In brief
Two brothers have killed each other at the gates of Thebes, one defending the city and one attacking it. Their uncle Creon, the new king, decrees that the attacker, Polynices, shall lie unburied, on pain of death. His sister Antigone asks her sister Ismene for help, is refused, and buries him alone. Caught, she defends the deed to Creon’s face and is sentenced to be walled up alive. Creon’s son Haemon, her betrothed, pleads and fails. The blind prophet Tiresias tells Creon the gods have turned away, and Creon gives in, too late. Antigone has hanged herself, Haemon kills himself beside her, and Creon’s wife Eurydice kills herself on hearing.
The play is usually taught as conscience against the state, but its proportions disagree. Antigone leaves for the last time with about 400 of its 1,350 lines still to come, and the rest is mostly the ruin of Creon.
Is Creon an equal party?
Hegel made this the central question. In his lectures on fine art the play is “the most excellent and satisfying work of art”, and in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and the lectures alike he reads it as a collision of two valid powers: “Antigone reverences the ties of blood-relationship, the gods of the nether world. Creon alone recognizes Zeus, the paramount Power of public life and the commonwealth.” Neither can win, since each lives inside the thing it attacks: “we find immanent in the life of both that which each respectively combats”.
The strength of this is that it takes Creon seriously. His opening speech is no tyrant’s rant, and he has just survived a siege: “Our country carries us” (first episode). Polynices did come to burn the city.
The weakness is that the play does not leave the balance standing. Tiresias reports that the altars are fouled by what the dogs have dragged from the corpse (fifth episode), which settles the question of the gods. Creon then concedes everything: “I slew thee—I, O misery!” (exodos). And his language has already drifted from the state to himself. “No woman rules me while I live” (second episode) is no argument about the city. When Haemon says “One only makes not up a city, father”, Creon answers “Is not the city in the sovereign’s hand?”, and Haemon has the reply: “Nobly you’d govern as the desert’s king” (third episode).
So I would keep half of Hegel. He is right about the form: there are two claims, both real at the start, and both people are narrow. Antigone is hard on her sister, and the Chorus can say “A self-willed passion was thine overthrow” (fourth episode) and not be simply wrong. Even her confidence falters at the end: “if this act be what the Gods approve, / In death I may repent me of my deed”. But he is wrong about the verdict. Creon begins with a defensible principle and uses it for an indefensible act, and the play says so. Martha Nussbaum’s version is the more useful, that both simplify a world too complicated for either of them, and that the play itself does not.
In the free text linked here Creon speaks about 350 lines and Antigone about 220.
The shape of the play
Editors divide it into a prologue, an entry song or parodos, and five episodes, each followed by a choral ode or stasimon, then the exodos. The first ode is the Ode to Man, the second is on the curse on a house (second stasimon), the third on Love (third stasimon), the fourth on people shut up like Antigone (fourth stasimon), and the fifth a joyful call to Dionysus (fifth stasimon) sung just before the news of the deaths.
A detail in the last movement is easy to miss. After Tiresias the Chorus tells Creon, in that order, “Go and release the maiden from the vault, / And make a grave for the unburied dead”. The Messenger reports the reverse: they tended and burned the body, “Then we turned us to the vault”. The play never says the delay was fatal, and we are not told when she died. It simply lets him do the dead first.
The Ode to Man and the word deinos
The ode opens with the Greek words polla ta deina. Deinos means terrible, formidable, clever and wonderful, usually at once, and no English word does all of it. The free version here chooses wonder: “Many a wonder lives and moves, but the wonder of all is man” (first stasimon). Storr has much the same. Fagles has “numberless wonders”. Anne Carson’s Antigonick (2012) has the most alarming solution: “Many terribly quiet customers exist but none more terribly quiet than man”. Heidegger, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, made the word mean strange, and built on it an account of what human beings are.
