Three Theban Plays, The

THIS PLAY, it is generally agreed, was produced before and fairly close to the year 441 B.C. Sophocles, as we know from a reliable contemporary source, was one of the nine generals elected, with Pericles, for a campaign against the revolt of Samos in that year. The ancient introduction to the play, found in most of the manuscripts, records a tradition that Sophocles owed his election to office to the popularity of Antigone. True or false, this story could only have been based on a widely accepted belief that the play was produced before the year 441.

The story also, by setting Antigone in a political context, draws attention to the political content of the play, its concern with the problems of the polis, the city-state. Antigone resurfaces in a highly political context once again in the fourth century, some sixty years after Sophocles’ death; it had by that time become a classic. The orator and statesman Demosthenes had the clerk of the court read out Creon’s speech on the proper loyalties of a citizen (lines 194-214 of the translation) as a lesson in patriotism to his political opponent Aeschines (who had once been a professional actor and had played the part of Creon). And in that same century Aristotle quoted the play repeatedly in his treatise the Politics.

To the modern world, particularly the world of Victorian England, with its comfortable belief in progress and its confidence that such barbaric acts as exposure of an enemy’s corpse were a thing of a distant past, the subject matter of the play seemed academic. Matthew Arnold wrote in 1853 that it was “no longer possible that we should feel a deep interest in the Antigone of Sophocles.” The twentieth century has lost any such illusions. Two modern adaptations of the play, both of them alive with political urgency, are highlights in the history of the modern theater. In February 1944, in a Paris occupied by the German army, four months before the Allied landings in Normandy, Jean Anouilh produced his Antigone, a play in which Antigone is unmistakably identified with the French resistance movement. This is clear from the frequent threats of torture leveled at the heroine (not to be found in Sophocles but characteristic of Gestapo interrogations); the fact, well known to everyone in the audience, that the German Nazi military police often exposed the corpses of executed resistance fighters as a deterrent; and finally from the brilliant characterization of Creon’s guards, whose low social origins, vulgar language and callous brutality accurately recall the contemporary miliciens, the French fascist terror squads, which were more feared and hated than the Gestapo itself. The reason the German authorities allowed the production of the play is its treatment of Creon. Anouilh presents him as a practical man whose assumption of power faces him with a tragic dilemma: his desire to rule firmly but fairly, to restore and maintain order in a chaotic situation, is frustrated by a determined, fanatical, apparently irrational resistance. These are exactly the terms in which the German military authorities would have described their own position in occupied France. At the first performance the play was greeted with applause from both the French and Germans in the audience.

The other modern adaptation, Bertolt Brecht’s radical revision of Hölderlin’s translation, staged at Chur in Switzerland in 1948, was less ambivalent. The prologue is a scene in a Berlin air-raid shelter, March 1945, and it is all too clear what Creon is meant to suggest to the audience: he has launched Thebes on an aggressive war against Argos, and Polynices (conscripted by Creon in Brecht’s violent reworking of the legend) has been killed for deserting the battle line when he saw his brother Eteocles fall. At the end of the play the tide turns against Thebes as Argos counterattacks; Creon takes Thebes down with him to destruction rather than surrender. Against this Hitlerian black, Antigone is all white; she is the image of what Brecht longed to see—the rising of the German people against Hitler, a resistance that in fact never came to birth. The poem Brecht wrote for the program of the production, an address to Antigone— -reminds us that Brecht was a lyric poet as well as a dramatist, but it is a dream poem, a lament, a regret for that rising of a whole people against fascism, which Brecht’s political creed urgently demanded but which never came “out of the twilight.”

Of these two modern adaptations, Anouilh’s, which presents the conflict between the protagonists as a real dilemma, is closer to the spirit of the Sophoclean play than Brecht’s passionate advocacy of one side against the other. For in the opening scenes of the Sophoclean play Creon is presented in a light that the original audience was certain to regard as favorable: he is the defender of the city, the eloquent champion of its overriding claim on the loyalty of its citizens in time of danger. His opening speech, a declaration of principles, contains echoes of Pericles’ Funeral Speech; since that speech was delivered in the winter of 431—30 B.C., long after the first performance of Antigone, it seems likely that these phrases come from the common stock of democratic patriotic oratory. The particular action that Creon tries to justify by this general appeal, the exposure of Polynices’ corpse, may have caused the audience some uneasiness, but on his main point, that loyalty to the city takes precedence over any private loyalty, to friend or family, they would have agreed with him.

