Poetry, drama, and fiction express the moral and political dimensions of our lives that philosophy attempts to examine and analyze. Indeed, given the character and complexity of moral and political life, literature often is the best avenue we have to its disclosure. Greek tragedy is a classic case of such disclosure. There are features of Greek ethics and Greek thinking in the fifth century B.C.E. that are known to us best from the writings of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
The fifth century was a towering period. The Greek world experienced the Persian Wars, the rise of the Athenian Empire, the war between Sparta and Athens, the flourishing of Periclean Athens as the apex of democracy and its cultural center, and the fall of Athens and the emergence of Sparta as the preeminent Greek polis. It experienced too the development of historical writing in the work of Herodotus and Thucydides, the rise of the itinerant teachers called sophists, the epitome of pre-Socratic natural philosophy, and the birth of old comedy. And the fifth century was the century of Socrates and of the tragedians, among them the author of the Antigone, Sophocles.
Born in 496 B.C.E., Sophocles died in 406, just prior to the fall of Athens. He composed over 120 plays; it has been calculated that about 96 of them won the first prize at the festival of Dionysus where tragedies and satyr plays were performed. His first victory was in 468; the Antigone was first performed in 441. Of this corpus, just seven plays survive.
Sophocles’s tragedies are marked by larger-than-life figures who, when confronted with momentous decisions and faced with the forces of fate and dike (justice), become victims of the complexity of such forces. In the Antigone both Creon and Antigone face such a situation. From antiquity to our own day, readers have puzzled over who the central player is and what Sophocles seeks to show us about how human beings respond to the forces of fate and justice that govern the universe and the affairs of humankind. Readers find within the Antigone multiple tensions—between the individual and the state, between familial obligations and duty to the polis, between divine command and positive law, between youthful self-sacrifice and adult domination, and more. Whether the drama does in fact display precisely these conflicts or ones like them the reader must make out for herself. What is clear is that Antigone’s choice, when faced with her brothers’ deaths and the edict of Creon, her uncle, sets in motion a chain of actions that ultimately leave Creon damaged and in despair. From one perspective, while it is Antigone who first confronts the pull of familial devotion and respect under the abiding laws of the gods, on the one hand, and the prohibition uttered by Creon as king, on the other, ultimately it is Creon whose convictions are shown to parent conflict and disaster. There is no easy way to subordinate family loyalty to the allegiance and commitment to the state. There is no escaping fate, no way of cultivating without fault the many modes of philia (friendship, mutuality, loyalty).
Modern discussion of the drama falls under the heavy burden of Hegel’s famous reading, in which such dichotomies, oppositions, and dialectical reversals take pride of place. But some interpreters suggest that the play is more subtle than that. Every opposition, like those between the family and the state, youth and age, the individual and society, is qualified in the careful speeches that Sophocles creates. It is not as easy as one might initially think to eulogize Antigone for her strength of character and conviction or to denigrate Ismene for her weakness, to demonize Creon or to heroize Haemon. Sophocles’ portrayal of the individual is more complex; what we call moral obligations and political responsibilities are less easy to separate than we tend to think. The lives that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle subject to examination and analysis realize in Sophocles a complexity that we should keep in mind.
Recommended Readings
Benardete, Seth. Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophocles’ Antigone. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine Press, 1999.
Bowra, C. M. Sophoclean Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1944.
Goldhill, Simon. Reading Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Kitto, H.D.G. Greek Tragedy. London: Methuen and Company, 1970.
Knox, Bernard. The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy. Berkeley: University of Californian Press, 1964.
Lloyd-Jones, H. The Justice of Zeus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
Reinhardt, K. Sophocles. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Segal, C. P. Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Steiner, George. Antigone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Winnington-Ingram, R. P. Sophocles: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.