antigone as a greek tragedy essay

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Sophocles’ Antigone

Analysis of Sophocles’ Antigone

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 29, 2020 • ( 0 )

Within this single drama—in great part, a harsh critique of Athenian society and the Greek city-state in general—Sophocles tells of the eternal struggle between the state and the individual, human and natural law, and the enormous gulf between what we attempt here on earth and what fate has in store for us all. In this magnificent dramatic work, almost incidentally so, we find nearly every reason why we are now what we are.

—Victor D. Hanson and John Heath, Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom

With Antigone Sophocles forcibly demonstrates that the power of tragedy derives not from the conflict between right and wrong but from the confrontation between right and right. As the play opens the succession battle between the sons of Oedipus—Polynices and Eteocles—over control of Thebes has resulted in both of their deaths. Their uncle Creon, who has now assumed the throne, asserts his authority to end a destructive civil war and decrees that only Eteocles, the city’s defender, should receive honorable burial. Polynices, who has led a foreign army against Thebes, is branded a traitor. His corpse is to be left on the battlefield “to be chewed up by birds and dogs and violated,” with death the penalty for anyone who attempts to bury him and supply the rites necessary for the dead to reach the underworld. Antigone, Polynices’ sister, is determined to defy Creon’s order, setting in motion a tragic collision between opposed laws and duties: between natural and divine commands that dictate the burial of the dead and the secular edicts of a ruler determined to restore civic order, between family allegiance and private conscience and public duty and the rule of law that restricts personal liberty for the common good. Like the proverbial immovable object meeting an irresistible force, Antigone arranges the impact of seemingly irreconcilable conceptions of rights and responsibilities, producing one of drama’s enduring illuminations of human nature and the human condition.

Antigone is one of Sophocles’ greatest achievements and one of the most influential dramas ever staged. “Between 1790 and 1905,” critic George Steiner reports, “it was widely held by European poets, philosophers, [and] scholars that Sophocles’ Antigone was not only the fi nest of Greek tragedies, but a work of art nearer to perfection than any other produced by the human spirit.” Its theme of the opposition between the individual and authority has resonated through the centuries, with numerous playwrights, most notably Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, and Athol Fugard grafting contemporary concerns and values onto the moral and political dramatic framework that Sophocles established. The play has elicited paradoxical responses reflecting changing cultural and moral imperatives. Antigone, who has been described as “the first heroine of Western drama,” has been interpreted both as a heroic martyr to conscience and as a willfully stubborn fanatic who causes her own death and that of two other innocent people, forsaking her duty to the living on behalf of the dead. Creon has similarly divided critics between censure and sympathy. Despite the play’s title, some have suggested that the tragedy is Creon’s, not Antigone’s, and it is his abuse of authority and his violations of personal, family, and divine obligations that center the drama’s tragedy. The brilliance of Sophocles’ play rests in the complexity of motive and the competing absolute claims that the drama displays. As novelist George Eliot observed,

It is a very superficial criticism which interprets the character of Creon as that of hypocritical tyrant, and regards Antigone as a blameless victim. Coarse contrasts like this are not the materials handled by great dramatists. The exquisite art of Sophocles is shown in the touches by which he makes us feel that Creon, as well as Antigone, is contending for what he believes to be the right, while both are also conscious that, in following out one principle, they are laying themselves open to just blame for transgressing another.

Eliot would call the play’s focus the “antagonism of valid principles,” demonstrating a point of universal significance that “Wherever the strength of a man’s intellect, or moral sense, or affection brings him into opposition with the rules which society has sanctioned, there is renewed conflict between Antigone and Creon; such a man must not only dare to be right, he must also dare to be wrong—to shake faith, to wound friendship, perhaps, to hem in his own powers.” Sophocles’ Antigone is less a play about the pathetic end of a victim of tyranny or the corruption of authority than about the inevitable cost and con-sequence between competing imperatives that define the human condition. From opposite and opposed positions, both Antigone and Creon ultimately meet at the shared suffering each has caused. They have destroyed each other and themselves by who they are and what they believe. They are both right and wrong in a world that lacks moral certainty and simple choices. The Chorus summarizes what Antigone will vividly enact: “The powerful words of the proud are paid in full with mighty blows of fate, and at long last those blows will teach us wisdom.”

As the play opens Antigone declares her intention to her sister Ismene to defy Creon’s impious and inhumane order and enlists her sister’s aid to bury their brother. Ismene responds that as women they must not oppose the will of men or the authority of the city and invite death. Ismene’s timidity and deference underscores Antigone’s courage and defiance. Antigone asserts a greater allegiance to blood kinship and divine law declaring that the burial is a “holy crime,” justified even by death. Ismene responds by calling her sister “a lover of the impossible,” an accurate description of the tragic hero, who, according to scholar Bernard Knox, is Sophocles’ most important contribution to drama: “Sophocles presents us for the first time with what we recognize as a ‘tragic hero’: one who, unsupported by the gods and in the face of human opposition, makes a decision which springs from the deepest layer of his individual nature, his physis , and then blindly, ferociously, heroically maintains that decision even to the point of self-destruction.” Antigone exactly conforms to Knox’s description, choosing her conception of duty over sensible self-preservation and gender-prescribed submission to male authority, turning on her sister and all who oppose her. Certain in her decision and self-sufficient, Antigone rejects both her sister’s practical advice and kinship. Ironically Antigone denies to her sister, when Ismene resists her will, the same blood kinship that claims Antigone’s supreme allegiance in burying her brother. For Antigone the demands of the dead overpower duty to the living, and she does not hesitate in claiming both to know and act for the divine will. As critic Gilbert Norwood observes, “It is Antigone’s splendid though perverse valor which creates the drama.”

Before the apprehended Antigone, who has been taken in the act of scattering dust on her brother’s corpse, lamenting, and pouring libations, is brought before Creon and the dramatic crux of the play, the Chorus of The-ban elders delivers what has been called the fi nest song in all Greek tragedy, the so-called Ode to Man, that begins “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.” This magnificent celebration of human power over nature and resourcefulness in reason and invention ends with a stark recognition of humanity’s ultimate helplessness—“Only against Death shall he call for aid in vain.” Death will test the resolve and principles of both Antigone and Creon, while, as critic Edouard Schuré asserts, “It brings before us the most extraordinary psychological evolution that has ever been represented on stage.”

When Antigone is brought in judgment before Creon, obstinacy meets its match. Both stand on principle, but both reveal the human source of their actions. Creon betrays himself as a paranoid autocrat; Antigone as an individual whose powerful hatred outstrips her capacity for love. She defiantly and proudly admits that she is guilty of disobeying Creon’s decree and that he has no power to override divine law. Nor does Antigone concede any mitigation of her personal obligation in the competing claims of a niece, a sister, or a citizen. Creon is maddened by what he perceives to be Antigone’s insolence in justifying her crime by diminishing his authority, provoking him to ignore all moderating claims of family, natural, or divine extenuation. When Ismene is brought in as a co-conspirator, she accepts her share of guilt in solidarity with her sister, but again Antigone spurns her, calling her “a friend who loves in words,” denying Ismene’s selfless act of loyalty and sympathy with a cold dismissal and self-sufficiency, stating, “Never share my dying, / don’t lay claim to what you never touched.” However, Ismene raises the ante for both Antigone and Creon by asking her uncle whether by condemning Antigone he will kill his own son’s betrothed. Creon remains adamant, and his judgment on Antigone and Ismene, along with his subsequent argument with his son, Haemon, reveals that Creon’s principles are self-centered, contradictory, and compromised by his own pride, fears, and anxieties. Antigone’s challenge to his authority, coming from a woman, is demeaning. If she goes free in defiance of his authority, Creon declares, “I am not the man, she is.” To the urging of Haemon that Creon should show mercy, tempering his judgment to the will of Theban opinion that sympathizes with Antigone, Creon asserts that he cares nothing for the will of the town, whose welfare Creon’s original edict against Polynices was meant to serve. Creon, moreover, resents being schooled in expediency by his son. Inflamed by his son’s advocacy on behalf of Antigone, Creon brands Haemon a “woman’s slave,” and after vacillating between stoning Antigone and executing her and her sister in front of Haemon, Creon rules that Antigone alone is to perish by being buried alive. Having begun the drama with a decree that a dead man should remain unburied, Creon reverses himself, ironically, by ordering the premature burial of a living woman.

Antigone, being led to her entombment, is shown stripped of her former confidence and defiance, searching for the justification that can steel her acceptance of the fate that her actions have caused. Contemplating her living descent into the underworld and the death that awaits her, Antigone regrets dying without marriage and children. Gone is her reliance on divine and natural law to justify her act as she equivocates to find the emotional source to sustain her. A husband and children could be replaced, she rationalizes, but since her mother and father are dead, no brother can ever replace Polynices. Antigone’s tortured logic here, so different from the former woman of principle, has been rejected by some editors as spurious. Others have judged this emotionally wrought speech essential for humanizing Antigone, revealing her capacity to suffer and her painful search for some consolation.

