Sophocles: Antigone. Peter Ahrensdorf and Thomas L. Pangle translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.
Sophocles: Antigone. William Blake Tyrrell translation and notes. Posted on-line by Professor Tyrrell.
William Blake Tyrrell and Larry J. Bennett: Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998.
Seth Benardete: Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999.
Note: Benardete’s characteristically subtle and intricate interpretation of the play resists summary, and no attempt at such will be found here. Rather, I have taken insights from his book to supplement my own (much simpler, and indeed simple-minded) interpretation, indicating them in parenthetical references to the pages on which they are found. “B” refers to Benardete, “TB” to Tyrrell and Bennett.
WM
In the city of Thebes, outside the gates of the royal courtyard, seeking secrecy, away from listening ears of rulers and their allies, Antigone meets with her sister, Ismene, in the semi-darkness before sunrise. Antigone appeals to their familial bond, calling her “sister,” but also intends to call her into a plot, a joint action, calling her “partner.” She appeals, too, to shared suffering, to the “evils” which have befallen them both, as a consequence of their father Oedipus’ actions or the wrath of Zeus—”your and my evils.” She is indignant at a public action. “The general,” Creon, has “laid down” an “edict” regarding their brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices. After the death of King Oedipus, they had quarreled over the throne. Polyneices had recruited an
Argive army to attack Thebes; during the battle, won by the Thebans, they killed each other. “Evils proper to enemies are coming against loved ones,” Antigone says. Ismene has heard “no word” of the edict, and Antigone has suspected as much: “Outside the gates of the Courtyard, I drew you for this very reason, so that you alone might hear.” Creon has honored Eteocles, defender of Thebes, and dishonored Polyneices, refusing to allow him to be buried. Anyone who attempts to bury him will be executed by “public stoning” by the city. You, Ismene, now knowing this, “will soon show whether you are by nature of good descent or one born wicked from those who are noble.” You will show it by deciding whether or not to join my plot, a private action intended to subvert what she takes to be an unjust public action.
Antigone associates sky-god Zeus with the city, Creon also with the city, the public. The city is said to be ruled by the Olympian gods. Antigone, however, cares not for the city but for the family, for the gods of the household, gods who dwell beneath the earth in the Underworld, which is ruled by Hades, chief ground of the Underworld. She associates nature, too, with the family, with bloodlines or descent. Antigone does not say why Creon has issued his edict. Nor does she mention the war, the fact that Eteocles and Polyneices were rivals for the rule of Thebes, the fact that Polyneices was killed during the war after having attacked Thebes and that Eteocles defended Thebes. She is also silent on the fact that the brothers perished in acts of mutual fratricide. She has no interest in politics or war. Instead she speaks about how Polyneices’ body has been “left for the birds,” food they doubtless will regard as “a sweet treasure,” not as what it is for humans, a putrid corpse (B.3) Although Creon has issued his edict to the city, Antigone insists that he has meant it as a command to you, Ismene, and “to me!” “It is no business of his to keep me from my own!” Antigone loves her own, her own family and especially her own brother. Even before Ismene can say if she will join her plot to give their brother a decent burial, which will enable him to join the royal family in the Underworld, Antigone has claimed the action for herself.
Ismene demurs. Our father, she argues, died “hated and infamous,” a suicide, having killed his father and married his mother, who also committed suicide; our family is not as loveable and noble as you claim. Our brothers killed each other. Then there is the city, and its ruler: “Consider how terribly we will be destroyed, if, in defiance of the law we transgress the decree or power of tyrants.” Ismene knows or perhaps assumes that the law of the city requires obedience to the decrees or edicts of tyrants. Finally, there is a natural limit associated with the city’s threat, countervailing the natural bond of family. “We are by nature women, not combatants against men”; it is a natural fact that “we are ruled by those who are stronger.” Therefore, “Those living in authority I will obey,” hoping for “understanding” from those no longer living, those “under the earth,” no longer on it. “For to do what is beyond the bounds” of family obligation, of decrees, and of the law that she thinks supports those decrees, “is altogether mindless!”
For Ismene, then “nature” means first and foremost the difference in physical strength between the sexes. “Antigone” means anti-woman, anti-generation. Like Lady Macbeth, Anti-gone ‘unsexes’ herself, ignoring her womanliness (B.10). This puts her in a circumstance of unusual tension with the city; she is a woman who thinks and acts against her womanly nature, but at the same time defies the man-ruled city. Her denial enables her to dismiss Ismene’s last argument. “You will be whatever suits your opinion,” she ripostes. Being—meaning here a way of life— is determined by opinion, for Antigone; it is not a ‘given.’ A way of life may be noble or ignoble. For my part, “I will bury him. It is noble for me, doing this, to die. A loved one will I lie, with him, a loved one—having stopped at nothing in doing this pious deed!” Lying-with is the language of incest, one of father King Oedipus’ crimes (B.13). Antigone will perform a pious deed—honoring the gods of the Underworld—for an end that suggests the incestuous, impiousness. But she does make a rational argument, too, saying she prefers to “please” the dead because it is in the Underworld where “I lie forever.” The above-ground world where cities are is only a temporary home for human beings. The gods of the city may punish us here, but it is the gods of the Underworld who will rule us eternally.
