Antigone is an icon of Greek Tragedy; and Antigone is herself an icon of World Tragedy. Yet it is pretty sure that she was the creation of Sophocles. Long before him there were many stories about the royal house and the dynastic wars at Thebes that were told in epic poetry and other narrative forms. These included accounts of how Polynices, the exiled son of Oedipus, went to Argos and raised ‘the Seven’, an army with seven contingents and seven leaders to take over Thebes. They told how he and his brother Eteocles were implacable rivals, and how they killed each other in the battle where the defending Thebans were victorious. There were also stories about how the dead bodies of the invaders were left unburied until foreign intervention rescued them.1 But, so far as we can tell, it was entirely Sophocles’ innovation to have a sister who faced death in order to ensure the burial of Polynices. As part of this narrative plot he also invented her betrothal to Creon’s son Haemon, and the suicide of his mother Eurydice.
Once invented, Antigone seems to have become almost immediately a favourite figure in the tragic stories of Thebes. Within Sophocles’ own lifetime she has substantial roles in Euripides’ Phoenician Women2 and in Sophocles’ own Oedipus at Colonus, composed probably some thirty-five years after Antigone. And a whole final scene of some seventy-five lines was added on to the end of Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, bringing her on with a role and portrayal closely modelled on the prologue of Sophocles’ play.3 And we know that Antigone went on to be one of the best known and most reperformed of his plays. It is prophetically apt that in the play Haemon reports to his father that the people of Thebes are asking in support of Antigone ‘does she not deserve a crown of golden honour?’ (line 699). While she is not given any communal recognition within the play—no monument or cult, for example—there is a sense in which the whole history of Tragedy has awarded her this crown.
Antigone has, indeed, serious claims to be the best-known and most discussed of all Greek tragedies. George Steiner4 suggested that it was the prime tragedy for the nineteenth century, but was supplanted by Oedipus the King in the twentieth. But for the last thirty years—and arguably for the last seventy—Antigone has probably been more widely engaged with and performed, and in a wider range of places globally,5 than any other play from before Shakespeare.
It is impossible to do justice to the multitude of those who have led engagements with Antigone in modern times, but a hasty roll-call of names will give some idea. Thinkers from Hegel to Jacques Lacan to Judith Butler (on gender); translators from Hölderlin to Seamus Heaney to Anne Carson; composers from Mendelssohn to Honneger to Theodorakis; playwright-adapters from Anouilh to Athol Fugard (The Island of 1973 is Robben Island under apartheid) to Femi Osofisan (1994); directors from Brecht to Andre Wajda (in ‘Solidarity’ Poland in the 1980s) to Ivo van Hove. Recent (2019) novels by Natalie Haynes and Kamila Shamsie and a film by Tacita Dean show that there is still more to come.
What is it then that gives the play such wide appeal? Big question! One reason may be that it dramatizes and gives a human embodiment to a whole range of fundamental issues, conflicts, and polarities. Steiner even claims a unique status in this regard: ‘It has, I believe, been given to only one literary text to express all the principal constants of conflicts in the condition of man. These constants are fivefold: the confrontation of men and of women; of age and of youth; of society and of the individual; of the living and the dead, of men and of god(s).’6 In keeping with this, I would suggest that it is this complex of interwoven confrontations that have made it possible for Antigone to be discussed and interpreted on so many different levels and in so many different cultures.
At the plainest level the play can be treated—and has been treated—as an idealistic parable of love versus hate, right versus wrong: the brave, clear-sighted young woman stands up as a martyr against inhumane oppression by authoritarian men. But it can also be viewed as much more complex and multi-layered. Not so much a clash of right and wrong, or even right and right,7 so much as a shifting interplay of desires for life and for death, realms of above and below, love and rejection, individuality and social loyalty. . . . Not black and white, but not grey either.
