Antigone, by Sophocles (FREE PDF)

TITLE: Antigone

AUTHOR: Sophocles

YEAR: 441 BC

GENRE: Tragedy - Greek theatre play

CHARACTERS:

-Antigone

-Ismene

-Creon

-Eurydice

-Haemon

-Tiresias

-Sentry

-Leader of the Chorus

-First Messenger

-Second Messenger

-Two Guards

-A boy

CHORUS: Theban Elders

THEMES:

-Civil desobedience

-Natural law

-Religion

-Ethics

TRANSLATOR: Richard Claverhouse Jebb

Antigone, by Sophocles, is a Classical Greek play which studies the conflict between civil law and religious and ethical convictions. When after a war in Thebes, King Creon orders the corpse of the rebel Polynices to remain unburied, his sister Antigone decides to perform the rituals anyway, despite knowing the consequences.

As most Greek plays, Antigone’s story spans just one day. She had already featured in other Theban Plays, like Oedipus at Colonus, but always from a secondary role.

Despite its obvious interaction with Greek Mythology, and its inherently moralistic message, Antigone’s gods never appear directly, but just conspire indirectly in her favour and influence scenes without being present. The play consists almost entirely of human characters, like Antigone’s sister Ismene or Creon’s wife Eurydice.

The play follows the archetypical Greek system of Hybric behaviour leading to a tragic Anagnorisis. The book finishes with a fable-like lesson, which reflects Ancient Greek moral standards and worldview.

Prior to the beginning of the play, the brothers Eteocles and Polynices, leading opposite sides in Thebes' civil war, died fighting each other for the throne. Creon, the new ruler of Thebes and brother of the former Queen Jocasta, has decided that Eteocles will be honored and Polynices will be in public shame. The rebel brother's body will not be sanctified by holy rites and will lie unburied on the battlefield, prey for carrion animals,^[a] the harshest punishment at the time. Antigone and Ismene are the sisters of the dead Polynices and Eteocles.

In the opening of the play, Antigone brings Ismene outside the palace gates late at night for a secret meeting: Antigone wants to bury Polynices' body, in defiance of Creon's edict. Ismene refuses to help her, not believing that it will actually be possible to bury their brother, who is under guard, but she is unable to stop Antigone from going to bury her brother herself.

The chorus enter and cast the background story of the Seven against Thebes into a mythic and heroic context.

Creon enters, and seeks the support of the chorus of Theban elders in the days to come and in particular, wants them to back his edict regarding the disposal of Polynices' body. The leader of the chorus pledges his support out of deference to Creon. A sentry enters, fearfully reporting that the body has been given funeral rites and a symbolic burial with a thin covering of earth, though no one sees who actually committed the crime. Creon, furious, orders the sentry to find the culprit or face death himself. The sentry leaves.

The sentry returns, bringing Antigone with him. The sentry explains that the watchmen uncovered Polynices' body and then caught Antigone as she did the funeral rituals. Creon questions her after sending the sentry away, and she does not deny what she has done. She argues unflinchingly with Creon about the immorality of the edict and the morality of her actions. Creon becomes furious, and seeing Ismene upset, thinks she must have known of Antigone's plan. He summons her. Ismene tries to confess falsely to the crime, wishing to die alongside her sister, but Antigone will not have it. Creon orders that the two women be imprisoned. The chorus sing of the troubles of the house of Oedipus. Haemon, Creon's son, enters to pledge allegiance to his father, even though he is engaged to Antigone. He initially seems willing to forsake Antigone, but when Haemon gently tries to persuade his father to spare Antigone, claiming that "under cover of darkness the city mourns for the girl", the discussion deteriorates, and the two men are soon bitterly insulting each other. When Creon threatens to execute Antigone in front of his son, Haemon leaves, vowing never to see Creon again.

The chorus sing of the power of love. Antigone is brought in under guard on her way to execution. She sings a lament. The chorus compares her to the goddess Niobe, who was turned into a rock, and say it is a wonderful thing to be compared to a goddess. Antigone accuses them of mocking her.

Creon decides to spare Ismene and to bury Antigone alive in a cave. By not killing her directly, he hopes to pay minimal respects to the gods. She is brought out of the house, and this time, she is sorrowful instead of defiant. She expresses her regrets at not having married and dying for following the laws of the gods. She is taken away to her living tomb.

