Edith Hamilton, although I will confess to being happy to have Google available for the more obscure references.
I realized, after reading this, that I would really enjoy revisiting all these early plays, Perhaps the other Oedipus plays from this trilogy will make my list before the end of the year,
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Acquire Today Antigone (The Theban Plays, #3) Originated By Sophocles Issued As Ebook
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