The drama concludes with the emphasis shifted back to Creon and the consequences of his judgment. The blind prophet Teiresias comes to warn Creon that Polynices’ unburied body has offended the gods and that Creon is responsible for the sickness that has descended on Thebes. Creon has kept from Hades one who belongs there and is sending to Hades another who does not. The gods confirm the rightness of Antigone’s action, but justice evades the working out of the drama’s climax. The release of Antigone comes too late; she has hung herself. Haemon commits suicide, and Eurydice, Creon’s wife, kills herself after cursing Creon for the death of their son. Having denied the obligation of family, Creon loses his own. Creon’s rule, marked by ignoring or transgressing cosmic and family law, is shown as ultimately inadequate and destructive. Creon is made to realize that he has been rash and foolish, that “Whatever I have touched has come to nothing.” Both Creon and Antigone have been pushed to terrifying ends in which what truly matters to both are made starkly clear. Antigone’s moral imperatives have been affirmed but also their immense cost in suffering has been exposed. Antigone explores a fundamental rift between public and private worlds. The central opposition in the play between Antigone and Creon, between duty to self and duty to state, dramatizes critical antimonies in the human condition. Sophocles’ genius is his resistance of easy and consoling simplifications to resolve the oppositions. Both sides are ultimately tested; both reveal the potential for greatness and destruction.

24 lectures on Greek Tragedy by Dr. Elizabeth Vandiver.

Antigone Study Guide

Sophocles (c. 497/6- 406/5 BC) is, along with Aeschylus and Euripides, one of the three ancient Greek tragic playwrights by whom complete plays survive. He won at least twenty victories in the tragic competitions, and never came third (last), a feat which suggests that he was the most successful of the three. Seven complete plays of his survive, of which Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus are the most well-known and frequently performed. The following three essays explore the play's themes and context.

Sophocles' Antigone in Context by Professor Chris Carey

Greek tragedy is a remarkable fictional creation. We are used to a theatre which can embrace past and present, fictitious and historical, bizarre fantasy and mundane reality. The Athenian theatre was far more limited than this. Like virtually all Greek poetry at all periods in antiquity, its subject matter was heroic myth. Invented plots with fictitious people and events were very few (and not found before the late fifth century). Historical tragedy (the staple of theatre from Shakespeare to the present) again was very rare. With very few exceptions, tragedy was about heroes. For Greeks at any period, the world of the heroes meant the world which they met in epic poetry, and especially Homer, the ultimate Greek classic.

Because we are so used to Greek tragedy, we don't usually stop to notice how strange all this is. The heroes are members of a superior elite. And the epic world is always ruled by kings. It has assemblies, and they matter; but they don't have power. Hereditary monarchy had become a rarity in Greece long before the rise of tragedy. So the epic world was politically remote. In fact, of all Greek states in the classical period, Athens was probably the furthest removed from the political world of epic. In democratic Athens public policy and legislation were in the hands of the mass assembly. Yet for two hundred years and more mass audiences sat in the theatre of Dionysus and watched plays about kings sponsored by the democratic state.

The issue is of course more complicated than this. Firstly, the world of the epic was a very familiar world to the Athenian audience. Epic poetry was performed every year at the civic festivals, which meant that the heroic age was a shared possession for the vast audience in the Athenian theatre, not just the property of an educated elite. Secondly, the world inside the plays and the world in which the audience lived were engaged in a complex and shifting relationship. In any attempt to represent or even to understand the past, the present acts as frame which shapes presentation or perception; we may or may not be aware of it, but it is always there. Literature which deals with the past therefore has a foot in two worlds. This includes Greek tragedy. Tragedy is riddled with anachronisms, on politics, gender, ethnicity, status, even technology (people in tragedy write letters and suicide notes, for instance, while in the epic world writing is completely absent except for one very mysterious passage in Homer's Iliad ). The effect is to make the tragic world a middle space where heroic past and present meet.

This makes the tragic stage an ideal space to explore political issues of interest to democratic Athens. Not all tragedy is political and not all of the political questions are unique either to Athens or to democracy. But Athens (with rare exceptions) was unusual among the classical Greek states in its openness to dispute and dissent and Athenian drama is almost unique in Greek literature in its ability to explore areas of actual or potential political tension.

This is true in the case of Antigone . Anyone in the audience listening to the newly appointed regent Creon might well catch echoes of contemporary sentiments about loyalty to the city. The rhetoric of devotion to the city above all else and at any cost which Sophocles puts in his mouth sounds very like the rhetoric of the democratic statesman Pericles in the historian Thucydides (Pericles even goes so far as to claim that we should all be lovers of the city). The sentiment has a powerful appeal. This was a world of citizen soldiers and a citizen was expected to fight and if necessary die for the city. As Creon says: 'This land - our land - is the ship that preserves us and it is on this ship that we sail straight and as she prospers, so will we.' But his insistence on loyalty to the state to the exclusion of all other allegiance prolongs into the present the rifts of the past and proves disastrous for the next generation of the family and robs him of his family.

The issue of burial which forms the focus for conflict in this play had political echoes. Burial was a vitally important aspect both of family and of civic life. For the city it was a means both of honouring devotion and also of punishing disloyalty. The world of this play is not just postwar but post-civil-war. The dead Polynices came with a foreign army to take his home city by force and died in the attempt. In Sophocles' Athens anyone executed for treason could not be buried in Attica. So some features of the play probably sounded very familiar. Democratic Athens demanded a lot of its citizens and at the probable date of Antigone this was visible especially in the treatment of the dead. As far as we know Athens monopolized its war dead to a degree unmatched by any other Greek state. Where most Greek states simply buried their dead on the battlefield, Athenian practice was to collect and burn the dead and bring the bones home. They then held a state funeral and buried the war dead in communal state graves (excavations for the new Athens metro unearthed one such burial just a decade ago) with no designation of family, just the name of their tribe. The war dead are now the property of the city. At the same time private grave memorials almost disappear. It looks as though only public burials, and specifically those for the dead warriors, matter. But by tradition the family not only buried its dead but also made offerings every year at the family tombs; and the job of preparing the dead and the lead in mourning fell to the women. By the late fifth century the private memorials, including memorials for those who died in war, become more common, and it looks as though the tensions between the demands of the state and the needs of the family have been resolved. But tensions there probably were and death and burial was one of the key areas. Issues such as family or individual versus state are Greek issues as well as Athenian issues. But they were probably present in Athens to an unusual degree and were at their most visible at the time Antigone was performed in the late 440s.

Antigone is not about Athens' burial of the war dead. And it is not about contemporary democratic ideology. It is a story about a clash of wills, a clash of principles and a clash of loyalties. About power and its limits and legitimacy. About commitment, tenacity and integrity. And it is not a sermon. It throws up more questions than it answers. It could play in any theatre of the Greek world, as it has played in countless theatres in many languages since. But for its Athenian audience the echoes of contemporary areas of tension gave it an added intensity.

Questions and Activities:

How would the experiences of ancient Greek theatrical audiences have differed from those of modern ones? How might that affect our appreciation of Sophocles' Antigone ?
If you were to translate the basic story of the play into modern Britain, what aspects would you change, what would you retain, and why?
What difference would it make if Antigone were staged in a contemporary setting, rather than the distant past?

Antigone and Creon in Conflict by Dr. Dimitra Kokkini

Antigone is a play full of intensity. Audience (and scholarly) responses have always been conflicted when it comes to analysing both characters' arguments. For some, secular law and rationality, as expressed by Creon, are right, while Antigone's religious approach is to be rejected as irrational. For others, Antigone's argument is the only one with validity. The remaining views recognise various degrees of legitimacy in both arguments, eventually proving the impossibility of the task in discerning right from wrong in this conflict.

Despite the fact that this explosive clash highlights the vast differences between Creon and Antigone in terms of world views and loyalties, it also brings to the fore their similarities in terms of characterisation. Creon continuously asserts his power, both in terms of social and gender status; he is the ruler of the city, in fact, its defender in what is seen an unlawful attack by Polyneices against his own fatherland (the gravest of sins in civic terms). Moreover, he is a man, faced with an insubordinate, stubborn, powerless female who is also a member of his own family and under his jurisdiction and protection. Antigone, on the other hand, continuously asserts the validity on her argument in religious and moral terms, being, at the same time, constantly aware of her limitations due to her gender and position in the city and her own family. Yet, although they both take pains to highlight the unbridgeable gap between them, contrasting civic/rational (Creon) and family/religious (Antigone) duty, they are remarkably similar in the way they approach and respond to one another. Both are characterised by unyielding stubbornness, a deep belief in the rightness of their own value system, and complete failure in identifying any validity whatsoever in each other's argument. Both insist on upholding their respective values with obstinate determination to the end: Antigone dies unchanged, whereas Creon's change of heart comes too late having first caused the destruction of his entire family.

More importantly, neither of them are easily relatable - or indeed sympathetic - characters. Antigone is often too self-righteous, obsessed with honouring Polyneices at all costs. She is dismissive of Ismene, almost indifferent to her betrothed, Haemon. Creon is equally obsessed with administering what he perceives as justice, as well as upholding his law and punishing the offender, he is cruel and dismissive towards his son. It is easier for us, the audience, to identify with Ismene, Eurydice or Haemon. Ismene, a foil for Antigone and her exact opposite, is arguably less determined and daring than her sister; but she is also much closer to an everyday person, aware of her limitations and hesitant to challenge authority and the laws imposed by a ruler. Antigone may be admirable for her bravery and resolution, but she is also extraordinarily distant to ordinary human beings. Although she presents herself as a weak woman and speaks of all the typical female experiences she will be missing with her untimely death, she functions more like a symbol - some say she is almost genderless. Ismene, however, appears to be more human, displaying a more conventional kind of femininity, which renders her pitiful but also more relatable as a character.