As the chorus obviously does. They express sympathy for Antigone only in the scene where she is led off to her death, and even then in such grudging terms that she takes their declaration as derision. Only when they hear from Tiresias the verdict of the gods and realize from his prophecy of wars to come that Creon’s action threatens the city with disaster, do they advise him to countermand his edict. For them the interests of the city are paramount. In the magnificent ode that they sing after the sentry comes to tell Creon that his orders have already been defied, they celebrate the progress of the human race from savagery to civilization: its culmination is the creation of the city. Man has become master of the sea and land, caught the birds of the air and tamed the beasts of the wild and taught himself speech and “the mood and mind for law that rules the city” (396). They end the song with a caution that man’s ingenuity and resourcefulness may lead him to disaster unless he “weaves in / the laws of the land, and the justice of the gods” and they repudiate the man of “reckless daring” (409-10, 415). By the end of the play the audience, if they remember these words, will think of Creon, but at this point the chorus is clearly thinking of the unidentified rebel who has defied the city’s ruler and thrown a symbolic handful of dust on the corpse of the city’s bitter enemy who was once her friend. They accept, as most of the audience did, Creon’s manifesto: “our country is our safety. / Only while she voyages true on course / can we establish friendships ...” (211-13).

This is not to say that Creon is right to order the exposure of the corpse; in fact, by the end of the play it is made clear that his action is a violation of divine law, and besides he has by then long since abandoned any claim to speak for the citizen body as a whole and in their best interest. “Am I to rule this land for others—or myself?” (823) he asks his son Haemon. There is no doubt about what he thinks is the correct answer to that question. But before he is driven by the consequences of Antigone’s defiance to reveal his true and deepest motives, he represents a viewpoint few Greeks would have challenged: that in times of crisis, the supreme loyalty of the citizen is to the state and its duly constituted authorities.

It is important to remember this since the natural instinct of all modern readers and playgoers is to sympathize fully with Antigone, the rebel and martyr. This is of course a correct instinct; in the end the gods, through their spokesman, the prophet Tiresias, uphold her claim that divine law does indeed prescribe burial for all dead men. But though she appeals to this law—“the great unwritten, unshakable traditions” (505)—in her magnificent challenge to Creon, she has other motives too. She proclaims again and again, to her sister Ismene as to her opponent Creon, the duty she owes to her brother, to the family relationship. “If I had allowed / my own mother’s son to rot, an unburied corpse”—she tells the king, “that would have been an agony!” (520-22). “He is my brother,” she tells her sister Ismene, “and—deny it as you will—/ your brother too” (55-56). Creon’s denial of burial to the corpse of Polynices has assaulted this fierce devotion to blood relationship at a particularly sensitive point, for the funeral rites, especially the emotional lament over the dead, were, in an ancient Greek household, the duty and privilege of the women. (In the villages of Greece today they still are.) Antigone and Ismene are the last surviving women of the house of Oedipus; this is why it seems to Antigone that Creon’s decree is aimed particularly at them—“the martial law our good Creon / lays down for you and me” (37-38)—and why she takes it for granted Ismene will help her and turns so contemptuously and harshly against her when she refuses.

Antigone’s dedicated loyalty to the family is, however, more than a private code of conduct; in the context of fifth-century Athens her challenge to the authority of the city-state and defense of a blood relationship had strong political overtones. Athenian democratic institutions were egalitarian beyond anything conceivable in modern societies (many important magistracies, for example, were filled by lot, not election), but Athens had for centuries before the establishment of democracy been ruled by the great aristocratic families that traced their descent from heroic or divine ancestors, and these families were still, under the democracy, powerful, cohesive, exclusive groups, which maintained their separate identities through religious cults and family priesthoods. They were powerful concentrations of patronage and influence, and they worked, within the democratic institutions, openly or through unseen connections, for the advancement and interests of their members (a phenomenon not unknown in modern Greece as well).

The political aspect of Antigone’s loyalty is emphasized at once in Creon’s inaugural address: “whoever places a friend [the Greek word philos also means ”relative“] / above the good of his own country, he is nothing” (203-4). And when he realizes later that this is in fact the issue between him and his niece, he reconfirms her death sentence with a sarcastic reference to Zeus Homaimos, the divinity especially associated with the family worship: “let her cry for mercy, sing her hymns / to Zeus who defends all bonds of kindred blood” (735-36).