The ode is often quoted as a hymn to progress. But it turns: “From Death alone he shall not find reprieve”, and “One while he moves toward evil, and one while toward good”. Its ideal is a man “Weaving the laws into his life and steadfast oath of Heaven”, human law and divine law together, the very thing the play shows coming apart. It closes by shutting the wicked out of the house, “Ne’er may he come beneath my roof”, and at once the guard brings in the culprit: “I know the girl Antigone”.
The word returns in Creon’s mouth when he breaks. At Greek lines 1096–97 he uses it twice, and Campbell has to spread it: “To yield is dreadful: but resistingly / To face the blow of fate, is full of dread” (fifth episode).
The husband and the brother
On her way to the tomb, Antigone says something that has embarrassed readers for two centuries. For a husband or child she would not have done it: “A husband lost might be replaced; a son, / If son were lost to me, might yet be born; / But, with both parents hidden in the tomb, / No brother may arise to comfort me” (fourth episode). These are the lines numbered 904–920 in the Greek, and they seem to shrink the “infallible, unwritten laws of Heaven” (second episode) to a calculation about one irreplaceable relation.
Goethe told Eckermann on 28 March 1827 that “I would give a great deal for an apt philologist to prove that it is interpolated and spurious”. Jebb’s translation at Perseus prints the passage in brackets. But most editors keep it, and the evidence is awkward for the doubters. Aristotle’s Rhetoric (3.16) quotes the argument as Sophocles’, so it was in the text about a century later. Its source seems to be the story of Intaphernes’ wife in Herodotus (3.119), and Sheila Murnaghan has noted that the parallel can cut both ways.
I think it is genuine, and for a reason inside the play. Creon has already made the same argument about the same girl. Told he is killing his son’s bride, he says “He may find other fields to plough upon” (second episode). Husbands and wives are replaceable: the tyrant says it coarsely and the heroine says it in anguish, moments before listing what she is losing, “unhusbanded, / Before my nuptial, having never known / Or married joy or tender motherhood”. It is what a person says when no argument is left, and it is not supposed to be good reasoning.
The two burials
The body is buried twice. First the guard reports that “a thin dust was o’er him”, with no track or spade mark (first episode). The Chorus wonders whether “Some Power divine hath interposed in this”, and Creon silences them. The guards then sweep the dust away. In the middle of the day a whirlwind fills the plain, and when it clears Antigone is there, crying “Like some despairing bird”, heaping dust again and pouring “three libations” (second episode).
A sprinkling of dust completes the rite, so why go back? Some have said the gods did the first burial. Jebb suggested she had omitted the libations. Tycho von Wilamowitz said the gap gives her defiance time to be felt. Norwood blamed stubbornness. Bonnie Honig, in Antigone, Interrupted, argues that Ismene did it, which would make her later “If her voice go therewith, I did the deed” (second episode) simply true. It is an exhilarating idea with no line to prove it, though Antigone’s answer is suggestive: “Who did the deed, the powers beneath can tell”.
I take the first burial to be hers, since the guard says she denied nothing when charged with it. The dramatic reason is enough: the first visit creates the mystery, and the second produces her in person.
The free English
The text linked here is Lewis Campbell’s verse version, begun in 1869, published with the other six plays in 1883 and reissued in the World’s Classics in 1906, Gutenberg #14484. It is complete, and it gives the range of Greek line numbers at each page head, reaching 1353, but no line numbers beside the text, so citations here are by episode and ode.
Its weakness is Victorian diction, with “Eterne” for eternal and “wisest leech” for doctor, and a certain politeness: where Storr’s Messenger has Haemon “Spat in his face”, Campbell has him merely glare. A few slips survive in the file, such as “carrion few”, and Creon’s sentence “Where human footstep shuns the desert ground” is headed for the Chorus.
The better-known free text is F. Storr’s Loeb of 1912, in Gutenberg #31 and used on this site’s Oedipus Rex page. For this play it comes second. It rhymes the lyric parts into jingles, “Let rite be paid when rites are due”, and the file is badly damaged: “Like anchors at a target” for archers, “the craven’s vaulted gloom” for a cavern, “All hall to thee”, a question of Creon’s labelled as the Chorus, and a sentence in italics with its spaces gone.