In a similar way, we feel more pity and sympathy for Haemon than we do for the two protagonists. His attachment to her is evident in a rare tragic instance of a young man being in love, but it is hardly reciprocated. Antigone's fixation on honouring Polyneices leaves little room for the development of any other relationship. Haemon fights, unsuccessfully, with his father in an attempt to save his betrothed and, when this fails due to Creon's refusal to repeal his decision, his response is rash and emotional. This is a young man in love, who is denied his chance to be with his beloved and, on seeing her dead decides to take his own life out of grief. In contrast with Antigone, whose suicide is consistent with her characterisation throughout the play and is directly related to her immovable value system, Haemon's suicide is full of pathos and his motivation feels more easily understandable in terms of personal relationships and youthful desperation. His death functions as the trigger for Eurydice's suicide, the culmination of Creon's catastrophic decisions and Antigone's unyielding position. Her appearance on stage is limited to one scene, with her uttering one single question to the Messenger before departing in silence, ominously, after the death of her son is confirmed, never to reappear on stage.

Antigone and Creon are caught in an impossible circle of stubbornness, miscommunication and destruction. Together, they manage to cause utter grief and ruin for their family caught in a conflict of ever-increasing intensity as they pull further and further apart. Antigone's death and Creon's remorse cause pity and reveal the utter futility of their conflict at the end of the tragedy; but the fate of the other characters, the innocent bystanders entangled in this mighty clash of wills, beg for our sympathy and compassion as much as the protagonists, if not more.

1. Which character from the play do you sympathise with the most and why?

2. 'Creon and Antigone are more similar than different to one another'. To what extent do you agree with this claim?

3. To what extent must tragedy always depend on conflict?

Conflict and Contrast in Sophocles' Antigone by Dr. Tom Mackenzie

Perhaps more than any other Greek tragedy, Sophocles' Antigone has captured the interests of philosophers, ranging from Aristotle (fourth century BC) to Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and beyond. Most famously, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) saw the tragedy as depicting, at its core, a conflict between the abstract principles of the household (the oikos) and the state (the polis), embodied in the characters of Antigone and Creon respectively. When we come to watch the play, it is not hard to see why this interpretation has proven immensely influential. On a purely formal level, the two characters dominate the action more than any of the others. It is their decisions - Creon's to impose the sanction against burying Polyneices, and Antigone's to bury him nonetheless - that cause the events of the narrative. Antigone is the eponymous heroine whose initial speech opens the play, whilst Creon receives more lines than any other character and is the exclusive focus of our attention after Antigone's departure in the latter part of the tragedy. The two characters thus bookend the action onstage, a structuring device that seems to illustrate the contrast between them. It is sometimes claimed that Greek tragedy typically focusses on a single character, but if that is the case, then Antigone is an exception to this tendency, for Creon and Antigone appear to be of equal concern.

Many aspects of the play can be taken to suggest that the two characters are indeed representative of certain contrasting principles. Perhaps the most obvious contrast is that between male and female: Ismene initially opposes Antigone's act of defiance partly on the grounds that they are women, and so 'cannot fight against men'. Creon further emphasizes the gender division in claiming that Antigone will be 'the man' and not him, if she is to challenge his authority with impunity. Several other statements of his also betray this anxiety. Antigone's defiance of her uncle, her closest living male relative, markedly transcends the normal behaviour expected of women in fifth-century Athens, a notoriously patriarchal society with severe restrictions on the freedom of women. The contrast in genders also evokes wider political and cosmic polarities: women's influence was supposed to be restricted to the oikos, whilst Athenian politics was exclusively a male activity: the welfare of the city was thought to be the responsibility of free males alone. Antigone's act is one of loyalty towards a close relative, a member of her oikos - but it is seen by Creon as an act against the interests of the state. His edict was pronounced in order to protect Thebes, and he explicitly criticises anyone who 'values a loved one greater than his city', a statement which inevitably recalls Antigone's defiance. Indeed, part of this initial speech was quoted by the fourth-century Athenian orator Demosthenes as a positive, patriotic sentiment, a fact which may suggest that Creon, at least at this point in the play, could be taken to embody civic values.

Yet Antigone herself does not see the conflict as one between the oikos and the polis so much as one between the man-made laws of the city, and the unwritten, permanent laws of the the gods. It is to these unwritten laws that she appeals in justifying her actions against Creon's proclamations. The Greek word for 'laws', nomoi, has a broader scope than the English term conveys - it can be translated as 'conventions' or 'customs' and can cover the religious duties such as burial of the dead. There is nothing metaphorical about such 'unwritten' nomoi: Aristotle even quotes Antigone in recommending lawyers to appeal to unwritten laws when the written laws are against them. For Antigone, there is a conflict between these unwritten laws, and those pronounced by Creon.

Accordingly, the two characters have different conceptions of justice and the just. The Greek word for justice, dikē, and its related adjectives, occur frequently throughout the play. Both Creon and his opponents, Antigone and Haimon, appeal to dikē to support their decisions. Creon seems to identify justice with the will of the ruling party, whilst for Antigone and Haimon, it is a super-human concept that is independent of the arbitrary decisions of any mortal ruler. This dispute reflects contemporary debates surrounding the nature of justice: Plato, writing in the first half of the fourth century BC, depicts the fifth-century thinker Socrates as arguing that justice is natural and objective, against opponents who argue that justice is simply the will of the more powerful. In Sophocles' play, there is little doubt that Creon's conception of justice is proven inadequate. That the downfall of his family and his personal suffering come as a direct result of his actions is assumed by all remaining characters at the end of the play. His folly reveals a central predicament in Sophoclean drama and in Greek theology: there is a divine, cosmic system of justice, but it is one that is usually impossible for mortals to understand until it is too late. The motif of 'learning too late' is commonplace in Greek tragedy, and Creon conforms to this literary convention, as the chorus' statements at the end of the play make clear. Only a select few mortals - notably the blind prophet Teiresias - can have a privileged, albeit still limited, understanding of this system before the catastrophes unfold.

'Justice', or rather dikē, in this sense of 'divine order' was taken by some early Greek philosophers as a governing principle, not only of ethical behaviour, but also of the rules of physics. Anaximander (early 6th century BC) saw the universe as composed fundamentally from opposite qualities - such as the hot and the cold, the dry and the wet - that give each other 'justice and reparation' for injustices committed, as a result of which some balance is maintained in the universe. Similarly, Heraclitus (late 6th century BC) saw 'justice' as keeping the Sun within its established limits. Viewed in this context, we can see Creon's actions as violations of this cosmic order: the deceased Polyneices ought to be buried, but Creon prevents that from happening; conversely, he orders Antigone to be entombed whilst still alive. After his punishment, he himself becomes, in the words of the messenger, a 'living corpse'. The balance is thus settled for Creon's blurring of the distinction between the living and the dead by refusing Polyneices' burial.

This enactment of cosmic 'justice' might be taken to support the notion that Creon and Antigone embody contrary principles. Yet their actions can also be explained by recognisably human motivations: Antigone no longer fears death, and even expresses suicidal thoughts, because of the immense suffering that she has experienced in the form of her family's tribulations; Creon is a new ruler who is paranoid that his rule is not accepted - he refuses to back down as he fears it will undermine his authority. The characters appeal to general principles, which place their specific conflict in a wider cosmic context - it is perhaps this feature which has aroused such philosophical interest in the play - but they are not reducible to those principles alone. Creon is a flawed and inconsistent ruler, and Antigone's ultimately self-destructive act is detrimental to her household, for it prevents her from continuing the family line. The play thus presents conflicts of principle and of character, but offers no easy resolutions: Antigone's desire for Polyneices' burial may be vindicated by the course of the narrative, but the gods still allow her to perish. In developing the imagined consequences of these conflicts of both character and principle, Sophocles unsettlingly exemplifies one of the virtues that Aristotle identified in the plots of great tragedies: that the course of events seems inevitable, but only in retrospect.

Questions and activities:

1. Should you be more loyal towards your family or towards your country? Come up with reasons in support of both sides of the argument - how do your reasons compare with what is said by Antigone and Creon?

2. If we do not agree with traditional Greek beliefs about the the gods and justice, how does that affect our appreciation of the play?

3. Given that she knows that this action will lead to her death, is Antigone right to bury Polyneices? Explain your answer with reference to the text.

4. I've learned through my pain (Creon): What exactly has Creon learned? Does the play make this clear and does it matter?

Tragedy in Sophocles’ “Antigone” Essay

Through Antigone play, Sophocles explores the ideas, motives, aspirations, utterances dispositions, and actions of different characters, thus allowing audiences to come to terms with the various characters. All the characters seem to be motivated by the desire to achieve some commendable objective. Based on the play’s events, it is thus not easy to definitively assign any character the label of ‘tragic hero’. In the traditional sense, a ‘tragic hero’ is a character who falls from grace to shame owing to the character’s inherent flaw of judgment. This character is influential. Their disgrace thus has a significant effect on their compatriots. The play’s 2 central characters, namely Creon and Antigone, are influential based on their respective social statuses. Antigone is a princess under is Creon’s foster daughter. Likewise, Creon is the ruler of Thebes. The 2 characters’ fall from grace thus greatly affects Theban people. Reverting to the issue of who between the 2 is a tragic hero, it is important to note that the reason for the duo’s demise has some moral and practical backing. The conventional definition of a ‘tragic hero’ thus fails to accurately apply to either Creon or Antigone.

