John Walbridge
John Walbridge is a Near Eastern languages and cultures professor at Indiana University Bloomington.
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John Walbridge is a Near Eastern languages and cultures professor at Indiana University Bloomington.
More About this Author
John Walbridge is a Near Eastern languages and cultures professor at Indiana University Bloomington.
More About this Author
Antigone Condemned to Death by Creon, Giuseppe Diotti, 1845
Some years ago, I attended a performance of Sophocles’s Antigone staged at a small outdoor amphitheater at my university. It was a beautiful spring day, and it was an opportunity to see a Greek tragedy staged in something like its original setting.
I first read Antigone as an eighteen-year-old college freshman in 1968. I would have seen its portrayal of the conflict between morality and state authority in the context of the Vietnam War, which was then at its height. Certainly, the figure of Antigone standing alone against the authority of the state appeals to young people. Thirty years later, I taught the play and its companion, Oedipus Rex, in a course on virtue ethics called The Pursuit of Happiness. My freshman and sophomore students mostly read it the same way, and, if my lecture notes are to be believed, I taught it as a rather dry analysis of diverse notions of justice. But when I saw it again another twenty years or so later, it seemed different.
Antigone is one of Sophocles’s earlier plays. The title character is one of the four children of the unhappy Oedipus and his wife/mother, Jocasta. After the death of Oedipus, her two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, had agreed to alternate years on the throne of the city of Thebes, but Eteocles not surprisingly refused to yield the throne after his year was over. Polynices then returned with an army from Argos. In the ensuing battle, the Argives are defeated, but the two brothers kill each other in single combat. The throne is then assumed by Creon, the maternal uncle of Oedipus’s children. When the play starts, Antigone has just learned that Creon has ordered that Eteocles be buried with all the honors of the city but that Polynices’s body should be left unburied to be devoured by dogs, which is both an appropriate punishment for a traitor and a violation of fundamental divine law. Antigone confides to her sister Ismene that she intends to bury her brother, but Ismene fears the consequences of defying the new king, who has threatened death to anyone who attempts to bury the traitor’s body. Antigone is able to sprinkle earth over her brother’s body and say funeral prayers. When she returns, she sees that the guards have removed the earth from the body. Again, she tries to cover the body, but she is seen, brought before Creon, and condemned to death by being walled in a cave, a form of execution that Creon hopes will avert a possible curse upon the city.
Events then unfold with the dismal inevitability of a well-constructed tragedy as the stubborn insistence of Antigone and Creon on their respective principles brings ruin to themselves and those around them. Despite the protests of Haemon, Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancé, the sentence is carried out. Warned by the blind prophet Tiresias of the folly of defying the primordial law of the gods, Creon relents, only to discover that Antigone has already hanged herself. Haemon, who has discovered her body, spits in his father’s face and falls on his own sword. The final blow comes when Creon learns that his wife, mad with grief at the death of her son, has also killed herself.
The play was immediately recognized as a classic and was included in the standard ancient collection of seven of Sophocles’s plays. In modern times, however, opinions have fluctuated. Arch-Victorian Matthew Arnold, writing in 1853, commented, “An action like the action of the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the heroine’s duty to her brother’s corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest.”1 Philip Whaley Harsh, in his Handbook of Classical Drama, wrote that “modern adaptations [of Antigone]... are of slight importance.”2 Few modern critics seem to understand why Antigone should insist that the loss of her brother is a graver matter than the loss of a husband or child,3 an ignorance on their part that might have been clarified by a sabbatical in Afghanistan or the mountains of Albania.
However, in February 1944, the same year that Harsh’s book appeared, French playwright Jean Anouilh produced his version of Antigone in occupied Paris, in which the conflict between Creon and Antigone echoes that between the Germans and the French Resistance.4 Both sides applauded the play, each recognizing their position fairly stated. In 1948, Berthold Brecht produced his version set in a 1945 Berlin air raid shelter. While Antigone’s specific loyalty to her brother’s corpse might remain puzzling, two world wars, innumerable lesser ones, and more cruel tyrannies than I can count have shattered any illusion that we have irrevocably moved beyond the world of Creon and Antigone.