And while the clash between Antigone and Creon is obviously at the core of the play, there are others who are powerfully and engagingly caught up in their struggle to the death; and these others offer different angles on the conflicts. They encompass Antigone’s weaker sister Ismene; Haemon, torn between his father and his betrothed; Eurydice, mother more than wife; the guard caught between admiration for Antigone and saving his own skin; Tiresias the prophet who intervenes, but too late to change the movement towards death. And not least, the chorus of elders of the city, loyal to authority but nagged by doubts, trying—and far from succeeding—in making sense of the fatal events.
The more one looks closely at the whole play, the more un-simple it appears. It emerges as something more like a double-helix, and marked with many shifting colours rather than black and white. Among approaches to pulling together these complexities two may be particularly effective: through dramatic structure, and through the motivations of Creon and Antigone.
Consider first the play’s construction. Antigone leaves the stage for the last time, after lamentations that clearly prefigure her death, at just over two-thirds of the way through (line 943). There is then a choral ode that reflects obliquely on her fate, and after that she is never again the focus of attention. The Tiresias scene is devoted entirely to his warnings to Creon; he never says anything direct about the rightness (or wrongness) of Antigone’s case. Then in the Messenger’s report, with Antigone already dead, the focus of the narrative is on Creon and through his viewpoint on Haemon. When Creon eventually returns (at line 1257 ff.) he has the body of Haemon with him: the body of Antigone is not alluded to, and presumably it was not seen, not in the original production at least. It would have been perfectly possible for Sophocles to have brought attention to the dead Antigone in the final part of the play, but he did not. Nor is there any suggestion of any kind of reminder, let alone memorial, for her.
The last quarter of the play is devoted to Creon. If the play were an unqualified heroization of Antigone, this would all be wasted time and trouble, with the audience impatiently feeling that ‘it serves the bastard right’. The whole construction of the play clearly indicates, in other words, that it is ‘about’ Creon as well as Antigone, and concerned with Creon as an individual, not merely a token figure. Nelson Mandela saw this clearly when he organized a reading with his fellow-prisoners and took the part of Creon himself. Creon is, he appreciated, a study in the responsibilities of power and in the potential for disastrous mistakes.
It has even been suggested occasionally that Creon is the central character of the tragedy. This interpretation maintains that he is a man doing his level best to rule responsibly in difficult times, and that Antigone’s role is secondary to this. She is, it is claimed, a menace, however courageous, against order, who brings the ruler down through her stubborn fanaticism. Advocates of this view emphasize the ancient Athenian attitude to women, especially the expectation that they should remain in the domestic space, and not let their voices be heard in public. So, they say, the audience of Athenian men will have unhesitatingly condemned Antigone, however admirable other ages may have found her.
But the whole structure of the play contradicts this interpretation as well. Antigone’s case is given the first hearing through the opening prologue scene in such a way that it comes across as calling for some admiration, however dangerous. Then, whatever the pros and cons of her big confrontation with Creon (at lines 446 ff.), she clearly does not emerge from it discreditably. Next, the Haemon scene is crucial. The young man reluctantly exposes the weaknesses in his father’s stance, and crucially reports (lines 692–700) what the citizens of Thebes are saying behind his back:8
For me, though, it’s still possible to listen to
what’s said in secret, and it’s this:
the city’s filled with sorrow for this girl
because, most undeservedly of women,
she is due to die most horribly—
and yet for highly admirable deeds.
She is the one who did not let her slaughtered brother
lie unburied, left for mutilation by wild dogs or crows—
so does she not deserve a crown of golden honour?
That’s the sort of word that’s darkly spread around.
Finally, and above all, there is her farewell scene, much of it in highly emotional lyric. This would be wasted on an audience that accepts Creon as in the right, regarding her as a mere rebel. This scene is recognizably ‘tragic’, clearly designed to bring the audience to tears. It may be open to dispute whether or not Creon is a tragic figure in his own way, but there can surely be no doubt that Antigone is.