Antigone appeals not only to the bond of kindred blood but also to the unwritten law, sanctioned by the gods, that the dead must be given proper burial—a religious principle. But Creon’s position is not anti-religious; in fact he believes that he has religion on his side. The gods, for him, are the gods of the city, which contains and protects their shrines, celebrates their festivals and sacrifices, and prays to them for deliverance; Creon finds it unthinkable that these gods should demand the burial of a traitor to the city who came with a foreign army at his back

Once again, there would have been many in the audience who felt the same way. These vivid phrases would have recalled to them the destruction of Athens and the desecration of its temples by the Persian invaders in 480; they 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 pro-Persian conspiratorial activity. Hounded from one Greek city to another he finally took refuge in Persian-controlled territory, where he died. When his relatives wished to bring his bones back to be buried in Athenian soil, permission was refused. Creon’s decree of course goes much further and forbids burial altogether, but the Athenian attitude toward Themistocles shows that for Sophocles’ audience the decree did not sound as outlandishly barbaric as it does to us. In the play, the opening song of the chorus gives tense expression to the terror inspired in the Theban people by Polynices’ treacherous attack, their hatred of the foreign warlords he has marshaled against them, and their joy at their own deliverance and his defeat and death.

The opening scenes show us the conflicting claims and loyalties of the two adversaries, solidly based, in both cases, on opposed political and religious principles. This is of course the basic insight of Hegel’s famous analysis of the play: he sees it as “a collision between the two highest moral powers.” What is wrong with them, in his view, is that they are both “one-sided.” But Hegel goes much further than that. He was writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, a period of fervent German nationalism in which the foundations of the unified German state were laid: his views on loyalty to the state were very much those of Creon. “Creon,” he says, “is not a tyrant, he is really a moral power. He is not in the wrong.”

However, as the action develops the favorable impression created by Creon’s opening speech is quickly dissipated. His announcement of his decision to expose the corpse, the concluding section of his speech, is couched in violent, vindictive terms—“carrion for the birds and dogs to tear” (230)—which stand in shocking contrast to the ethical generalities that precede it. This hint of a cruel disposition underlying the statesmanlike façade is broadened by the threat of torture leveled at the sentry (344—50) and the order to execute Antigone in the presence of Haemon, her betrothed (852—54). And as he meets resistance from a series of opponents—Antigone’s contemptuous defiance, the rational, political advice of his son Haemon, the imperious summons to obedience of the gods’ spokesman, Tiresias—he swiftly abandons the temperate rhetoric of his inaugural address for increasingly savage invective. Against the two sanctions invoked by Antigone, the demands of blood relationship, the rights and privileges of the gods below, he rages in terms ranging from near-blasphemous defiance to scornful mockery.

And for Antigone’s appeals to Hades, the great god of the underworld to whom the dead belong, Creon has nothing but contempt; for him “Hades” is simply a word meaning “death,” a sentence he is prepared to pass on anyone who stands in his way. He threatens the sentry with torture as a prelude: “simple death won’t be enough for you” (348). When asked if he really intends to deprive Haemon of his bride he answers sarcastically: “Death will do it for me” (648). He expects to see Antigone and Ismene turn coward “once they see Death coming for their lives” (655). With a derisive comment he tells his son to abandon Antigone: “Spit her out, / ... Let her find a husband down among the dead [in Hades’ house]” (728-30). And he dismisses Antigone’s reverence for Hades and the rights of the dead with mockery as he condemns her to be buried alive: “There let her pray to the one god she worships: / Death” (875—76). But this Hades is not something to be so lightly referred to, used or mocked. In the great choral ode which celebrated Man’s progress and powers this was the one insurmountable obstacle that confronted him:

ready, resourceful man!
Never without resources
never an impasse as he marches on the future—
only Death, from Death alone he will find no rescue ... (401—4)