The Chorus encourages Antigone by singing of the great women of myth who suffered.

Tiresias, the blind prophet, enters. Tiresias warns Creon that Polynices should now be urgently buried because the gods are displeased, refusing to accept any sacrifices or prayers from Thebes. However, Creon accuses Tiresias of being corrupt. Tiresias responds that Creon will lose "a son of [his] own loins"^[3] for the crimes of leaving Polynices unburied and putting Antigone into the earth (he does not say that Antigone should not be condemned to death, only that it is improper to keep a living body underneath the earth). Tiresias also prophesies that all of Greece will despise Creon and that the sacrificial offerings of Thebes will not be accepted by the gods. The leader of the chorus, terrified, asks Creon to take Tiresias' advice to free Antigone and bury Polynices. Creon assents, leaving with a retinue of men. The chorus delivers an oral ode to the god Dionysus.

A messenger enters to tell the leader of the chorus that Haemon has killed himself. Eurydice, Creon's wife and Haemon's mother, enters and asks the messenger to tell her everything. The messenger reports that Creon saw to the burial of Polynices. When Creon arrived at Antigone's cave, he found Haemon lamenting over Antigone, who had hanged herself. Haemon unsuccessfully attempted to stab Creon, then stabbed himself. Having listened to the messenger's account, Eurydice silently disappears into the palace.

Creon enters, carrying Haemon's body. He understands that his own actions have caused these events and blames himself. A second messenger arrives to tell Creon and the chorus that Eurydice has also killed herself. With her last breath, she cursed her husband for the deaths of her sons, Haemon and Megareus. Creon blames himself for everything that has happened, and, a broken man, he asks his servants to help him inside. The order he valued so much has been protected, and he is still the king, but he has acted against the gods and lost his children and his wife as a result. After Creon condemns himself, the leader of the chorus closes by saying that although the gods punish the proud, punishment brings wisdom.

Sophocles (/ˈsɒfəkliːz/; Ancient Greek: Σοφοκλῆς, pronounced [so.pʰo.klɛ̂ːs]; c. 497/6 – winter 406/5 BC) is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than, or contemporary with, those of Aeschylus; and earlier than, or contemporary with, those of Euripides. Sophocles wrote over 120 plays, but only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost fifty years, Sophocles was the most celebrated playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens which took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia. He competed in thirty competitions, won twenty-four, and was never judged lower than second place. Aeschylus won thirteen competitions, and was sometimes defeated by Sophocles; Euripides won four.

The most famous tragedies of Sophocles feature Oedipus and Antigone: they are generally known as the Theban plays, though each was part of a different tetralogy (the other members of which are now lost). Sophocles influenced the development of drama, most importantly by adding a third actor (attributed to Sophocles by Aristotle; to Aeschylus by Themistius), thereby reducing the importance of the chorus in the presentation of the plot. He also developed his characters to a greater extent than earlier playwrights.

This edition was translated by Richard Claverhouse Jebb, professor of Greek at Cambridge. It belongs to a collection of other plays of Sophocles published as a whole by the same translator.

Tragedy (from the Greek: τραγῳδία, tragōidia) is a genre of drama based on human suffering and, mainly, the terrible or sorrowful events that befall a main character. Traditionally, the intention of tragedy is to invoke an accompanying catharsis, or a "pain [that] awakens pleasure", for the audience. While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term tragedy often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilization. That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.

From its origins in the theatre of ancient Greece 2500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as many fragments from other poets, and the later Roman tragedies of Seneca; through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Jean Racine, and Friedrich Schiller to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg; Samuel Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering; Heiner Müller postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change. A long line of philosophers—which includes Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Camus, Lacan, and Deleuze—have analysed, speculated upon, and criticised the genre.

In the wake of Aristotle's Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general (where the tragic divides against epic and lyric) or at the scale of the drama (where tragedy is opposed to comedy). In the modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama, the tragicomic, and epic theatre. Drama, in the narrow sense, cuts across the traditional division between comedy and tragedy in an anti- or a-generic deterritorialisation from the mid-19th century onwards. Both Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal define their epic theatre projects (non-Aristotelian drama and Theatre of the Oppressed, respectively) against models of tragedy. Taxidou, however, reads epic theatre as an incorporation of tragic functions and its treatments of mourning and speculation.