Ismene rejoins, “I am by nature incapable of acting in violent defiance of the citizens.” Her nature, fearful or at least respectful of men’s superior bodily strength, inflects her way of life, which in turn is shaped by public opinion—itself the rule of the stronger, of the majority. Further, you, Antigone, “have a warm heart for cold things,” for a corpse, for the dead. “But you know that I am satisfying those whom I must especially please,” Antigone replies—the deathless dead. Your love is misdirected, Ismene insists, as “you are passionately in love with what is impossible”—namely, successful defiance of men’s power in the city; further, such “a hunt for what is impossible is not fitting,” not natural or legal. Antigone, however, intends precisely to defy the limits of what Ismene says is fitting. “I will suffer nothing that is so great that I will not die ignobly.” She chooses not a decent life but a noble death. Ismene calls this “mindless,” while admitting that her sister is “rightly dear to your loved ones.” They depart, separately.
The Chorus, who are the city elders, greet the Sun, a sky-god, not an Underworld god. They credit him for having driven away “the Mortal from Argos,” Capaneus, whom Polyneices had “raised up” against Thebes as an ally in his struggle for the throne. Benardete observes that Antigone is the only suffering heroine in extant Greek tragedy who has no female chorus to console her (B.19). Unlike self-unsexed Antigone, the Chorus side with the city and its gods, especially Zeus, who “detests the boasts of a great tongue,” the boasts of a failed would-be conqueror like Capaneus. Zeus rules the turning points of battles on earth; along with the war-god Ares, he causes victory (B.22). As for the lamentable deaths of the two brothers, “since great-named Victory has come with responsive joy to well-armed Thebes, of these present wars establish forgetfulness.” They would have the city celebrate with wine-god Bacchus (Dionysus), whose mother, Semele, was born in Thebes; Bacchus is well-armed for inducing forgetfulness. The Chorus calls Creon a king, not a tyrant, as Antigone had done. Seeing him, the Chorus wonders, “What plan does he come turning over”?
Creon addresses this “assembly of elders.” “Men,” he announces—appeals to manliness will prove crucial to his claim to rule—”the affairs of the city the gods have safely set right again, after having shaken them with much tossing,” by which he may mean not only the war but the travails of Oedipus and his queen-mother-wife, Jocasta. But now he must establish his own legitimacy, and this will drive his arguments and actions throughout. He knows that the elders “have always revered” the “throne of Laius,” that is, the ruling dynasty to which Oedipus was heir. In this he glosses over Oedipus’ dubious accession to power and his crimes, which may have invalidated his sons’ claims to succeed him in ruling the city (B.24). Like Antigone, then, Creon needs to derive the authority he claims from the Laius family, but like her, the authority he so derives is questionable—parricidal and incestuous, both against the family and familial-too-familial. He therefore points not to the legitimacy of Oedipus’ claim to rule but to the wisdom which made him deserving of it, seen in his solution of the riddle of the Sphinx. Despite all the troubles that followed, you elders “remained still steadfast in mind,” consenting to the rule of the house of Laius.
Now, having witnessed the deaths by fratricide of the inheriting brothers, killed “by their own polluting hands,” you surely must recognize that “it is I who hold all the might and the throne in accordance with closeness of kinship with the dead”; he is the wife of Oedipus’ surviving sister. This means that neither Creon nor the elders contemplate accession to the throne by a woman, whether his wife or either of Oedipus’ daughters. Women remain in the household, protected by the city but not ruling it. As for his wisdom and other virtues—the better claim of Oedipus to rule, and one that Creon needs to address, as well—”it is not feasible to learn, in the case of any man, the soul and mind and judgment, until he would be manifestly tested by offices and laws.” Proverbially, ‘power shows the man’; you can only find out what’s in a man if you give him the authority to rule. As a precaution, however, Creon admits that “to me whoever in directing an entire city fails to grasp the best counsels… seems now, and from of old, most evil”; he promises to share power with the elders, not to rule tyrannically. As if anticipating Antigone’s defiance, or at least defiance of he edict he has issued against the burial of Polyneices, he adds that “whoever conventionally holds a loved one as better than the land of his own fathers, I say this man is nowhere!” Creon associates fathers and brother-citizens with the land; Antigone associates fathers and brothers with their graves, with the family plots in which their remains are interred. Benardete remarks that the city is the regime, but the fatherland “persists through all changes of regime” (B.25). Creon would consolidate his regime not only or even primarily by invoking the royal line to which he is related only by marriage, nor by blood, nor so much to his virtues (which are by his own admission as yet unproven), but by linking his regime to the fatherland, to the Olympian gods who rule that fatherland. He appeals not only to the elders’ loyalty to the royal family, not only to their proffered share in political authority, but to their patriotism. To make this claim, and to assert moreover its priority over the claims of family, he calls family claims merely conventional, whereas his edict is patriotic, calling citizens to a larger brotherhood, to loyalty to the land of their fathers, not to the claims of the fathers and brothers of their own particular families.
His argument is by no means trivial. From his own time to ours, families and clans challenge the authority of political communities, at times threatening to split them apart in civil war, at times appealing to foreign rulers to strengthen their claims to rule—foreign rulers who may decide to rule the community themselves, once admitted into its gates. The defense of political rule against familial self-rule has merit. It remains to be seen whether Creon’s defense of such rule makes sense, whether his way of ruling will prove as virtuous as he promises. And there is one dimension of the circumstance that goes unmentioned by Antigone, who is apolitical and doesn’t care about it, by Creon, who is tyrannical and has no reason to mention it, and indeed by no one, now or later. Polyneices and Eteocles had a pact; they agreed to share the rule of the city, taking turns being king on an annual basis. Eteocles violated his oath and refused to step down when his year was up; in raising the Argive army against Thebes, Polyneices, it could at least be argued, prosecuted a just war—at least in the sense that he fought for a just cause. No person in Sophocles’ play mentions this, but the audience at the play might well have known it that patriotic Eteocles violated an oath witnessed by the city he defended.