Creon is forced at last to recognize the strength of those social and religious imperatives that Antigone obeys, but long before this happens he has abandoned the principles which he had proclaimed as authority for his own actions. His claim to be representative of the whole community is forgotten as he refuses to accept Haemon’s report that the citizens, though they dare not speak out, disapprove of his action; he denies the relevance of such a report even if true—“And is Thebes about to tell me how to rule?” (821)—and finally repudiates his principles in specific terms by an assertion that the city belongs to him—“The city is the king’s—that’s the law!” (825). This autocratic phrase puts the finishing touch to the picture Sophocles is drawing for his audience: Creon has now displayed all the characteristics of the “tyrant,” a despotic ruler who seizes power and retains it by intimidation and force. Athens had lived under the rule of a “tyrant” before the democracy was established in 508 B.C., and the name and institution were still regarded with abhorrence. Creon goes on to abandon the gods whose temples crown the city’s high places, the gods he once claimed as his own, and his language is even more violent. The blind prophet Tiresias tells him that the birds and dogs are fouling the altars of the city’s gods with the carrion flesh of Polynices; he must bury the corpse. His furious reply begins with a characteristic accusation that the prophet has been bribed (the sentry had this same accusation flung at him), but what follows is a hideously blasphemous defiance of those gods Creon once claimed to serve:

You’ll never bury that body in the grave,
not even if Zeus’s eagles rip the corpse
and wing their rotten pickings off to the throne of god! (1151—53)

But here she is appealing for sympathy to the city over the heads of the chorus, the city’s symbolic representative on stage. In all her arguments with Creon and Ismene she speaks as one wholly unconscious of the rights and duties membership in the city confers and imposes, as if no unit larger than the family existed. It is a position just as extreme as Creon’s insistence that the demands of the city take precedence over all others, for the living and the dead alike.

Like Creon, she acts in the name of gods, but they are different gods. There is more than a little truth in Creon’s mocking comment that Hades is “the one god she worships” (875). She is from the beginning “much possessed by death”; together with Ismene she is the last survivor of a doomed family, burdened with such sorrow that she finds life hardly worth living. “Who on earth,” she says to Creon, “alive in the midst of so much grief as I, / could fail to find his death a rich reward?” (516—18). She has performed the funeral rites for mother, father and her brother Eteocles:

I washed you with my hands,
I dressed you all, I poured the sacred cups
across your tombs. (989—91)

She now sacrifices her life to perform a symbolic burial, a handful of dust sprinkled on the corpse, for Polynices, the brother left to rot on the battlefield. She looks forward to her reunion with her beloved dead in that dark kingdom where Persephone, the bride of Hades, welcomes the ghosts (980-82). It is in the name of Hades, one of the three great gods who rule the universe, that she defends the right of Polynices and of all human beings to proper burial. “Death [Hades] longs for the same rites for all” (584), she tells Creon—for patriot and traitor alike; she rejects Ismene’s plea to be allowed to share her fate with an appeal to the same stern authority: “Who did the work? / Let the dead and the god of death bear witness!” (610—11). In Creon’s gods, the city’s patrons and defenders, she shows no interest at all. Zeus she mentions twice: once as the source of all the calamities that have fallen and are still to fall on the house of Oedipus (3-5), and once again at the beginning of her famous speech about the unwritten laws. But the context here suggests strongly that she is thinking about Zeus in his special relationship to the underworld, Zeus Chthonios (Underworld Zeus). “It wasn’t Zeus,” she says,

But, like Creon, she ends by denying the great sanctions she invoked to justify her action. In his case the process was spread out over the course of several scenes, as he reacted to each fresh pressure that was brought to bear on him; Antigone turns her back on the claims of blood relationship and the nether gods in one sentence: three lines in Greek, no more. They are the emotional high point of the speech she makes just before she is led off to her death.

These unexpected words are part of the long speech that concludes a scene of lyric lamentation and is in effect her farewell to the land of the living. They are certainly a total repudiation of her proud claim that she acted as the champion of the unwritten laws and the infernal gods, for, as she herself told Creon, those laws and those gods have no preferences, they long “for the same rites for all” (584). And her assertion that she would not have done for her children what she has done for Polynices is a spectacular betrayal of that fanatical loyalty to blood relationship which she urged on Ismene and defended against Creon, for there is no closer relationship imaginable than that between the mother and the children of her own body. Creon turned his back on his guiding principles step by step, in reaction to opposition based on those principles; Antigone’s rejection of her public values is just as complete, but it is the sudden product of a lonely, brooding introspection, a last-minute assessment of her motives, on which the imminence of death confers a merciless clarity. She did it because Polynices was her brother; she would not have done it for husband or child. She goes on to justify this disturbing statement by an argument which is more disturbing still: husband and children, she says, could be replaced by others but, since her parents are dead, she could never have another brother. It so happens that we can identify the source of this strange piece of reasoning; it is a story in the Histories of Sophocles’ friend Herodotus (a work from which Sophocles borrowed material more than once). 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 brother’s. When Darius asked her why, she replied in words that are unmistakably the original of Antigone’s lines. But what makes sense in the story makes less in the play. The wife of Intaphrenes saves her brother’s life, but Polynices is already dead; Antigone’s phrase “no brother could ever spring to light again” (1004) would be fully appropriate only if Antigone had managed to save Polynices’ life rather than bury his corpse.