The preceding realization brings us to another concept, namely, Hegel’s definition of tragedy. This philosopher notes that tragic collisions are the central elements within tragedies. Hegel adds that these collisions do not arise owing to various characters’ evil or good actions. Instead, Hegel’s holds that tragic collisions arise from characters’ clash over different opinions. It is important to note that each of these varied opinions has a tinge of goodness in it. Hegel’s ideology accurately applies to the case of Creon and Antigone. These characters have some valid points for backing their ideas. Further, the 2 characters clash over their divergent viewpoints.

To illustrate, after arresting Antigone, Creon informs the girl that the former seeks to uphold law and order in Thebes, hence his decision to refuse Polynices a decent burial. This treatment of Polynices – who is a brother to Antigone – is the genesis of Creon’s disagreement with the young girl. The ruler then explains that his actions are consistent with the policies of the Theban governing system. Such a confession by Creon shows that his actions satisfy the rules set out by Hegel. To expound, Creon’s edict against burying Polynices has both a bright as well as a dark side (Sophocles, Fagles, and Bernard 76). Regarding the bright side, by issuing and implementing this decree, Creon is attempting to preserve order in Thebes. With an order, peace, and prosperity will follow. This is a commendable intention that abides by Hegel’s theory of tragic collisions.

On the other hand, Creon’s edict has vestiges of unpleasant elements, thus abiding by the theory proposed by Hegel. For instance, Creon demonstrates partiality through his discriminative decree. Such bias is evident through the ruler’s seeming disregard of the fact that Polynices is as guilty as Eteocles. It is thus improper to deem either brother as better than the other. Eteocles instigated the conflict by refusing to hand over the leadership mantle to Polynices. Oedipus – the 2 character’s father – instructed the sons to rule in turns, an order that Eteocles quashes. Polynices’ fault occurs when he attempts to forcefully wrestle power from his brother rather than follow peaceful means. Further, both brothers attempted to overthrow Oedipus. Despite this glaring truth, Creon orders for Eteocles to be correctly buried, with Polynices’ corpse being left to rot in the fields. This is a biased approach that exposes Creon’s dark side. For fairness to prevail, Creon should have accorded equal treatment to the 2 brothers’ bodies. Such partiality on the part of Creon proves that he satisfies the rules for tragic collisions set out by Hegel.

Further, Creon listens to and even appreciates the motives making Antigone bury the body of Polynices – her brother. Creon’s show of understanding for Antigone’s motivations plays out in the play when Antigone points out that the king’s directives are unjust. This awareness pushes Creon to implore Antigone to pity the ruler. In addition, Haemon – Creon’s son – warns the father that the ruler’s decree is causing disquiet in Thebes. Despite being privy to such clear reasons for Antigone’s actions, Creon goes ahead to order for her interment. This is an erroneous action on the part of Creon. Through such an action, Creon demonstrates that he has characteristics that make him satisfy the guidelines set out by Hegel.

On her part, Antigone makes certain actions that identify her as someone who satisfies the rules of tragic collision set out by Hegel. Some of Antigone’s actions are correct while others are flawed. For example, by choosing to stand up against the injustice being meted out on her dead brother, Antigone does an honourable action. She is aware that the administration is unjustly punishing Polynices – one of the deceased brothers. The gallant girl thus resolves to set things straight with the administration. She clandestinely buries the corpse. In addition, she tells off Creon when the latter tries to persuade her to abandon her defiant position. Considering that Antigone’s actions resonate with those of the larger Theban society, her actions are justified. She thus satisfies the guidelines for tragic collisions stipulated by Hegel.

On the contrary, Antigone does several acts that are erroneous, thus delineation herself as a person who satisfies Hegel’s rules of the tragic collision. To illustrate, she gives up her love for Haemon, thereby causing the latter much heartache. At one point, Antigone is quoted as categorically informing Haemon that she will not be able to love him. This statement may explain Haemon’s troubled status and his eventual tragic suicide. For the aforementioned reasons, Antigone satisfies the requirements stipulated by Hegel about tragic collisions.

To summarize, Sophocles Antigone play has no definite tragic hero. Rather, the play has 2 characters, namely, Antigone and Creon, who exhibit both positive and negative behaviour. Such behaviour makes the 2 people clash. Hegel’s idea of tragic collision thus comes to the fore, replacing the notion of a tragic hero. Through their divergent opinions, Creon and Antigone clash throughout the play. These clashes highlight both Antigone and Creon’s strong and weak points. Regarding the negative behaviour, Creon disregards justice, thus unjustly ordering Polynices’ bodies to be allowed to rot in the fields. Creon however accords Eteocles, who is as guilty as Polynices, a fitting burial. On the positive side, Creon aspires to uphold order and law in Thebes, thus facilitating peace and prosperity. It is thus clear that Creon has both negative and positive aspirations that cause his clash with Antigone. Likewise, Antigone depicts several pleasant behaviours, for instance, she boldly opposes Creon’s partiality concerning the treatment given to the corpses of Eteocles and Polynices. On the contrary, Antigone allows her desires to push her away from Haemon – her lover. The preceding traits designate Antigone as a character who satisfies Hegel’s ideology of tragic collision.

Sophocles, Fagles, Robert and Knox, and Bernard MacGregor Walker. The Three Theban Plays. New York: Penguin, 1984. Print.

Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, July 11). Tragedy in Sophocles' "Antigone". https://ivypanda.com/essays/tragedy-in-sophocles-antigone/

"Tragedy in Sophocles' "Antigone"." IvyPanda , 11 July 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/tragedy-in-sophocles-antigone/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Tragedy in Sophocles' "Antigone"'. 11 July.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Tragedy in Sophocles' "Antigone"." July 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tragedy-in-sophocles-antigone/.

1. IvyPanda . "Tragedy in Sophocles' "Antigone"." July 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tragedy-in-sophocles-antigone/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Tragedy in Sophocles' "Antigone"." July 11, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/tragedy-in-sophocles-antigone/.

“The Antigone” by Sophocles: Characters and Plot
Background of Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Sophocles’s “Antigone”
Mythology: The Tragic Hero in Antigone
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House Play From a Biographical Perspective
Medieval and Classical Traditions in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”
The Play ‘Death of a Salesman’ by Arthur Miller
“Antigone” by Sophocles Is a Play Without a Hero
The Play "Death of a Salesman"

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

As the play begins, the invading army of Argos has been driven from Thebes, but in the course of the battle, two sons of Oedipus (Eteocles and Polynices) have died fighting for opposing sides. Their uncle, Creon , is now king of Thebes. He decrees that the body of Polynices, who fought against his native city, will not be given burial rites but will be left to rot, as a warning to traitors. Creon further decrees that anyone who does try to bury Polynices will be punished with death.

Oedipus's daughters, Antigone and Ismene , are grieving for the loss of their two brothers, but Antigone is also defiant. She declares that the burial traditions are the unwritten laws of the gods, and are more important than the decrees of one man. She vows to give Polynices the proper burial rites. Ismene begs Antigone not defy the laws of the city and add to their family's tragedy. Antigone will not yield.

Antigone is caught in the act of performing funereal rites for her brother. Creon is furious, and has Antigone brought before him. She remains defiant, and says that she will not break the laws of the gods just to follow Creon's unjust law. Creon responds that she will die for her disobedience to the laws of the city. Ismene pleads with Creon to spare her sister's life. Antigone is engaged to Creon's son, Haemon , and the two of them are very much in love. But Creon is as unyielding in his allegiance to the rule of law as Antigone is to the unwritten traditional rules of the gods.

Haemon comes to Creon to ask him to reconsider. The citizens of Thebes are sympathetic to Antigone's desire to bury her brother, but are too afraid of Creon to speak up. Creon grows angry at his son's attempt to offer him advice. Their exchange grows heated. Haemon insists he is trying to prevent his father from pursuing an injustice. Creon accuses his son of siding with a reckless traitorous woman over his own father, to whom he owes obedience. Haemon threatens that the death of Antigone will lead to another death, and then rushes away, saying that Creon will never see him again.

Antigone laments her approaching death and all that she is giving up in refusing to bend to Creon's law. Guards lead her away to be sealed up (alive) in a tomb. Tiresias , the blind prophet, warns Creon that he is about to make a terrible mistake in killing Antigone, and that he should not leave the body of Polynices unburied. Creon flies into another rage and accuses Tiresias of false prophecy and of accepting bribes. Upset, Tiresias tells Creon that as punishment for killing Antigone, the gods will soon take the life of Creon's child. Creon is shaken by this, and eventually decides to relent. He rushes off to free Antigone from the tomb.

After Creon has left, a messenger arrives at the palace with the news that Haemon has killed himself. Eurydice , Haemon's mother and Creon's wife, asks to know what happened. The messenger says that Haemon went to Antigone and found that she had hanged herself. When Creon arrived, Haemon lunged at him with his sword, then used the weapon to kill himself. Eurydice leaves without a word. Creon returns, overcome with grief, carrying the body of his son. He cries out and blames himself for driving his son to suicide. A messenger enters with the news that Eurydice has killed herself while cursing Creon for murdering their son. Creon is left a broken man.