Like Antigone, Creon believes that he knows the minds of the gods, and that they know his mind. “For I—may Zeus Who always sees all things know—would not be silent when I saw ruin in place of salvation coming on the townsmen.” I shall never “hold dear a man who was ill disposed to the land,” the fatherland; “for I now that this is what saves, and that when this sails upright, we make loved ones.” The land, the surface of the earth, provides protection and nourishment for those who live on it, in cities; we owe it our prime loyalty for that reason. Antigone associates love, and loveableness, with family; Creon associates it with the fatherland, as those who are loyal to it will love one another. Further, “it is with laws such as these that I make the city grow.” The ‘law’ in this case is his edict to honor Eteocles, “who in fighting on behalf of this city died,” and to dishonor Polyneices, who, while “sharing [Eteocles’] blood,” attempted “to burn down the land of his fathers and the kindred gods,” to “drink common blood and to carry [the Thebans] away as slaves.” The familial blood-tie didn’t stop Polyneices from turning against his brother, and to form the intention to ruin the city he could not rule. [1]
The argument again has merit, but it is shadowed with problems. Creon confuses his edict with the law, indeed, “mistak[ing] the laws of his soul for the laws of his country” (B.28). His edict and his justification of it he calls “my thought”; never by me shall the wicked take precedence in honor over the just, who, “in death and while living, will be honored similarly by me.” Because he cannot simply inherit rule, because he must argue for it, and because he intends a regime of one man, not many or even a few, his speech shades into a self-absorption not unlike that of Antigone. The difference is that he ‘identifies with’ the city—directs his eros towards it—not the family. It is not, as Benardete says, that Cleon fails to see the possibility of conflict between love of one’s own country and love of one’s own family, a failure that “shows how unprepared he is to confront Antigone” (B.27); on the contrary, he sees that possibility quite clearly, and argues against it. Rather, he tries to override that conflict, to defeat it as thoroughly as the Thebans have defeated the Argives in the war. But the civil life of the city may require more balance than the violent life of the battlefield, outside the city. The Chorus, who speak for respectable opinion in the city, put the responsibility for the edict squarely on Creon; they imagine he wants them to guard the corpse. But Creon has guards for that; he only wants the Chorus “not to join the side of those who lack faith in these things” that he has asserted. To this, the Chorus replies, “No man is so foolish as to love being dead!” That is, they fear Cleon’s power more than they consent freely to his rule. What will upend Creon is not them but Antigone, the anti-woman woman, who is indeed so foolish as to love being dead, for reasons she has disclosed to her sister, reasons at present unknown to Creon, the Chorus, or any of the men who are citizens.
Uneasy the head that wears the (somewhat dubious) crown: Creon suspects that hope of gain might overpower fear of death among the men of the city. A guard enters to report, reluctantly, that Polyneices’ corpse has been sprinkled with dust, that “the holy rituals” have been performed on it, contravening Creon’s edict. The guard denies that he did it; he denies any knowledge of who did it; and he denies that any of his fellow guards did it, saying that they had fallen to accusing each other of the deed. This guard was chosen by lot to tell Creon the bad news; he is the scapegoat, ‘chosen’ by Fate. When the pious, elderly Chorus suggest that the gods did it, Creon angrily denies it. The gods of these temples, the gods who accept offerings in those temples, the gods of this land, of these laws, would never honor this corpse. No, his political enemies must have bribed the guards, a theme upon which he is quick to moralize. To humans “there is no conventional thing that has grown up that is so evil as money,” which divides and ruins both cities and families, perverts hitherto “upstanding minds,” destroys morals and sets mortals to “shameful acts,” indeed to “impiety in every action.” He swears by Zeus that if you guards fail to find the criminal and “show him to my eyes, Hades alone won’t suffice for you,” as I will torture you before I kill you. That will teach you; “you shall learn that one ought not to be fond of making gain from everything!” Under his regime, “more are ruined than saved” by such “shameful takings.”
The Guard is surprisingly insouciant in the face of these threats, quite unlike the Chorus, who are already intimidated, without having been threatened. Creon had threatened actions to cut through words—lies and opinions. But the Guard is confident that his innocence will prevail and besides, he will simply not return to Creon’s presence. He had worried that Creon would have him executed merely for reporting bad news, but “having been preserved” from this, “beyond my hope and my judgment,” he “owe[s] to the gods great gratitude.” Having been chose by lot to risk himself, he has now been saved by Fate or by the gods, whichever determined the outcome of the lot. He can now take matters into his own hands by avoiding Creon in the future.