For this reason, and also because of some stylistic anomalies in this part of the speech, but most of all because they felt that the words are unworthy of the Antigone who spoke so nobly for the unwritten laws, many great scholars and also a great poet and dramatist, Goethe, have refused to believe that Sophocles wrote them. “I would give a great deal,” Goethe told his friend Eckermann in 1827, “if some talented scholar could prove that these lines were interpolated, not genuine.” Goethe did not know that the attempt had already been made, six years earlier; many others have tried since—Sir Richard Jebb, the greatest English editor of Sophocles, pronounced against them—and opinion today is still divided. Obviously a decision on this point is of vital significance for the interpretation of the play as a whole: with these lines removed, Antigone goes to her prison-tomb with no flicker of self-doubt, the flawless champion of the family bond and the unwritten laws, “whole as the marble, founded as the rock”—unlike Creon, she is not, in the end, reduced to recognizing that her motive is purely personal.

There is however one objective piece of evidence that speaks volumes for the authenticity of the disputed lines. Aristotle, writing his treatise on rhetoric less than a century after the death of Sophocles, summarizes this part of Antigone’s speech and quotes the two lines about the irreplaceability of a brother. He is telling the would-be orator that if, in a law-court speech for the defense, he has to describe an action that seems inappropriate for the character of his client and hard to believe, he must provide an explanation for it “as in the example Sophocles gives, the one from Antigone”—the phrasing suggests that the passage was well known to Aristotle’s readers. Evidently he does not find the passage as repellent as Goethe and Jebb did; he recognizes that Antigone’s initial statement is, in terms of her character, “hard to believe” (apiston), but apparently he finds her explanation rhetorically satisfactory. He does not, however, for one moment suspect the authenticity of the lines. And this should make modern critics think twice before they make another attempt to oblige the shade of Goethe. Aristotle was head of a philosophical school which, under his direction, investigated the origins and early history of drama and drew up its chronology, based on official documents; he was himself the author of the most influential critique of the drama ever written, the Poetics; he was an acute critic of poetic style, with a keen eye for improprieties of diction and syntax; and, finally, he was perfectly conscious of the possibility of really damaging inconsistency of character, for in the Poetics he criticized Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis on precisely that score. His acceptance of Antigone’s speech as genuine demands that rather than suppress it we should try to understand it.

This is Antigone’s third and last appearance on stage; in the prologue she planned her action, in the confrontation with Creon she defended it, and now, under guard, she is on her way to the prison which is to be her tomb. In lyric meters, the dramatic medium for unbridled emotion, she appeals to the chorus for sympathy and mourns for the marriage hymn she will never hear (this is as close as she ever comes to mentioning Haemon). She gets little comfort from the Theban elders; the only consolation they offer is a reminder that she may be the victim of a family curse—“do you pay for your father’s terrible ordeal?” (946)—a suggestion that touches her to the quick and provokes a horror-struck rehearsal of the tormented loves and crimes of the house of Oedipus. There is, as she goes on to say, no one left to mourn her; the lyric lament she sings in this scene is her attempt to provide for herself that funeral dirge which her blood relatives would have wailed over her corpse, if they had not already preceded her into the realm of Hades. This is recognized by Creon, who cuts off the song with a sarcastic comment : “if a man could wail his own dirge before he dies, / he’d never finish” (970-71). And he orders the guards to take her away.