Any straightforward taking of sides, any right-and-wrong approach, also breaks up even more under scrutiny of the motivations and dispositions of Creon and Antigone. The integrity of Creon’s case, first, is the easier to unpick. Most of what he says in the first half of the play is unobjectionable, and even admirable.9 Leaving the body of a traitor unburied, while open to question, was not incontrovertibly an illegal, let alone an impious, act. And it is not clearly wrong to insist that loyalty to the city, especially in times of war, trumps any loyalty to family. Yet, while there are not grossly offensive signs, there are naggingly alienating characteristics that begin to accumulate. He shows unjustified impatience, not least towards the conformist chorus. He is too hasty with accusations of financial bribery, and implausibly accuses the guard (as he will Tiresias later). He does not, as is often claimed, offend against conventional religion, and can plausibly claim to be reverencing the gods of the city. When, however, he says of Antigone (lines 486–9):
I do not care if she’s my sister’s child,
or closer kin than everyone who shares
our household Zeus, she and her sister
won’t evade the nastiest of deaths . . .
he is failing to recognize that Zeus has a role as a guardian god of the family as well as of the city. And in the dialogue with Antigone, although he has all the physical power, he displays a growing obsession with the notion that she threatens to reverse gender-roles.
It is Ismene who first raises the consideration that Antigone is betrothed to Creon’s son. His response is harshly crude (lines 568–9):
ismene
But are you going to kill your own son’s bride?
creon
I am—as there are other fields for him to sow.
After this it is the scene with Haemon in which the weaknesses in Creon’s whole position are exposed. It becomes evident that, while he claims to represent the best interests of the city as a whole, it is really his own grip on power and his sense of his authority which drive him to his increasingly isolated stand. When he shows no respect at all for Haemon’s courteous persuasion, the dialogue deteriorates, and deteriorates to Creon’s disadvantage (lines 731–9):
haemon
I wouldn’t tell you to exalt those who are in the wrong.
creon
But isn’t that the plague this woman is afflicted by?
haemon
The common people here in Thebes do not agree.
creon
And is the city telling me the way to rule?
haemon
Can you not see how juvenile that sounds?
creon
Is ruling here my task—or someone else’s?
haemon
It’s no true city that belongs to just one man.
creon
And is the city not considered as its ruler’s realm?
haemon
Well, you would make the perfect monarch of a desert land.
After this domineering over his son and his ruthless enforcement of Antigone’s punishment, it is only to be expected that the prophet Tiresias will condemn Creon’s judgement. And it is by now no surprise that Creon rejects the old seer with accusations of venal bribery. What is new is Tiresias’ authoritative report that the gods above are being polluted by the unburied corpse. More fundamentally, he declares that the reason why Creon will be punished—and punished through his close family, not through the city—is that he has offended the gods below by breaking what appears to be a kind of cosmic order: the vertical division between the world in the sunlight above the ground and the world of Hades below (lines 1066–74):
This is to pay for thrusting down below
a human from this world above,
resettling a living spirit in the tomb,
whilst also keeping here above
a corpse belonging to the gods below,
unportioned and unburied and unhallowed.
Yet these things are not for you to regulate,
nor for the gods above: they have been
violently displaced through your command.
So Tiresias finally confirms those grave faults that Creon will go on to recognize with such unreserved self-reproach in the final scene of the play. Up until the Tiresias scene the audience is likely to feel an increasing unease about his demeanour and behaviour, but not such outright condemnation. Creon has been deeply wrong, but also highly understandable. He is new to power in disturbed times, and it is far from incomprehensible that he makes the mistake of deciding that his authority must be maintained above all else. It is only human that the more his power is questioned, the more aggressively he asserts it. Some might question whether Sophocles has portrayed Creon with redeeming features enough to salvage tragic pity for him in the final scene, but that is evidently the way that the shape of the play flows.