Creon and the Guard exit, leaving the Chorus to reflect upon these events. They too generalize, and moralize, from the events and characters they have seen to observations about the nature of man. “Many are the terrible things, and nothing more terrible than man!” Their immediate example is terrifying Creon, but Creon is human, and his actions are human-all-too human. Man sails the sea, powered by the winter winds; he travels on “the highest” of the gods, Earth, but despite the divinity of sea (Poseidon), wind (Boreus), and Earth, he exploits them all, uses them for his own purposes, netting the fish of the sea, capturing the birds of the air, domesticating the wild beast of the earth and hitching them to plows, ruling them, using horses and bulls as living implements with which he “tirelessly wears away the earth” from which he has seized them. More, his speech, his thought, and “the rage that gives towns laws he has taught himself” bespeak his resourcefulness in exploiting and controlling resources. The city’s laws are man-made, not god-made; the arts generally are self-taught. “Justice is sworn to in the name of the gods,” but not therefore sincerely. In the mind of man, the gods rule only nominally. The gods did not give the arts, including such political arts as rhetoric, to man; nor did man steal them from the gods, as the story of Prometheus maintains. The gods had nothing to do with the man-made arts which man made for himself. The god who limits man is Hades, the god under, not above or on, the earth, the god associated with burial, with Antigone (B.42). And even this limit can be extended by man’s art, by medicine. The Chorus see that man “is high in the city; but without any city is he with whom the ignoble consorts, on account of daring. May he never share my hearth, nor think on an equal level with me, who does these things,” such as burying the corpse of a man self-exiled from his fatherland and city, one who would rally a foreign ruler to conquer that fatherland, that city, on behalf of his own claims to rule. The hearth is the fire, the fourth, final element, the one that Prometheus is said to have stolen from the gods. Antigone reveres Hades, under the earth, who limits man; Creon upholds the city in the name of Zeus, but the city is located on the earth—Earth, whom the Chorus laud as the highest god, “imperishable,” and therefore greater than Zeus. Man is therefore “terrible,” using arts to plough the earth, making use of the highest god, but without such impiety he is ignoble.
Antigone, by contrast, justifies her action in behalf of her brother, her family, and the Underworld god as noble, condemning her sister, obedient to the city and its ruler, as ignoble, fearful of death—as is the Chorus, the Chorus has admitted. As Benardete puts it, “However unaware the Chorus are that the city can only be high at the expense of the highest of the gods, the Chorus do see that the city cannot be, as Creon assumes, unqualifiedly good” (B.41). The city rests on earth, but it establishes and maintains itself by the arts which exploit earth, air, sea, and fire. Antigone, by contrast, “has no arts” (B.52); “her morality undermines the city no less than her immorality (B.49), that is, her daring, which she opposes to manly daring. “With her hot heart for cold things, her love of death, and her antigeneration, Antigone shows thus the union of the divine and the human, which (the Chorus thought) the city harmonized, is essentially monstrous” (B.50). One need not endorse the anti-Christian animus that lurks behind that comment; nor need one endorse its anti-political character. But Benardete is right with respect to Creon‘s single-minded patriotism, the patriotism of a tyrant who will not, in the end, want to share political authority with anyone.
The Guard returns, with Antigone. The Chorus hope she isn’t the guilty one, “you wretched one, of a wretched father, Oedipus.” They ask her, “Are you the one who, in folly,” “lacked faith in the royal laws”? The Guard, not Antigone, answers that she is indeed the one. Creon emerges from the royal courtyard, thinking characteristically of himself: “With what fortune have I arrived in coordination?” The Guard is only too happy to tell him, and at considerable length, caring for his own exoneration and expecting it. To be sure, he had determined never to return to Creon’s presence, but one should never swear to anything, since “the second thoughts falsify the judgment.” Creon doubts him, still convinced that he must be corrupted by the money of his enemies in the city (enemies, it might be noticed, never come forward, and are never identified at any time during the play). The Guard triumphantly describes his own wisdom—that Oedipal and Creonian title to rule—as seen in the way he and his fellows trapped Antigone, who, upon seeing that someone had swept off the dust she had lovingly applied to Polyneices’ body, “shrieked out bitterly, with a sharp bird’s cry”—this, in ironic parallel to the birds who earlier had pecked at the corpse she had wanted to protect and honor.
Creon interrogates Antigone, who bows her head to the ground surely not in shame, Benardete suggests, but in thinking that the sacred dead are in the ground (B.58). Might she be praying to Hades? “I will not deny it,” she says of the accusation against her. “You dared to transgress these laws?” that is, his edict, Creon asks. “Yes, for it was not Zeus,” the god of the city, “Who proclaimed these things to me, nor was it She, Justice, Who dwells with the gods below, who defined these laws for human beings; nor did I think that such strength was in your proclamations, you being mortal, as to be able to prevail over the unwritten and steadfast conventions of the gods!” For the first time she appeals (if only negatively) to the authority of Zeus, her erstwhile enemy—the sky-god of the city, the god by whose authority Creon professes to act. She intends to catch Creon in a contradiction, even if it means seemingly to change her own mind. She clinches her argument by averring that the laws or conventions she obeys are not “something contemporary or of yesterday” but “everlasting,” predating even the rule of the Olympian gods and of the human regimes who make laws in their name. “No one knows from where” the laws I have obeyed “appeared.” What is more, this eternity must be on my side, not yours; more, I will die, anyway, and dying before my time is a gain, living as I do among so many evils. Not the least of which is you and your edicts, Creon, but also the laws of Zeus and the fate of my father, Oedipus, cursed as he was to pollute the ruling dynasty, the House of Laius by killing its reigning father and marrying its reigning mother. To tolerate the refusal to bury him “who is from my mother” would be painful, and as for Creon’s charge of folly, “it is about as if I were charged with folly by a fool!”
Despite her negative appeal to the authority of the city’s god, the Chorus are not persuaded. Antigone’s “savage” birth “from a savage father”—they ignore her reference to her mother—has caused her not to “know how to yield from evils.” Her birth and father are savage, that is, uncivil, incest being the most extreme example “of love of one’s own” (B.63). Civil men such as themselves, civil women such as Ismene, do yield, do respect force at least to the extent that they do not openly defy it. Antigone has no such inhibition. In her own way, she is as terrifying, as unlimited as a man, but unlimited in her defiance of the city, and especially of its ruler, those examples of the fearfulness of man as such. Her limit is not their limit. The one limit of man’s strivings, man’s arts, man’s daring, was death. Hades holds know terrors for her, making her terrifying to those who do find death terrible.