Her song cut off, she turns from the lyric medium of emotion to spoken verse, the vehicle of reasoned statement, for her farewell speech. It is not directed at anyone on stage; it resembles a soliloquy, a private meditation. It is an attempt to understand the real reasons for the action that has brought her to the brink of death. After an address to the tomb and prison where she expects to be reunited with her family she speaks to Polynices (Creon is referred to in the third person). It is to Polynices that she is speaking when she says that she would not have given her life for anyone but a brother; it is as if she had already left the world of the living and joined that community of the family dead she speaks of with such love. Now, in the face of death, oblivious of the presence of Creon and the chorus, with no public case to make, no arguments to counter, she can at last identify the driving force behind her action, the private, irrational imperative which was at the root of her championship of the rights of family and the dead against the demands of the state. It is her fanatical devotion to one particular family, her own, the doomed, incestuous, accursed house of Oedipus and especially to its most unfortunate member, the brother whose corpse lay exposed to the birds and dogs. When she tells him that she has done for him what she would not have done for husband or children she is not speaking in wholly hypothetical terms, for in sober fact she has sacrificed, for his sake, her marriage to Haemon and the children that might have issued from it.

And in this moment of self-discovery she realizes that she is absolutely alone, not only rejected by men but also abandoned by gods. “What law of the mighty gods have I transgressed?” (1013) she asks—as well she may, for whatever her motive may have been, her action was a blow struck for the rights of Hades and the dead. Unlike Christians whose master told them not to look for signs from heaven (Matthew 16:4), the ancient Greek expected if not direct intervention at least some manifestation of favor or support from his gods when he believed his cause was just—a flight of eagles, the bird of Zeus, or lightning and thunder, the signs which, in the last play, summon Oedipus to his resting place. But Antigone has to renounce this prospect: “Why look to the heavens any more ... ?” (1014). She must go to her death as she has lived, alone, without a word of approval or a helping hand from men or gods.

Antigone’s discovery that her deepest motives were purely personal has been overinterpreted by those who would suppress the passage on the grounds that, to quote Jebb’s eloquent indictment, “she suddenly gives up that which, throughout the drama, has been the immovable basis of her action—the universal and unqualified validity of the divine law.” This formulation is too absolute. Before the raw immediacy of death, which, as Doctor Johnson remarked, wonderfully concentrates the mind, she has sounded the depths of her own soul and identified the determinant of those high principles she proclaimed in public. But that does not mean that they were a pretense, still less that she has now abandoned them. She dies for them. In her very last words, as she calls on the chorus to bear witness to her unjust fate, she claims once more and for the last time that she is the champion of divine law—she suffers “all for reverence, my reverence for the gods!” (034).

Unlike Creon, who after proclaiming the predominance of the city’s interests rides roughshod over them, speaking and acting like a tyrant, who after extolling the city’s gods dismisses Tiresias, their spokesman, with a blasphemous insult, Antigone does not betray the loyalties she spoke for. No word of compromise or surrender comes to her lips, no plea for mercy; she has nothing to say to Creon—in fact the last words of her speech are a prayer to the gods for his punishment. “But if these men are wrong”—she does not even name him—

Antigone reaffirms the rightness of her action, despite the open disapproval of the chorus and the silent indifference of the gods; she has not changed—“still the same rough winds, the wild passion . . .” The chorus here restates the judgment it has passed on her earlier in the scene: “Your own blind will, your passion has destroyed you” (962). This is of course the verdict of a chorus that is clearly sympathetic to Creon’s political program (and also afraid of his wrath), but it contains an element of truth. This young princess is a formidable being, a combination of cold resolve and fierce intensity. Unlike Anouilh’s Antigone she has no tender emotions; except when she speaks to Polynices, she is all hard steel. Once she has made up her mind to act, no persuasion, no threat, not death itself can break her resolution. She will not yield a point or give an inch: “she hasn’t learned,” says the chorus, “to bend before adversity” (527)—and she never does. Those who oppose her will are met with contempt and defiance; friends who try to dissuade her are treated as enemies. Even when she despairs of the gods to whom she had looked for help, she does not waver; she goes to her death with a last disdainful insult to Creon: “see what I suffer now / at the hands of what breed of men” (1032-33).

This is a pattern of character and behavior which is found in other Sophoclean dramatic figures also; not only in the Oedipus of the other two plays of this volume but also in the protagonists of Ajax, Electra and Philoctetes. They are of course very different from each other, but they all have in common the same uncompromising determination, the same high sense of their own worth and a consequent quickness to take offense, the readiness to die rather than surrender—a heroic temper. This figure of the tragic hero, though it had a nonhuman predecessor in the Aeschylean Titan Prometheus and its origin in the great Achilles of the Homeric Iliad, seems, as far as we can tell from what remains of Attic tragedy, to have been a peculiarly Sophoclean creation. In his plays he explores time and again the destinies of human beings who refuse to recognize the limits imposed on the individual will by men and gods, and go to death or triumph, magnificently defiant to the last.