Given, then, that Creon is deeply, if understandably, flawed, is Antigone unreservedly admirable? The more closely her motivation and self-justification are scrutinized, the more any pure model of virtue crumbles. ‘Antigone-worshippers’ maintain that she stands for love against hate and tyranny; her capacity for love is even claimed to extend to all humanity. But from the actual play, viewed without prejudice—especially prejudice coloured by Christianity—it emerges that Antigone does not express love for one single living being. She virulently rejects her sister Ismene; she never even hints at any personal feelings for Haemon.10 There is a much-quoted sentiment that is claimed to express her benignity; but, once it is taken in context, it is clear that she is talking about her blood-kin, not about humanity at large. Line 523 does not mean ‘I am born to join in love, not join in hate’ but ‘I’m bound by birth to join in love, not join in enmity’.
Antigone does indeed declare love, repeatedly and fulsomely: it is expressed for her dead family, above all her father, mother, and one brother, Polynices. In the prologue scene she even uses language that suggests an incestuous colouring (lines 72–6):
It’s right for me to do that and then die;
belovèd I shall lie with him beloved,
a righteous criminal.
You see, I have to please the dead below
for longer far than those up here
as I shall lie down there for evermore.
Antigone’s arguments and driving impulses are reserved for the dead and for the gods of the underworld below.
A significant element in promoting the general admiration of Antigone has been her piety, or at least her claims of piety. But her appeals to the gods turn out to refer mostly to the gods of the underworld, or the gods in general in relation to the dead. Even her celebrated speech on the ‘unwritten statutes of the gods’ (lines 450 ff.) is, when taken in dramatic context, more particular to her fixations, and less universal in scope. As Mark Griffith well puts it, ‘her concern is not to distinguish and define the limits of secular authority, nor to articulate a coherent set of religious or political principles, but simply to defend her deeply-felt conviction that her brother and the gods below must be honoured, come what may—and she seems to be driven also by a virulent antipathy to Kreon himself ’.11
There is another strand in Antigone’s case which may appeal to some modern sensibilities, but in a way that derives from religions quite different from that of ancient Greece: the importance that Antigone attaches to her ‘afterlife’, her future existence with her family in death. This may well seem familiar and even admirable to those immersed in the traditions of Christianity or Islam. As well as the lines quoted above where she says she shall ‘have to please the dead below | for longer far than those up here’, she claims to know what the dead want and feel. For example she says to Creon (line 515), ‘the man who’s dead will not support that view’. And in her final speech she looks forward to being re-united below (897–901):
At least as I reach there I am sustained by hoping
I’ll arrive as loving to my father,
and beloved for you, my mother,
and as loving towards you, dear brother.
For all of you, when you lay dead, I washed
and dressed and poured out
funeral offerings with my own hands.
But in the Greece of Sophocles and of the great age of tragedy views of the ‘afterlife’ were very different from those of the Abrahamic religions. Hades was nothing like Paradise: the world below was usually envisaged as indistinct, dark, and comfortless. It was not even sure that the dead kept their characteristics or retained any memories from the world above. Sophocles’ audiences would not have unquestioningly accepted Antigone’s arguments about the paramount importance of affiliations among the dead, let alone their responses to the life that had been lived above by those arriving there. Arguably she is, like Creon, distorting the fundamental vertical order of the cosmos. Creon underrates the proper location of the living and the dead: Antigone overrates the lower reaches to the detriment of the living world above.
Antigone is not presented—not to my view at least—as a fully admirable, let alone lovable, person. There are stumbling-blocks in the way of sympathy for her. Or at least this is the case up until her final scene at lines 801 ff. It is her circumstances rather than her arguments that then capture the feelings of witnesses for her in the end. As she is brought under guard on the way to her subterranean cell, the old men of the chorus set the mood (lines 801–5):
As I see this, even I am
swept beyond the laws’ high order.
I can now restrain no longer
teardrops spilling as I witness
young Antigone here passing
to the room where all must sleep.
In the course of the following lament-scene Antigone appeals repeatedly, not to any personal love for Haemon, but to that way she is being deprived of ever experiencing marriage. She shall only be wedded in death—she shall even be wedded to Death. She sums up her desolation at line 876: ‘Without tears, without friends, without wedding-chorus . . .’. But at the same time she is granted the pity and the tears of spectators and readers, innumerable across the ages and the whole world. She has become an icon of Tragedy.