Antigone as a Greek Tragedy | Antigone as a Tragedy

Antigone Tragedy

Table of Contents

Introduction

Aristotle is full of warm praise about The Oedipus Rex as a tragedy . About The Antigone the great Stagirite seems to be silent. And yet The Antigone has been enjoying immense popularity as a tragedy through ages. It has been translated, imitated and adapted by the dramatists of different ages and countries. Seneca, Alfieri, Racine, Mendelssohn, to refer only a few, have written about Antigone, who embodied the purest and noblest idea of womanhood. “Antigone”, says a critic,

“has been said to be the poetry of what Socrates is the prose; that is, she is in fiction what he is in history-a martyr in the cause of truth.”

Aristotelean Definition of Tragedy

The Antigone may be analyzed as a tragedy from the Aristotelian point of view . Aristotle defines a tragedy as follows:

“A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasure accessories, each kind brought separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic note; in a narrative form : with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.”

The Tragic Action

The action of tragedy should be Spoudaious, i.e. grave, noble, and solemn. To even a superficial observer, the action of the Antigone will unmistakably appear to be Spoudaious. It is the story of a terrible conflict between two strong protagonists Creon and Antigone . The subject is sufficient importance. There is nothing low or base in the plot. What is frivolous, low, petty or depraved lends itself to comic treatment.

Aristotle insists on an action, that is complete in itself. It must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The length of the tragedy should be appropriate-neither too short nor too long. The Antigone , consisting of 1350 lines does not violate the rules about length. The question of the size, in Aristotle’s opinion is both aesthetic and utilitarian.

Compactness of the Plot

The Antigone is an excellent illustration of compactness and concentration. It has no word about Athens, no political propaganda, no contemporary allusions, no appeal to patriotism. It is concerned with what might be called a political issue, but this is seen from an exalted detachment as an incident in the relation between God and man.

Seriousness

In The Antigone, all the characters are solemn and serious. For a moment the guard, no doubt seemed to be a little comical. But comicality was the farthest from his intention. He was in a state of terror, because some invisible hand had violated the royal edict. His antics and apparently comical words were the expression of a man, who wanted to save himself.

Catharsis in Antigone

There is, of course, a controversy as to who is the hero of this tragedy . Creon and Antigone are the protagonists, and both command our respect. Aristotle has suggested that three kinds of plot are to be scrupulously avoided. A good man must not be seen passing from happiness to misery, or a bad man from misery to happiness. The first situation is not fear-inspiring or piteous, but simply shocking or odious to us. If a bad man passes from misery to happiness, the situation is extremely untragic. It will not appeal to our feelings- either pity or fear. Aristotle also insists that a bad man must not be seen falling from happiness into misery. Hence Aristotle concludes that the tragic hero is the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice and depravity, but by some error of judgment.

If Creon is the tragic hero , and quite a few critics agree that he is, he cannot be called a personage of unblemished goodness. He belonged to the intermediate position. He was longer on the stage than any other character, and appeared to be the most dominating force in the play. He refused to bury Polynices , and passed an edict that anybody defying his edict would be stoned to death. Dressed in brief little authority, he became a tyrant.

Hamartia in Antigone

Yet Creon was not a villain , for a villain cannot be an ideal tragic hero . A hero may not be a man of perfectly blameless character. But he must have ethical goodness. A good king, Creon sought to vindicate the position of a king. An edict is a law, and no man should ever challenge it. An ideal tragic hero should have his fall through hamartia , (error in judgment). He had committed acts of impiety, but he was not conscious of it. In the eyes of the gods he was impious. But he always proudly asserted that he was vindicating the cause of Law. In his pride and arrogance he was blind to truth. In his behavior with Antigone he was proud and haughty. No less proud and haughty was he in relation to his son Haemon. In a fit of anger, the inevitable outcome of pride, he wanted to punish Ismene also, who, for all practical purposes was innocent.

The Chorus in Antigone

But Antigone had no hamartia or mochtheria . She began with remarkable strength, which some critics have described as unwomanly. She was even a little arrogant. Antigone set herself above the established Law of Creon and proved the tenacity of her character and the steadfastness of her ideal.

Aristotle, as we have already pointed out, does not believe in the unblemished goodness of a hero. And Antigone had unblemished goodness. Smart in an excellent Essay published in Essays and Studies , Vol. VII defends unblemished goodness. From the point of view Antigone may be regarded as an ideal tragic heroine , who has unblemished goodness. Hegel, however, does not think Antigone to be blameless. Antigone. according to Hegel, disobeyed the King, and that was a blemish in her character. She had a double duty-duty to the King or the State and the duty to religion and the gods. She did her duty to one, and failed in another.

Conflict in Antigone

No tragedy is imaginable, which has no conflict – external and internal. The Antigone is a play, the only interest of which consists in the conflict between Antigone and Creon . Antigone represents the unwritten laws, justice, and piety, while Creon is the symbol of the laws of man. No compromise was possible between the two strong wills and, therefore, the tragedy was precipitated

Both in Creon and Antigone there was also internal conflict . As Creon came in clash with Haemon , his obstinacy received a shock. And as he had an encounter with Tiresias , he felt that his own arguments were hardly tenable. Still torn between pride and repentance, he was almost at his wit’s end. Tiresias had given him a grim warning that his doomsday was in the offing. Had he listened to the prophet’s counsel, the tragedy could be averted. But he was still vacillating. His conversion was, for a while, only skin-deep. His delay was a scheme of the dramatic action. It was because of this delay that he lost Haemon and Eurydice. The gods, incensed at his pride and arrogance, wanted to punish him. The delay precipitated that punishment. Towards the end of the play, Creon was a completely changed man. A deep distress- distress too deep for tears had humanized his soul. The terrible consciousness dawned upon him that he was responsible for the death of his son and wife. Creon exclaimed, as the corpse of Haemon lay before him:

“The sin, the sin of the erring Soul Drives hard into death. Behold the slayer, the slain, The father, the son, O the curse of my stubborn will ! Son, newly cut off in the newness of youth, Dead for my fault, nor yours.”

Humbled and reduced to dust, Creon left the stage, blinded with tears with nothing to look forward to :

“I am nothing, I have no life. Lead me away. That have killed unwittingly My son, my wife. I know not where I should turn, Where look for help. My hands have done amiss, my head is bowed With fate too heavy for me.”

Antigone had also an internal conflict . She was being led by the ground to be buried alive, she felt for the first time the fear of death. Almost romantic love of death was no more. Once determined to be a martyr to the cause of truth, piety and justice, she felt that her nerves are giving away.

Nemesis in Antigone

In any Greek tragedy , guilt must be followed by Nemesis or divine retribution. Creon committed a grievous wrong. He had defied piety, justice and the majesty of the divine laws. He was therefore punished. He however did not die. For death would have been his much sought relief. He was punished by the death of his wife and son. Humbled and helpless, he left the stage with the full consciousness that he was the murderer of his son and wife.

Antigone, who was a symbol of purity and noble womanhood, had her nemesis too. Antigone’s pride and self-will, of which the Chorus accused her, brought about her death.

In tragedy, the innocent often die with the wicked. Sophocles had no desire to satisfy man’s natural desire for ‘poetic justice’ . Antigone’s death is Creon’s punishment in much the same way as Cordelia’s death is King Lear’s punishment . Antigone is felt to be akin to, and the pledge of the law and beauty that reside at the heart of reality, and glimpses of which are vouchsafed to man only in moments of beatific vision. She is the star, the pledge of universal serenity, momentarily glimpsed by weary travellers in storm.

Peripeteia in Antigone

In an ideal tragedy, Aristotle insists, there should be a complex plot. In a simple plot as in a complex plot there is peripeteia , which has often been translated as reversal of fortune. Creon wanted to punish Antigone. But eventually it was he who was punished. Creon did not care to understand the divine laws. Antigone stood for. It was a fatal error in judgment, and he had to pay a price for it. Creon is punished by the death of his son and by the death of his wife.

Anagnorisis in Antigone

Anagnorisis is another characteristic of a complex plot. Anagnorisis has been translated as ‘revelation’ or ‘recognition’. The hero suddenly realizes the truth, and he is conscious of the error committed. In The Antigone the anagnorisis is there. Creon was blind in passion, pride and egoism, and could not see the folly he was committing. He thought that the Edict he had passed was sacrosanct. That is why he refused to see Antigone’s point of view. He was suffering from the chastisement of hubris . Pride was the besetting sin of Creon, which brought about his downfall. He could not realize that Antigone was in the right, and he was absolutely in the wrong.

It was a happy augury. Creon was on the way to light. Then came Tiresias, who spoke about evil comes, all for which Creon was solely responsible. A victim of delusion or hallucination, Creon had still scales in his eyes. Still obstinately he hugged his fond beliefs and illusions. Then came Nemesis in all its fury. He lost his son; he lost his wife. The truth so long hidden emerged with all its effulgence. He realized that he was to blame. He realized that his son and wife were sacrificed at the altar of his crass stupidity and towering pride. Thus The Antigone as a tragedy gets its pinnacle of perfection.

Hello, Viewers! Besides being the Founder and Owner of this website, I am a Government Officer. As a hardcore literary lover, I am pursuing my dream by writing notes and articles related to Literature. Drop me a line anytime, whether it’s about any queries or demands or just to share your well-being. I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for stopping by!