Better versions cost money. Robert Fagles (1982, with Bernard Knox’s notes) is the usual recommendation, and David Grene’s (1991) is plainer. Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s Loeb (1994) faces the Greek. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald’s version of the late 1930s has been faulted for making the gods sound monotheistic. Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes (2004) and Carson’s Antigonick are adaptations.
Written first, set last
Editions print the plays in story order: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone. Sophocles wrote them in another order over some 36 years, with Antigone first and Colonus produced in 401 BC, after his death. Campbell’s preface already complains of “a loose way of speaking of ‘the Theban Trilogy’”. Each belonged to a different group of plays, now lost.
They do not fit. Antigone here says of her father, “with these very hands I decked / And bathed you after death” (fourth episode), while the later Colonus has him vanish at a spot “No man save Theseus knoweth” (Storr’s wording). That play also has a doomed Polynices begging his sisters for burial, a backstory Sophocles wrote decades after this play.
The people
Ismene
Ismene gets the play’s first statement of the realist case: “We needs must bear in mind we are but women, / Never created to contend with men” (prologue). Antigone turns on her with startling coldness, and when Ismene later offers to die with her, she answers “I care not for lip-kindness from my kin”. Ismene’s last words in the play are about Haemon, and then she disappears. Going to her death, Antigone calls herself “the only scion left” of the line, with her sister still indoors.
One line matters more than its length. In Campbell and in Storr, Antigone cries “O dearest Haemon! how thy father wrongs thee!” (second episode). The manuscripts give line 572 to Ismene. The Aldine edition of 1502 moved it to Antigone, Jebb followed, and the Oxford text of 1990 moved it back. If the manuscripts are right, Antigone never once names the man she was to marry.
Haemon
Haemon opens with obedience and offers a politician’s argument, not a lover’s: “Thy people mourn this maiden”, and “The plant that yields where torrent waters flow / Saves every little twig” (third episode). Hegel noticed that he pleads “the external aspects of the case rather than the power of his own personal passion”. He and Antigone are never on stage together. The Messenger finds him “clinging to her on his knees”, and after the failed sword-stroke at his father, “Wroth with himself”, he drives it in.
Tiresias and Eurydice
Tiresias speaks gently until insulted, then with terrible exactness. Eurydice has eight lines, hears the Messenger and leaves without a word. “There is a danger, even in too much silence”, the Messenger says, and she is next seen dead.
How it was made
The date is an estimate. No record of the first production survives. Britannica gives 442 or 441 BC, other references 442 or 440, and about 441 is a convention. The usual argument links the play with Sophocles’ election as a general for the Samos campaign of 441/0, which is tradition, not evidence, and R. G. Lewis argued in 1988 against the common date of the 442 festival. Style supports an early play. The burial of Polynices is known from the end of Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes (467 BC), but that ending is now widely thought to be a later addition made to fit Sophocles.
Readers and critics
George Steiner’s Antigones is the survey of how the story has been reused. Hölderlin’s German version of 1804, mocked on publication, became a model of radical translation. Lacan gave it a central place in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim (2000) asks what an incestuous line does to Hegel’s neat idea of kinship.
Afterlives
Jean Anouilh’s Antigone opened in Paris in February 1944 under Nazi censorship, ambiguous enough to pass. Bertolt Brecht adapted Hölderlin’s text at Chur in 1948 with a Nazi-style Creon, and Carl Orff’s opera used Hölderlin in 1949. Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona’s The Island (1973) has two prisoners rehearse the play on Robben Island. Ivo van Hove staged Carson’s translation at the Barbican in 2015, and Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017) moves it among British Muslims.
How to read it
- Read it first of the three. That is the order it was written in.
- Stop at the ode. Try reading “wonder” as “terror” all the way through.
Read next
- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (about 429 BC). A later and kinder Creon, and a different Thebes.
- Jean Anouilh, Antigone (1944). Creon gets the better arguments, and she refuses them anyway.
- Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire (2017). The burial question asked of a modern state.