Nor is Creon impressed. “Too-hard thoughts” are like iron, hard on the outside but easily shattered. He expects the girl to break; alternatively, he will ‘break’ her the way a men break spirited horses. He charges her with hubris in transgressing “the established laws” (again, primarily his proclamation) and in boasting of that transgression. Anti-Woman, I will show you who is the real man (anēr): “Indeed, now I am not a real man, but she is rather the real man, if with these acts, she is to dominate with impunity.” He senses that a woman has challenged to a dual of manliness. Who rules, me or this girl? Even if she were my sister, “or still closer than blood,” he would prosecute her; I am the city, I am Thebes. In invoking Zeus against Creon, Antigone referred to another of Zeus’s ruling aspects, to Zeus Herkeios, “Zeus of the Boundary,” that is, to Zeus who protects the boundary of each Greek household and its possessions (TB 74).Creon will defy this Pan-Hellenic Zeus in favor of Zeus the god of his city, the city with which he effectively identifies himself as the regime of that city. And the city’s enemies are numerous. Her very conspiring to commit these acts shows that she’s not mad but a subverter of the city. And a self-righteous one at that: “I do hate it also when someone is caught in evil acts, and then wants to ennoble them!” Nobility sacrifices itself for the city, not for a traitor to the city, brother or no brother. The higher brotherhood remains the fraternity among citizens.
Antigone cuts him short. “So what are you waiting for?” Your words displease me, and my words displease you. My fame will exceed yours because I honored my brother. The Chorus would admit as much, “if fear did not close up the tongue” in the face of your tyranny. Like a man, she issues a dare to her rival. Stop talking and act.
But because Creon’s authority rests unsteadily, he must continue to talk, to justify his rule in the eyes of the elders, the Chorus, who had refrained from full-throated speech in support of his proclamation. He interrogates her, puts her on trial, although the interrogation immediately turns into a dialogue, a debate, a war of logoi. “Was he who died on the other side your own blood too?” She admits it, and it might be added that not only were her two brothers equally her brothers, but her father, who married her mother, was equally her brother, and the brother of her brothers. “How then can you honor with gratitude one who is impious to him”—Polyneices, who killed Eteocles? Because Eteocles would not “bear witness to” this charge. Oh, yes he will, Creon rejoins, “if you honor him on equal terms with the impious one!” Not so, because Eteocles knows “it wasn’t some slave; it was a brother who died!” Yes, but he died “sacking his land,” while Eteocles “stood up on its behalf!” Unqualifiedly, Antigone does not care. It is “all the same”—patriotism or treason—because “He who is Hades longs for these laws.” The god of the Underworld takes no interest in cities or fatherlands, having his own eternal kingdom to rule. “Who knows” if nobility in the eyes of the city is “free from pollution down below,” in the Underworld, in the eyes of Hades, whose laws are not the laws of the city. Creon denies that “one who is an enemy becomes a friend when he dies,” but Antigone maintains that familial love conquers all: “Not to join in hating”—in uniting a city with a shared passion against common enemies—”but to join in loving, is my nature.” (Alternatively, in Tyrrell’s translation, “It is not my nature to side with an enemy but with a philos,” that is, a beloved one. This translation nicely echoes, but in contrast with, Ismene’s earlier declaration of love.) She would not join in the city at all, but join in loving what she understands as the more natural bond, the love of her own family. My nature is to love the truly natural, which is the family, not the city. She understands the natural almost exclusively in terms of its archē, its generative beginning-point, not in terms of its telos, which Aristotle would later describe as the good life, which for citizens means life in but also beyond the family, political life. In this, Anti-Woman is quite womanly, indeed, preferring her own kin to the more extenuated brotherhood of citizenry and sisterhood of all mothers and sisters of citizens. At the same time, as Benardete observes, unlike-a-woman Antigone never weeps (B.69), never throws her arms around the tyrant’s knees to beg him for mercy. She is no suppliant, and in this manly daring, this defiance, she threatens real-man Creon’s rule.
“Go now below and, if they ought to be loved, love them!” he thunders. “But no woman will exercise rule while I am alive!” To be ruled in even one important thing by Oedipus’ daughter: Might that not entail being ruled in all things? Or by his wife, Eurydice, sister of Antigone’s mother, the late Queen Jocasta? Creon, too, will die before submitting to the proclamation of one who contradicts the good of what and who he loves— the city, the Thebans. When Ismene joins them, offering now to share Antigone’s fate, Antigone rejects her offer, telling her to remain among the living, for “my soul long ago died, so as to be a benefit to the dead.” As Benardete remarks, “Creon thought he was exposing Antigone’s unconscious premise when he bid her in death love the dead below,” but she now “answers that she had been doing that all along” (B.73). When the Chorus summarize, lamely, “It has been decided, as it seems, that she is to die,” Creon immediately says, “By you as well as by me.” He intends to exact their support because he needs it. The Antigone is ‘about’ rulers and what legitimate or lawful rule is. Creon bases his rule on legitimacy, on being the sole surviving male member of the ruling dynasty. Not only is this claim tenuous, since he is related to that family by marriage only, but the family itself is awash in illegitimacy, in patricide and incest, even if unintended. Antigone is right about one thing: Creon is indeed a tyrant. He rules the diffident Chorus by fear, and hopes to ‘break’ the two sisters by confronting them with death, cynically assuming that “even the bold fellows flee, when once they see Hades close to their lives!” They too will submit to fear of death, he supposes and hopes, so supposing because he hopes.