Role of Brother in The Antigone
The Antigone by Sophocles | Analysis
Haemon Antigone | Character Analysis
The Chorus in Antigone | Role and Significance
Character of Antigone

Greek Tragedy Antigone

This poem is quite successful in getting the plot across to the reader. Unfortunatly, that is all he can get across because of his beleif that, “inside every fat book is a skinny book trying to get out. ” Sargoff cannot have character descriptions, themes, or any real detail in his “skinny book” because of his beleifs. Sargoff leaves off why Polynices should not be burried and why his brother, who is not even menchoned, can be burried. This is important to building the feelings of contempt towards Creon and an understanding of what Antigone is doing.

Also, because this is a “Humorous Distillation,” the tone of the play is lost. Instead of being a dramatic play about obeying a higher law, it is a comical, rhyming poem about what happened. This may cause it to lose the impact it had. Sargoff reduces important and pivotal points in the story to a sentence such as, “Creon wilts, and tries to bang a U-ee. ” This sentence does not tell of Creon’s attempt to repent for what he has done by burrying Polynices and then going to free Antigone. Even if Sargoff gets all of the plot across, that is not enough to tell the whole story.

Aristotelian Unities Yes, Antigone does follow the Aristotelian Unities. The play occurs in the same place and roughly the same time. Things that happened before the play or outside of the place, was told by a messenger or a character themself. The action was all centered around Antigone’s actions. Her actions were the sole cause of everything that happened. Greek Tragedy Antigone does follow the Greek definition of tragedy. Tragedy is a story or play that has a signifigant conflict of morals, with a noble protagonist displaying a tragic flaw that is their strength but leads to their downfall.

The exposition of the story is when Antigone is talking with her sister and we learn of what has happened. The turning point of this play is when Creon tries to mend his wrongs by burying Polynices and freeing Antigone. Antigone herself is the tragic hero because she dies for what she believes morally right. Antigone’s tragic flaw is that she has only sees her point of view which leads to her death. The denouement of this story is everybody dying and then Creon realizing what he has caused. The song of the story is attenden to throuhg the chorus’ comentating on what is happening or through direct dialog.

The thought of this play is wether it is right to follow heavenly laws or ones made by man. Antigone is the tool through which Sophocles tells th! at one should obey the law of the gods and human laws. The complication of the story is done through Creon misunderstanding what is happening. Creon thinks at one point that the guard has been bribed when actually he is telling the truth. Creon’s recognition is when he finaly sees what has been happening and that Antigone is innocent and that Polynices should be buried.

To export a reference to this article please select a referencing style below:

Distillation of Antigone by Maurice Sagoff
Antigone quite successful in getting the plot across to the reader
Antigone by Sophocles
Antigone a great Greek tragedy
Greek Tragedy: Sophocles’ Antigone
Sophocles Greek tragedy, Antigone
The Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s
Antigone – Analysis Of Greek Ideals
Antigone – Analysis of Greek Ideals
Antigone – Classic Tragedy
Greek tragedy, The Oresteia
The Greek tragedy of Oedipus

Greek tragedy in a global crisis: reading through pandemic times

Daniel libatique , fairfield university. [email protected].

This book illustrates in a timely and important fashion the ways in which the ancient world can arm us with hermeneutical tools to process trauma and conflict. In this fifth year of an ongoing pandemic, with countless examples of “tragic” conflict, loss, and injustice firmly imprinted into the human consciousness by autopsy and media amplification, Telò’s observation that “the poetic form of ten emblematic plays of Greek tragedy can speak to us about the pandemic as well as the crises it has aggravated and come to epitomize” (4) calls us to consider how we as humans respond to forces outside our control and how those forces are not endemic to any one time or place. This process of reading necessitates two simultaneous vectors of interpretation, from the past into the present and vice versa: “This interpretive approach entails not simply reading tragedy through the pandemic, reading the pandemic into tragedy … but also using the ‘stasis of constant crisis’—the defining psychic atmosphere of the moment, the Zeitgeist of no-time or of saturated time—to inhabit the unsettling non-normativity, the queerness of tragic feeling” (3, emphasis original).

Telò’s approach to each of these ten plays comprises novel and insightful philological analysis, reception as illustration of the benefits of dialogic interpretation, and interdisciplinary elucidations of theory. The book is divided into four sections that each tackle one of the many aspects of the pandemic that Greek tragedy can address. Each chapter focuses on one Greek play and can largely be read in isolation, though obviously all chapters together form a cohesive whole that explores the connections between the pandemic and Greek tragedy from a variety of angles.

Part One, “Air Time Faces,” considers environmental contagion and states of being. In Oedipus Tyrannos (Chapter 1, “Oedipus”), the themes of congestion and contagion find formal expression in polyptoton, paronomasia, alliteration, and consonance, with asphyxiating collocations of consonant sounds and thematic cognates, throughout such purple passages as the parodos and Oedipus’ and Teiresias’ agōn . The Bacchae (Chapter 2, “Teiresias Cadmus Dionysus”), particularly in the queer scene between Teiresias and Cadmus, encapsulates the “continuousness alreadyness of disaster” (44), what Blanchot terms the déjà, in which the evisceration of Pentheus is part and parcel of a disaster that is both imminent and immanent. Cadmus’ breaking of Agave out of her mania ruptures the ubiquitous sense of achrony, timelessness, that pervades the Bacchae in a manner that parallels modern governments’ attempts to rupture the achrony of the pandemic with “back to normal” mandates, economy be lionized and human lives be damned (50). Various games, verbal and physical, and inordinate focus on mundane activities in Iphigenia at Aulis (Chapter 3, “Iphigenia”) attempt to fill unfillable air and time, and we find in the tragic masks that frustrate Iphigenia’s attempt at connection with her father Agamemnon an analogue to our modern masks which “became the necessary intermediary of our daily social interactions … sharpening racialized hierarchies and stereotyping along with ‘face hunger’” (66). Iphigenia as a “willing” sacrificial victim becomes a precursor to the elderly, the immunocompromised, the “frontline heroes”—those shockingly and callously deemed sacrificial or expendable to the modern pandemic by government officials like Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick (67-70).

Part Two, “Communities,” explores the various nexuses of (dis)connection that are exposed in times of crisis. In Alcestis (Chapter 4), the queer undertones of the Admetus-Apollo-Heracles relationships throw into relief the “tragedy of heterosexuality” and “toxic domesticity” (78) that doom Alcestis to die for her husband. This is one of three chapters that draws on visual comparanda, with examples like the paintings “Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis” and “Orpheus and Eurydice” by Frederick Leighton illustrating the “strikingly queer” (79) resonances and relationships of those male figures. Telò’s analysis of Euripides’ Suppliant Women (Chapter 5), on the other hand, explores disrupted community, as mothers are precluded from connecting tactilely with their unburied sons in a manner that evokes modern massacres and mass graves in Ukraine. The funeralization of the city of Thebes with haptic acts of supplication creates a sense of proto-feminist solidarity, as expectations around familial relationships are reconfigured and the ineffective state, embodied by Adrastus ( a-drastos ), is forced into action.

Part Three, “Ruins,” marshals as its material plays with eschatological resonances. What is left when human constructions and relationships crumble or, worse, are destroyed by forces outside our control, and we are forced to reckon with the ends of the worlds that we knew? In Sophocles’ Antigone (Chapter 6), what is left is the earth itself. Telò’s geopolitical reading of the play situates Antigone’s cave as “a locus of intimate contact with the most literal foundation of life itself (human and non-human)” (124), a space that supports and nurtures despite attempts to weaponize it or bleed it dry by characters like Creon and entities like modern “extractivist dynamics” (109). He draws effectively on Saidiya Hartman’s “Litany for Grieving Sisters”, in which a Black Antigone wanders through a deserted, post-apocalyptic New York City holding a baby, as a space in which to think through a world existing beyond and after our imaginations (111-112). By comparison, Aeschylus’ Niobe (Chapter 7) serves more as a starting point for an exploration of Niobe’s lithic nature and connection to frozen environments in sources such as Aristophanes’ Frogs and Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Tristia than as a focus in its own right, due to the play’s fragmentary nature. Niobe’s “glacial ancestrality” (136) elevates her beyond mortal existence and connects her in an almost immortal fashion to the natural world. Telò’s brief but powerful discussion of a Bansky Niobe in Gaza and the ruins that surround it (139-140) has heightened impact in light of the current attacks on Gaza and the Palestinian people.

Part Four, “Insurrections,” sweeps across three plays that resonate with modern protests and uprisings such as the Black Lives Matter movement. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (Chapter 8), Telò makes his most compelling connections between the ancient and the modern by reading “Prometheus as a figure of the colonisé stripped of the right to breathe by a necropolitical police state, living in an atmosphere in which respiration has been obstructed by the polluted air of colonization” (148). Here, he explores most effectively the social justice issues inherent in the pandemic and contemporary events, like the police’s murders of George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Elijah McClain, through comparisons of Prometheus Bound ’s diction, structure, and musical qualities to contemporary dance performances like the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s “WE. DANCE.” (created in response to the murder of George Floyd) and Akram Khan’s Xenos and media like the photograph “Untitled (Face in Dirt)” by David Wojnarowicz.

