Sophocles: ‘Antigone’

 Sophocles is at it again: this play has two central characters, not one.

And I am at it again, following Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the tragedies.

Antigone, the title character, is gone before the play gets started. Her fate is straightforward, and she faces it with resolve and courage.

Creon, the new king of Thebes, has decreed that anyone who tries to bury Polyneices, who attacked the city with an army, will be executed. Polyneices was Antigone’s brother. She buries him. 

All the drama lies with Creon. He is so sure of that his decree is righteous.

But the chorus of Theban elders hesitates about whether the decree is wise. News comes that Antigone is defying the decree. Creon’s son Haemon, who is Antigone’s fiancé, pleads for her life and suggests the decree is unjust. Word comes that the people of the city are grumbling. Teiresias the prophet tells Creon bluntly that he’s making a catastrophic blunder.

Creon has many chances to back away from a bad decision. But he does not because he cannot. He’s the kind of leader who can’t admit he’s wrong — can’t change his mind even when the evidence mounts that he’s heading toward disaster.

About tyranny they were never wrong, the old Greek tragedians, how well they understood how quickly an inability to empathize with others leads to insensitivity and then cruelty, erodes trust, makes a person forever suspicious. People who are so self-centered and distrusting of others are unable to take counsel, unable to yield, unable to change course. They come to ruin, as do those who follow them. It’s a law of nature.

There are so many good lines in this play it’s hard to pick a favorite. But today it’s Tiresias verdict on the tyrant:

 

Stubbornness and stupidity are twins.

 

And, after a bitter argument:

 

Let him spend his rage

on younger men and learn to keep his tongue,

and keep a better mind than now he does.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Antigone is on pp. 129-35. 

Antigone, translated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, is in Sophocles I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 157-204. The quotations are on pp. 193 and 196.