Torn between such fear and their reservations about Creon’s proclamation (and therefore about Creon as the ruler), the Chorus deliberate amongst themselves on the question of Zeus, the Olympian god of the city, and “the infernal gods” who rule the dead, and unfailingly seize the living, even living rulers. “Nothing in all cities”—not only Thebes, but universally—”comes to the life of mortals that is without ruin.” Human hopes, and the arts with which they are instantiated, are themselves two-edged. They bring “benefit to many among men, but to many a snare, of lightheaded erotic desires” which come “upon one who does not know, until he burns his foot against a hot fire”—Oedipus, for example, but perhaps Creon, as well. Might Creon not follow Oedipus less in rule than in ruin? The hubris he would pin on Antigone may find its mirror in his own soul.
Creon hopes to pass his rule down to his sole surviving son, Haemon, who is betrothed to Antigone. His other son had died to save Thebes from Ares’ wrath (B.81); in this, he resembles Eteocles in his patriotism. What of Haemon? Marriage and wife, or father and country? He begins in obedience: “I am yours. For me no marriage will be worth more than your noble guidance,” a sentiment Creon cannot be applaud, sententiously: “Do not ever, son, cast out prudent thoughts on account of pleasure for the sake of a woman.” For “what could be a greater wound than an evil loved one,” one who can “marry someone in Hades”? “I shall kill her.” What is more, although she may try to stay my hand by appealing to the authority I acknowledge, the authority of Zeus, Zeus presides over not only the city but “over blood kinship,” over the family. To eliminate the threat to the city kinship ties pose (always and everywhere, it should be noticed), the city’s god must also be taken as the families’ god, ruling the sacred lares and not to be defied by them. “For whoever amongst his family is a noble man, will show himself just also in the city,” and whomever “the city sets up” as its ruler, families must obey. This is Creon’s central claim, or set of claims. There shall be no tension between city and family because the city rules the family; the ruler is established by the city (hence his insistence that the Chorus consent to his rule) and, moreover, such a man “would rule nobly, and be willing to be ruled well.” Ruling and being ruled is the distinctly political relationship, Aristotle will later say, not kingship or tyranny. Creon claims kingly legitimacy but also the political status citizen consent affords. Such a man will be “a just and good comrade in arms,” unlike Polyneices. Because “there is no greater evil than anarchy,” this man will not only protect citizens from foreign enemies but from the worst domestic perils. For Creon, the thing that binds the city together, that unifies it, is the same thing that binds the family together. Finally, this isn’t so much practical wisdom, love of city or of fatherland, but obedience
In the Greek, what comes across in the Ahrensdorf and Pangle translation as an unqualified statement of obedience to his father by Haemon is actually qualified in the Tyrrell translation; in the latter, Haemon says, “You would guide me aright if you have good judgment that I will follow”—hinting that he would obey his father if and only if his father exhibited fatherly wisdom. Haemon now recurs to that theme: “Father, the gods make grow for humans prudent thoughts, the highest of all possessions.” While I would not contradict you flatly, “it might be the case, however, that there is another noble view,” one I offer only because “it is natural for me to watch on your behalf whatever someone might say or do or hold in blame.” A son by nature protects his father, and if a tyrant is one’s father, a man “whose eye is terrible to a man of the people,” he may not hear the honest words of praise or blame citizens utter for and against him. But a son might: “For me it is possible to hear, undercover, these things: How the city laments for this child, as the least deserving of all women to perish miserably on account of deeds most glorious,” not allowing “her own brother, fallen amidst slaughter, to lie unburied, or by savage dogs, or by one of the birds, to be destroyed”—allowing the human to be converted into the bestial by its consumption by beasts, as Benardete remarks (B.88). It is the citizens who speak precisely in defense of the family; Antigone is not as savage as the Chorus had claimed, and the threat she poses isn’t so much to the city as to its ruler, its current regime of one-man rule. Your punishment of Antigone, Father, although intended to guard your rule and to uphold the authority of the city over families, works the opposite effect. Haemon goes so far as to suggest that his father’s regime itself is defective. “For whoever supposes that he alone can be prudent, or that he has a tongue, or a soul, such as no one else’s—these when laid open are seen to be empty.” And further, more daringly still, he adds, “For a real man”—the kind of man Creon praises himself as being, the human type who deserves to rule the less manly men—even if he be wise, learning many things and not being too stubborn is not shameful.” In terms of both wise logos and noble thumos, my Father, I ask you to reconsider your decision.
Almost needless to say, the tyrant will have none of this impudence, as he regards it. “By nature” the young man shall not teach the elder; by convention, the city is “held to belong to the one in power.” You, son, ally yourself with a woman. By “going to a court of justice against your father,” addressing him before the Chorus of elders, you commit a sort of parricide, you re-commit the crime of Oedipus. And you defy the gods, by criticizing me for “piously revering my offices.” Your character is therefore “foul, worse than a woman’s!” Haemon protests that his argument is not merely on behalf of the woman but “on your behalf, and on mine, and on behalf of the gods below!”—that is, it should be seen, on behalf of the gods of the family, not of the gods of the city. To Creon, male is to female as the Olympians are to the chthonic gods, the gods of the Underworld. He threatens to drive his claim home (that is, into his own household, into his recalcitrant son) by killing Antigone in front of him. Obedience, the of family and city, rests on fear. Haemon defeats his father’s threat by the simple expedient of running away.