The gradual disappearance and increasing silence of the eponymous Hecuba of Euripides’ play (Chapter 9) leads to a state of silent insurrection at the play’s end, in which the plosive quality of Hecuba’s final word pais diffuses through Agamemnon’s final plosive-laden lines, figuring an appropriation of Agamemnon’s breath and the air of the environment around them (178-180). Hecuba’s atmospheric survivance finds fruitful comparison in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive and the end of Toni Morrison’s Beloved . The referent of The Trojan Women in Chapter 10 is less Euripides’ play than Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson’s The Trojan Women: A Comic , a format suited for the “notorious episodicity” (182) of Euripides’ version. The noir world of the comic atmospherically evokes Picasso’s Guernica , which in turn evokes the destructive news of Astyanax’ execution, Andromache’s metamorphosis into a tree, and Hecuba’s transformation into a dog. (The chapter’s brevity—at 7 pages, the shortest chapter in the book—comes as something of a surprise).

A brief Epilogue explores Clare Pollard’s 2022 novel Delphi and the Theatre of War’s Zoom production of Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women with a chorus of Ukrainians as a means of tying the various themes of the book together: “To reimmerse oneself, affectively and interpretively, in the contagious oversaturation of Greek tragedy is to breathe the sensation of this pandemic—a curdled, clinging aggravation that, densifying the atmosphere, portends not a singular ‘storm-beaten whirlwind,’ but a proliferating, unbound agitation, a force of de-individuation that confounds the homogenization of time, never ceasing to bristle the air” (195).

Telò’s writing style is extremely dense; it frequently ventures into jargon-laden territory and rewards slow, careful contemplation of each and every sentence. Form matches content as his prose exhibits similar flourishes of wordplay and rhetoric as the Greek tragic texts to which he applies his philologically rigorous analytical lens. For example, at the outset of his introduction, he describes our experience of images of the pandemic as follows: “The ‘sonic images’—perceptive flashes arranged in a pristine parataxis of no ’s; losses; voided, deserted spaces—capture the contradictory sensations left by the pandemic: the frightening yet liberating feeling of reaching the end of the world, imminent extinction—an imminence, however, laden with the chronic exhaustion of ongoing non-eventality—combined with the realization that nothing has changed, that the systemic inequalities structuring the world as we know it, the race-, gender-, and class-based hierarchies constituting the social, have not been interrupted but heightened” (1-2, emphasis original). Each phrase is a gut-wrenching encapsulation of pandemic-era emotions, from fear to exhaustion to aporia , and the sentence’s almost stream-of-consciousness composition embodies in structural character the dizzying, disorienting experience of the last few years. For all its insightful truth, though, it is difficult to deny that Telò’s diction and writing style will stymie a non-specialist or a reader whose impulse is to speed-read or engage with the text superficially. For this reason, this book best serves an audience at the graduate level and onward, especially a reader interested in tragic philology, theory, reception, and/or interdisciplinarity.

The bibliography is admirably up-to-date, with the most recent publications dating (necessarily) to 2022, and the capacious index helpfully points the interested reader towards anything from “authoritarianism” to “heterosexual melancholy” à la Judith Butler. Endnotes are extremely helpful in situating Telò’s scholarly interventions and evince careful, thoughtful engagement with his sources. All Greek in the book is transliterated into Latin characters, an understandable editorial decision (if one that slightly saddens a Greek alphabet lover like myself). Occasional black-and-white images are produced as necessitated by Telò’s discussions and used as visual comparanda in Chapters 4, 7, and 8.

In all, Telò’s thoughts on these ten plays demonstrate in admirable form the myriad of ways in which one might utilize the bread and butter of literary analysis (close reading, philological scrutiny, rhetorical evaluation) in constructing theoretical arguments. Greek tragedy arms us with tools to think through the injustices and anxieties of the Covid pandemic because of “the queer unhistoricism of tragedy, its distinctive collapsing of present, past, and future, which derives from its recontextualization of myth as a notional past in a performative present that is always a potential reperformative future” (6). This collapse of temporal boundaries ensures that Telò’s contributions to our understanding of these plays and our own current situation will remain valid far beyond the current pandemic era into, gods forbid, the next global crisis.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Reading Greek Tragedy through Pandemic Times (1-14)

Part One: Air Time Faces

Oedipus (17-35)
Teiresias Cadmus Dionysus (36-52)
Iphigenia (53-73)

Part Two: Communities

Alcestis (77-91)
The Suppliant Women (92-106)

Part Three: Ruins

Antigone (109-125)
Niobe (126-142)

Part Four: Insurrections

Prometheus (145-168)
Hecuba (169-181)
The Trojan Women (182-188)

Epilogue (189-195)

Notes (196-249)

Bibliography (250-276)

Index (277-286)

Who is Athena? Decoding the Myth and Influence of the Greek Goddess of Wisdom

This essay about Athena explores her multifaceted role in Greek mythology as a symbol of wisdom, warfare, and artisanship. It describes her unique birth from Zeus’s forehead and her significant impact on the cultural and political life of Athens, as well as her enduring legacy in literature and modern institutions. Highlighting her role as a wise counselor in mythic tales and her symbolic importance in contemporary society, the essay portrays Athena as a timeless icon of strategic intelligence and cultural sophistication.

How it works

In the rich tapestry of ancient Greek mythology, Athena emerges as a luminous character, closely associated with wisdom, warfare, and artisanship. Unlike other deities, Athena sprang fully formed from Zeus’s forehead, symbolizing the sudden, brilliant flash of insight and epitomizing strategic thinking, bypassing traditional narratives of divine gestation. Her origin story highlights wisdom as a fundamental, inherent attribute, allowing her to stand immediately as a symbol of knowledge and strategic thought.

Athena’s influence extends well beyond her miraculous birth.

As the revered guardian of Athens, her presence influenced all aspects of Greek society, molding its cultural and political contours. The Parthenon stands as a majestic tribute to her, reflecting her exalted position in the city, while celebrations like the Panathenaea vividly celebrate her divine nature. Through these festivals and structures, the Athenians expressed their reverence and sought Athena’s guidance in statecraft and military matters, regarding her insights as vital for success.

In literature, Athena represents the archetypical wise advisor and tactician. From the sweeping narratives of Homer to the works of subsequent writers, Athena consistently appears to aid heroes, demonstrating her cleverness and tactical acumen, steering them through dangers with her prudent counsel.

In contemporary times, Athena’s influence continues to resonate, inspiring artists, philosophers, and truth-seekers. Her image graces the emblems of educational institutions, representing the quest for knowledge and enlightenment. In today’s complex and turbulent world, Athena’s enduring wisdom provides a beacon of light, offering clarity and insight in times of confusion and turmoil.

Thus, Athena transcends mere mythology to become a lasting emblem of intelligence and cultural refinement, echoing through various cultures and eras. Her mythical figure, rooted in intellect and strategic prowess, remains a source of inspiration for future generations, underscoring the timeless value of wisdom in overcoming challenges and uncertainties.

Cite this page

Who Is Athena? Decoding the Myth and Influence of the Greek Goddess of Wisdom. (2024, May 12). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/who-is-athena-decoding-the-myth-and-influence-of-the-greek-goddess-of-wisdom/

"Who Is Athena? Decoding the Myth and Influence of the Greek Goddess of Wisdom." PapersOwl.com , 12 May 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/who-is-athena-decoding-the-myth-and-influence-of-the-greek-goddess-of-wisdom/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Who Is Athena? Decoding the Myth and Influence of the Greek Goddess of Wisdom . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/who-is-athena-decoding-the-myth-and-influence-of-the-greek-goddess-of-wisdom/ [Accessed: 14 May. 2024]

"Who Is Athena? Decoding the Myth and Influence of the Greek Goddess of Wisdom." PapersOwl.com, May 12, 2024. Accessed May 14, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/who-is-athena-decoding-the-myth-and-influence-of-the-greek-goddess-of-wisdom/

"Who Is Athena? Decoding the Myth and Influence of the Greek Goddess of Wisdom," PapersOwl.com , 12-May-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/who-is-athena-decoding-the-myth-and-influence-of-the-greek-goddess-of-wisdom/. [Accessed: 14-May-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Antigone — Hubris In Antigones Creon Analysis

Hubris in Antigones Creon Analysis

Categories: Antigone

About this sample

Words: 859 |

Published: Mar 5, 2024

Words: 859 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof Ernest (PhD)

Verified writer

Expert in: Literature

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 792 words

3 pages / 1356 words

2 pages / 918 words

4 pages / 1725 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Antigone

The play Antigone, written by Sophocles, is a remarkable piece of Greek literature that explores the complexities of society and human relationships. It delves into the clash between personal beliefs and the laws of the [...]

Antigone, a play written by the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, has long been a subject of debate and discussion among scholars, philosophers, and literary critics. At the heart of this debate lies the question of whether [...]

In the tragic play Antigone by Sophocles, foreshadowing is a powerful storytelling device that not only adds depth and complexity to the plot, but also provides hints and clues about the future events in the play. [...]

Sophocles' tragedy, Antigone, is a timeless piece of literature that delves into the complexities of human nature, morality, and pride. At the heart of the play is the character of Creon, the newly crowned king of Thebes, whose [...]

The word “feminism” was first officially coined by French socialist Charles Fourier to be used to describe equal rights and social standing for women in the 1890’s. Throughout time, the meaning has changed, but the underlying [...]