Antigone is such a heroic figure, and this is another of the ways in which she is different from Creon. Not only does Creon, unlike Antigone, betray in action the principles he claimed to stand for; he also, subjected to pressure that falls far short of the death Antigone is faced with, collapses in abject surrender. He was sure Antigone would give way when force was applied; he has seen “the stiffest stubborn wills / fall the hardest; the toughest iron... crack and shatter” (528-31)—but he is wrong. He is the one who is shattered. Tiresias tells him that he will lose a child of his own to death in return for the living being he has imprisoned in the tomb and the corpse he has kept in the sunlight. He hesitates: “I’m shaken, torn. / It’s a dreadful thing to yield . . .” (1218—19). But yield he does. “What should I do?” he asks the chorus (1223) and they tell him: release Antigone, bury Polynices. But he arrives too late; Antigone, independent to the last, has chosen her own way to die—she has hanged herself in the tomb. Creon finds Haemon mourning his betrothed; the son spits in his father’s face, tries to run him through with his sword and, failing, kills himself. Creon’s wife, Eurydice, hearing the news, kills herself too, her last words a curse on her husband.

Creon, as we learned from his speech to Haemon earlier in the play, had his own idea of what a family should be. “That’s what a man prays for: to produce good sons—/ a household full of them, dutiful and attentive ...” (715—16). His savage dismissal of the claims of that blood relationship Antigone stood for has been punished with exquisite appropriateness, in the destruction of his own family, the curses of his son and wife. Tiresias predicted that he would have to repay the gods below with a death—“one born of your own loins” (1184); the payment has been double, son and wife as well. The gods of the city whom he claimed to defend, have, through the medium of the blind seer, denounced his action, and the city he proposed to steer on a firm course is now, as Tiresias told him, threatened by the other cities whose dead were left to rot, like Polynices, outside the walls of Thebes (1201—5). He is revealed as a disastrous failure, both as head of a family and head of state, an offender against heaven and a man without family or friends, without the respect of his fellow-citizens. He may well describe himself as “no one. Nothing” (1446).

Antigone asked the gods to punish Creon if he was wrong, and they have. They have shown to all the world that her action was right. But she did not live to see her vindication. She took her own life and by that action sealed the doom and ensured the punishment of Creon. But the will of the gods remains, as in all three of these plays, mysterious; revealed partially, if at all, through prophets rejected and prophecies misunderstood, it is the insoluble riddle at the heart of Sophocles’ tragic vision. The gods told Creon he was wrong, but it is noticeable that Tiresias, their spokesman, does not say Antigone was right, he does not praise her—in fact he does not mention her. Antigone was ready to admit, if the gods did not save her and she suffered death, that she was wrong (1017-18); these words suggest that she hanged herself not just to cut short the lingering agony of starvation and imprisonment but in a sort of existential despair. Why did the gods not save her, since they approved her action? Was it because her motives, even those she openly proclaimed, were too narrow—her total indifference to the city and its rights an offense to heaven? Because, to use Eliot’s phrase, she “did the right thing for the wrong reason”? We are not told. Her death, which leads directly to the destruction of Creon’s family, is a thread in a tragic web spun by powers who are beyond our comprehension. “Since the gods conceal all things divine,” runs a fragment from a lost Sophoclean play, “you will never understand them, not though you go searching to the ends of the earth.”

The gods do not praise Antigone, nor does anyone else in the play—except the young man who loves her so passionately that he cannot bear to live without her. Haemon tells his father what the Thebans are saying behind his back, the “murmurs in the dark” (775): that Antigone deserves not death but “a glowing crown of gold!” (782). Whether this is a true report (and the chorus does not praise Antigone even when they have been convinced that she was right) or just his own feelings attributed to others for the sake of his argument, it is a timely reminder of Antigone’s heroic status. In the somber world of the play, against the background of so many sudden deaths and the dark mystery of the divine dispensation, her courage and steadfastness are a gleam of light; she is the embodiment of the only consolation tragedy can offer—that in certain heroic natures unmerited suffering and death can be met with a greatness of soul which, because it is purely human, brings honor to us all.

INTRODUCTION