What will you do with Antigone, the elders want to know? Earlier, he had threatened to have the perpetrator of the burial of Polyneices stoned to death. To show his leniency, he will spare Ismene but take Antigone outside the city, give her some food (so as to avoid the city’s pollution), and wait to see if Hades, “Whom alone among the gods she reveres,” will answer her prayers; if Hades does nothing (as he seems confident Hades will do), “she may come to know, even so late, that it is extravagant labor to revere those” in the Underworld. He may have listened to Haemon after all, in one way: getting Antigone out of the city, letting her die there, is less likely to spark a rebellion among a restive citizenry.
To understand what has happened, the Chorus continues to invoke the Olympians, the sky-gods, first of all the love-god, Eros, “invincible in battles” and all-pervasive in the world, maddening and therefore the god who “justif[ies] unjust thoughts.” “It is You who have stirred up this quarrel between men of the same blood,” father and son. “What wins the victory is the shining desire, in the eyes of the beautiful bride-to-be.” Above Eros is Aphrodite, who sets down her own “great binding laws,” but does so playfully, playing all sides (B.97). The Chorus too, elderly though they are, are “carried out of lawful bounds”—pulled away from the proclamations of Creon, even from the laws of the city proper—by the power of love “when I look upon these things, and no longer can I hold back the streams of tears, when I see Antigone here passing to the chamber where all rest.”
Antigone has already proclaimed repeatedly the object of her own love—her family, with whom she will be reunited in the Underworld: “I shall wed Acheron.” Insofar as she recognizes the authority of the Olympians at all, she recognizes Zeus “of the Boundary,” protector of household, Eros and Aphrodite as the love they inspire directs her ‘down’ below the ground, where her family is, not ‘up’ to the city, much less to Olympus. Eros impels her to Hades (B.99) When she compares herself to Niobe, daughter of the god Tantalus, punished by the goddess Leto for boasting that she had more children than Leto, the Chorus in its rather fatherly, or grandfatherly love for her cautions that Niobe was a god and we are not. Your love, having caused you to have “advanced to the extreme of daring,” has caused you to fall heavily “upon the high pedestal of Justice,” and “you are paying for” your father’s sins.
For the first time, the speech of fellow-citizens makes Antigone pause. As a lover of family, and especially of those members of her family now in the Underworld, she cannot dismiss an argument concerning her family, especially her father who now dwells there. “You have touched upon my most painful worries, the threefold pity for our whole fated doom, for the famous Labdacids.” In recalling her “ill-fated mother’s sleeping with her own child,” generating herself, Antigone reminds herself (in Benardete’s words) that “incest is love of one’s own writ large” (B.104). Her brother Polyneices, who married an Argive princess in yet another “ill-fated marriage,” have “slain me while still existing!” And of course Oedipus, her father, is also her brother, so he too has slain her while still existing.
She then begins her third and final apologia or defense before what amounts to the Theban jury of elders. She does not address them directly, however, as she remains preoccupied with family, not city. Instead, she addresses her fallen brother: “Having buried your body, such is what I reap as reward! Yet you I have honored well, in the eyes of those who think prudently”—this, with a glance at the Chorus, whom she has insisted are really on her side. She would never have buried a husband or even children who had died “in violent defiance of the citizens”; husbands and children are replaceable. Her brother is not replaceable. “By such a law indeed have I given you preeminence in honor, while to Creon I seemed to err in these things, and to dare terrible things, oh dear brother!” Therefore, “What justice of the divinities have I transgressed?” If none, then may those here “not suffer greater evils than what they do to me, unjustly?” As for Thebes, it is the “town of my fathers, and of ancestral gods”—significant to her only as the place in which her family has lived. As “the sole woman remaining of the royal line,” she abjures Thebans to see “what kind of things I am suffering, at the hands of what sorts of men, for having revered piety.” She is a threat to Creon’s rule, but he is an unjust man. This is the closest Antigone comes to a political statement, and it is even a potentially revolutionary, regime-changing one.
The fearful Chorus have reached an aporia or impasse impossible to overcome. Creon had claimed that obedience holds families and cities together—obedience, that is, to human rulers, himself in particular. The Chorus are now driven to speak not of Creon, not of Antigone and her family, not even of the gods, but of the “awesomely terrible” Fates, more “terrible” than man, rulers of men and gods alike, whom none escape. The Fates are the real rulers of all. At exactly this moment, when they are most in need of a man who can speak as a prophet, the blind prophet Teiresias appears, the man who had told Oedipus of his fate. Teiresias ‘sees’ beyond the impasse: “I shall teach; and you shall obey the prophet!” You Theban elders have feared a man; I shall remind you to fear the gods more. Once again, he tells them, as in Oedipus’ day, you Thebans balance “on the razor’s edge of Fortune.” The gods are no longer accepting the sacrifices and prayers offered at the temples. While “it is something common to all humans to err,” that only bespeaks their need for counsel. Creon and his city need it, in heart and in mind. In terms of the heart (or, as the Greeks would say, the head, the emotions), they are deficient in courage: “What is the bravery in killing again one who is dead?” In terms of the mind, “to learn from one who speaks well,” such as a blind prophet, “is most pleasing if what he says is profitable.” Like Haemon, Teiresias wants Creon and the elders to learn from him, this time about the gods, not public opinion (B.122). But although Teiresias cannot be dismissed as a presumptuous youth, Creon (perhaps attending to Teiresias’ word, “profitable”) can dismiss him as an avaricious liar in the pay of the ruler’s enemies, just as the guards were, in his mind. It would have been better for him had he recalled the fact that the guard was telling him the truth. What is more, he, Creon, is the superior theologian. Teiresias, you speak of pollution, but “I know well that no one of humans is strong enough to pollute the gods!” Even if Zeus’s eagles were to take “the carrion and take it to the throne of Zeus,” I, the real man, would not by “frightened by this pollution, into allowing that man to be buried!”