Sophocles. (441 BCE). Antigone. (R. C. Jebb, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

Instructions Followed To The Letter
Deadlines Met At Every Stage
Unique And Plagiarism Free

IMAGES

Antigone: A Tragedy
The Classical Greek Literature Relationship to Tragedy in “Antigone
The Greek Tragedy Antigone Analytical Essay on Samploon.com
Antigone is a greek tragedy
Antigone's Tragic Hero
Arrogance and Wisdom in The Tragedy of Antigone

VIDEO

Meet Antigone from Greek mythology
Who is Antigone｜Greek mythological figures｜VISMYTH
Antigone #3
Submitting Antigone and Greek Tragedy Essay
A play that speaks to Ferguson’s tragedy and lets the audience speak back
BUILDING A SET FOR A GREEK TRAGEDY. Back Stage Tour of "Antigone" @ BLC Theatre

COMMENTS

Analysis of Sophocles' Antigone
Analysis of Sophocles' Antigone By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 29, 2020 • ( 0). Within this single drama—in great part, a harsh critique of Athenian society and the Greek city-state in general—Sophocles tells of the eternal struggle between the state and the individual, human and natural law, and the enormous gulf between what we attempt here on earth and what fate has in store for us all.
Antigone
Introduction - Who wrote Antigone. "Antigone" is a tragedy by the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, written around 442 BCE. Although it was written before Sophocles ' other two Theban plays, chronologically it comes after the stories in "Oedipus the King" and "Oedipus at Colonus", and it picks up where Aeschylus ' play ...
Antigone Essay Examples: Topics, Hooks, Thesis Ideas
Antigone: a Heroine Meets Her Tragedy. Essay grade: Good. 3 pages / 1484 words. It is not often in Greek myth or tragedy that a woman is found portrayed as a tragic hero. However, Sophocles makes the hero of his Antigone, the third and last play in the theme of Oedipus' life, a woman.
The Ancient Greek Tragedy "Antigone"
809 writers online. Learn More. The ancient Greek tragedy "Antigone" was written by Sophocles and narrates about a woman fighting against a royal decree that hurt her personal feelings and principles. Antigone is a girl who has crossed out her future by her act and has incurred the wrath of King Creon. She has the following features ...
Antigone: a Heroine Meets Her Tragedy: [Essay Example], 1484 words
The essay provides a brief analysis of Sophocles' Antigone as a Greek tragedy where the main character is a woman. It evaluates Antigone's status as a tragic hero based on the three characteristics of a tragic hero - noble birth, goodness, and a tragic flaw.
Antigone Analysis
Antigone is a classic example of Greek tragedy. Traditionally, a tragedy describes how a hero is ruined by their tragic flaw. ... What is a good thesis statement for an essay about Sophocles' play ...
Antigone Study Guide
The following three essays explore the play's themes and context. ... Perhaps more than any other Greek tragedy, Sophocles' Antigone has captured the interests of philosophers, ranging from Aristotle (fourth century BC) to Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and beyond. Most famously, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) saw the tragedy as ...
Antigone Summary
Antigone is a Greek tragedy written by Sophocles in the 5th century BCE. One of the most famous and enduring works of ancient Greek drama, Antigone explores themes of moral conflict, duty, and the ...
Antigone
Antigone was the third play in the Oedipus trilogy written by the great Greek playwright Sophocles (c. 496 - c. 406 BCE). Produced around 441 BCE and receiving first prize at the Dionysia festival, the tragedy was actually written long before both Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus.In the play, Antigone returns to Thebes after the death of her father Oedipus.
Antigone (Sophocles play)
Antigone (/ æ n ˈ t ɪ ɡ ə n i / ann-TIG-ə-nee; Ancient Greek: Ἀντιγόνη) is an Athenian tragedy written by Sophocles in (or before) 441 BC and first performed at the Festival of Dionysus of the same year. It is thought to be the second oldest surviving play of Sophocles, preceded by Ajax, which was written around the same period.The play is one of a triad of tragedies known as ...
PDF Sophocles' Antigone
essay by director Karen Libman. Antigone begins after Oedipus and Jocasta's sons have killed each other in a battle over the kingship. The new king, Kreon, decrees that the brother who ... Greek Tragedy Festival to Dionysos Greek tragedy was composed for performance at an annual Athenian festival honoring the god Dionysos. That festival ...
Tragedy in Sophocles' "Antigone"
Tragedy in Sophocles' "Antigone" Essay. Through Antigone play, Sophocles explores the ideas, motives, aspirations, utterances dispositions, and actions of different characters, thus allowing audiences to come to terms with the various characters. All the characters seem to be motivated by the desire to achieve some commendable objective.
Polis and Tragedy in the 'Antigone'
Tragedy is the polis' partner in an intricate. logue. She has her own agenda and her own ways of making. points, some of them quite sly,6) and she is rather more on Antigone's. side than the polis is. The main burden of this essay is to stand better her side of the conversation, an area where.
Antigone
Antigone, in Greek legend, the daughter born of the unwittingly incestuous union of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta.After her father blinded himself upon discovering that Jocasta was his mother and that, also unwittingly, he had slain his father, Antigone and her sister Ismene served as Oedipus' guides, following him from Thebes into exile until his death near Athens.
Antigone: A Tragedy of Human Conflicts and Divine Intervention
Antigone is a passionate tragedy of conflicts and sufferings. Its plot revolves around Antigone's burial of her rebel brother Polyneices. This essay explores this act's consequential conflicts ...
Analysis of Antigone by Sophocles
Antigone is considered one of the most famous tragedies ever written. The play fits into the category of Greek Tragedy. Greek Tragedy is one of the more unique categories in drama. The tragedy contains a plot, a tragic hero, theme, diction, a chorus, and spectacles. Sophocles used these six characteristics when creating Antigone.
Antigone by Sophocles Plot Summary
Antigone Summary. Next. Lines 1-416. As the play begins, the invading army of Argos has been driven from Thebes, but in the course of the battle, two sons of Oedipus (Eteocles and Polynices) have died fighting for opposing sides. Their uncle, Creon, is now king of Thebes. He decrees that the body of Polynices, who fought against his native city ...
2
Summary. Chapter Two provides an original interpretation of Sophocles' Antigone, arguing that the play illustrates the tragic consequences of perceiving law exclusively in its human or divine form. It builds on and diverges from the Hegelian reading of the play, drawing out the role of hubris, as characterized by Creon's myopic view of law ...
Antigone Vs. Creon: Clash of Values and Consequences
The ancient Greek tragedy "Antigone" by Sophocles revolves around a profound conflict between two central characters, Antigone and Creon. This timeless play explores the clash of values, ethics, and power, ultimately revealing the consequences of their opposing beliefs and actions. The characters of Antigone and Creon serve as powerful symbols ...
Essay on Antigone Is a Tragedy by Aristotle's Rules
The play Antigone by Sophocles is considered a tragedy. There are five rules created by Aristotle that classify a tragedy. All plays must have catharsis, a tragic hero, a change in fortune within a character, must be poetic, and happen in one location, in one day, and it is all closely related. Two main characters are the king Creon and a girl ...
Antigone as a Greek Tragedy
Antigone represents the unwritten laws, justice, and piety, while Creon is the symbol of the laws of man. No compromise was possible between the two strong wills and, therefore, the tragedy was precipitated. Both in Creon and Antigone there was also internal conflict. As Creon came in clash with Haemon, his obstinacy received a shock.
Greek Tragedy In Antigone
824 Words4 Pages. Antigone written by Sophocles is a prime example of a Greek tragedy. Antigone is fighting against the law made by the king, Creon. His justification to why she should not be able to bury her brother is that he was a traitor. Antigone believes, as do all citizens of Thebes, that she should have custody over the body to give a ...
Greek Tragedy Antigone Antigone, Essay
Greek Tragedy Antigone does follow the Greek definition of tragedy. Tragedy is a story or play that has a signifigant conflict of morals, with a noble protagonist displaying a tragic flaw that is their strength but leads to their downfall. The exposition of the story is when Antigone is talking with her sister and we learn of what has happened.
Greek tragedy in a global crisis: reading through pandemic times
Greek tragedy in a global crisis: reading through pandemic times. ... Telò's geopolitical reading of the play situates Antigone's cave as "a locus of intimate contact with the most literal foundation of life itself (human and non-human)" (124), a space that supports and nurtures despite attempts to weaponize it or bleed it dry by ...
The Enigmatic Realm of Hades in Greek Mythology: A Journey into the
Essay Example: In the vast expanse of Greek mythology, few realms hold as much intrigue and fascination as the underworld, ruled by the enigmatic deity Hades. Often depicted as a shadowy figure lurking in the depths, Hades presides over a domain that transcends mere darkness, offering a complex
Who Is Athena? Decoding the Myth and Influence of the Greek Goddess of
This essay about Athena explores her multifaceted role in Greek mythology as a symbol of wisdom, warfare, and artisanship. It describes her unique birth from Zeus's forehead and her significant impact on the cultural and political life of Athens, as well as her enduring legacy in literature and modern institutions.
Hubris In Antigones Creon Analysis: [Essay Example], 859 words
Hubris, the excessive pride and arrogance that leads to a character's downfall, is a common theme in Greek tragedy. In Sophocles' play Antigone, the character of Creon demonstrates hubris as he refuses to listen to the wise counsel of others, leading to disastrous consequences for himself and those around him.This essay will analyze Creon's hubris and its role in the tragedy of Antigone ...