To Creon’s tyrannical daring Teiresias opposes his own charge: Creon, you are not thinking; you “are now by nature full of this disease” of mindlessness. After trading accusations of corruption with Creon, Teiresias stops reasoning and starts prophesying, saying that you will “be giving one from your loins, a corpse in exchange for dead ones.” The dead ones “are not your business,” nor even “the business of the gods above,” the Olympians, the Zeus you invoke, the city-gods. The dead ones are the business of “the Furies of Hades and of the gods,” who “lie in wait” for the likes of you. The gods of the city cannot protect you against them. To put it another way, the city is composed of families and it is located neither in the sky, on Mount Olympus, or in the Underworld, but on the ground, on the surface of the earth. The city therefore ‘needs’ not only the gods above it but the gods below it; the regime of the city needs to rule families (if it is to remain a city, a political union) but also needs the consent of families, again if it is to remain a city, and not sunder into warfare of family against family, tribe against tribe. The regime of the city that fails to recognize both of those needs will fail. Creon has made much of Thebes’ victory in the war, but his impious commands can lead to a reversal of the results of that war by the gods of the Underworld, backed by the Fates. Creon is doomed, “learn[ing] too late the difference between a decree and a law” (B.117), a human command and a divine command.
This gives the Chorus yet another thing to fear, and they communicate their fear to Creon. “The man, lord, has left, having prophesied terrible things!” More to the point, “he has never uttered a falsehood to the city!” Finally mindful, Creon admits this is true. “I am unsettled in my thoughts; for to give in is terrible, but in standing fast my spirited anger may be struck with a terrible disaster.” He is now willing to curb his thumos, to “give way,” to “renounce doing what my heart was set upon” since “one must not wage a vain war with necessity,” with the Fates who rule even the gods. In a telling irony, real-man Creon will now play the woman, lamenting the dead (TB.151) For their part, the Chorus prays to Bacchus, the patron god of Thebes, for salvation.
Too late. Too late for the Laertian dynasty, at least. Antigone has hanged herself, anticipating reunion with her beloved family. Haemon has also committed suicide, joining her in the Underworld. “Corpse lies on corpse,” a messenger reports, “like a grim mockery of a sexual embrace” (B.139). Having given Polyneices a proper burial, Creon learns of his son’s death, as does Eurydice, who rushes off to commit suicide as well, cursing Creon “as the killer of [his own] child,” as the messenger tells Creon. Haemon had been partially right in telling his father his rule would end in ruling no one, in ruling a city of one person, namely himself. For if the city is primarily the regime, and Creon has precipitated the self-destruction of the ruling dynasty, Creon (along with Ismene, who is nowhere to be seen, and a woman, one who will not rule), is the last one standing. But it is worse, as Creon no longer has the spiritedness in him to rule even a ‘city’ or regime of one. Broken, as if he were Antigone in the cave, he asks to taken away, having proved his own maxim, power shows the man. For her part, Ismene has feared that her sister’s actions would leave her alone in the world. They have. In the Ahrensdorf/Pangle translation, Sophocles gives the Chorus the last word; it is “prudence.”
This is the seventh of the Chorus’s seven major speeches. In the first they offered thanksgiving to the gods for Thebans’ victory over the Argives; in the second they spoke of the terrifying acts of man, that self-taught, wily being who masters the god, Earth. Does man owe his prosperity to the gods, and especially the gods of his own city, or to his own art? They next offered two speeches of praise of universal, Olympian gods: to Zeus, punisher of the wicked, and to Eros, who never loses a battle. The fifth speech acknowledges the Fates, who are more terrifying than man; the Fates can terrify the terrifying, men or gods. Having persuaded Creon to attempt to right his impious command to leave Polyneices’ corpse unburied, they return to Bacchus, this time not in thanksgiving but in supplication. Their final speech, on prudence, corrects the understanding of self-taught human wisdom. If the ultimate reality is the Fates, and after them the gods, then the highest form of prudence is piety, higher than the practical skills man teaches himself, higher than the technē of man.
Near the beginning of the play, Ismene was indeed prudent to respect strength, mistaken to assume that it was human strength she most needed to respect. Antigone was right to respect the gods of the Underworld, but imprudent in ending her life, as she could have both survived and seen her brother buried by Creon, her enemy. Creon may well have been prudent in suspecting that Polyneices’ alliance with the Argives made him dangerous to Thebes, despite the justice of Polyneices’ claim against his brother. Creon was imprudent, and indeed tyrannical, in assuming that the city’s defense required obedience to himself, even when he offended the gods of the Underworld, who are as universal as the Olympian gods he prefers. The right relation between the universal sky-gods of Olympus and the universal Underground gods—whose rule intersects on the surface of Earth in particular cities, and itself is overawed by the Fates—will be discovered in the souls of men who give honor to each set of gods in their own sphere, men of the right kind of piety or prudence. Fear of the gods is the beginning of wisdom.
Note
- But did Polyneices intend to ruin Thebes, or only to rule it, as his pact with Eteocles entitled him to do? If so, he attacked Thebes justly, with a just and limited intention. However, it is also true that in Argos he married the daughter of the king. A Theban might worry that an Argive victory would end Theban self-government, that Polyneices might rule as his father-in-law’s subaltern.
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