Sophocles, ancient Roman mosaic
What surprised me when I saw the play fifty years after I’d first read it was that my sympathies were now with Creon, the ruler and politician, and not with Antigone, the stubbornly courageous defender of the rights of family and divine law. It wasn’t the acting; the young theater students were perfectly capable of playing a convincing Antigone. And the actor playing Creon was good but not so good as to overshadow the eponymous character. It was that something had changed in me.
Antigone’s position was clear enough. Her responsibilities were to her dead brother and to the law of the ancient gods of death. The fact that fate had taken both her parents and the war both her brothers only made her less willing to compromise. Her sister Ismene was simply afraid to defy the king, so Antigone proudly proceeds alone. A certain prideful arrogance seems to run in the family, infecting Antigone, Oedipus, Creon, and even Creon’s son, Haemon.
But why does Creon act as he does? Certainly, pride plays a role in keeping him stubbornly on his course even after he has been warned of the danger he faces and the sympathies of the town begin to turn against him. He is clear about his reasons: Polynices has come in arms against his home city and thus deserves a traitor’s fate.5 What awaited cities taken by storm was not pretty, as everyone in the original audience would have known. The temples of the city’s gods would be desecrated or destroyed. Men would be massacred, and women and children, if they survived, would be sold into slavery, a recognized law of war that lasted well beyond the Middle Ages. The fate of the women of Troy is told in Euripides’s play staged a quarter century later, and Thucydides tells the fate of the people of Melos who resisted the Athenians. Such was what Polynices proposed to bring upon his own city. In the myth, that was indeed the fate of Thebes a decade later when the sons of the seven captains who had died attacking the city returned to take revenge. In historical fact, it was the eventual fate of the city after its unsuccessful revolt against Macedonian rule in the fourth century BCE.
A ruler, be it of a city-state or an organization of almost any size, must be able to keep two contradictory ideas in his head at once. Creon needed to balance the threat to the city that had become his personal responsibility with the demands of family and human decency—the laws of the most ancient gods, as Antigone would formulate it. Creon is clear that his first responsibility is to the city.6 He has right on his side in the punishment of a traitor whose actions threatened the destruction of the whole community. Moreover, he needs to establish his own authority. He has been king only a day or two, and his claim to the throne is not the strongest, he being only the maternal uncle of Eteocles, the previous king, and the brother-in-law of Oedipus. Even the betrothal of his son, Haemon, to Antigone can be seen as an effort to link his family to the family of the legitimate rulers. It would not help his position to back down from the first controversial decision he has had to make, and to do so because of the defiance of a stubborn and unreasonable young woman.
Of course, there is also an element of self-righteous pride in his actions. He boasts of his decisive actions and is unwilling to seriously consider Antigone’s position. Moreover, when the blind prophet Tiresias shows up—always a sign of trouble in a Greek tragedy—Creon dismisses his warning as an attempt to undermine his own position. He refuses to change his decree, and as we have seen, disaster promptly ensues.
There are a couple of simple ways to read this play. You can see Antigone as the powerless young person fearlessly standing up for basic decency against arbitrary authority, which is probably the way I read it as an eighteen-year-old. I think that by the time I was lecturing on the play in my late forties, I was more interested in Creon’s “tragic flaw” and the fact that the text allowed me to teach the contradictory notions of justice. In either case, the disaster was undeniably brought about by Creon’s stubborn refusal to compromise, though critics differ in how much blame attaches to Antigone herself. For a leader, compromise is the ability to balance priorities so as to achieve the best outcome that is actually possible. Antigone’s example shows that while a refusal to compromise may be deeply satisfying, it does not necessarily bring about the desired outcome.
Still, seeing the play as simply the calamitous results of the collision of two arrogant characters who each refuse to compromise is not very interesting, so on that level Arnold’s judgment is correct: if they had just behaved like proper Victorian ladies and gentlemen, all would have been well. But I think there is something else going on that explains why my sympathies had shifted by my seventh decade.
Creon, flawed though he may be, does face a genuine dilemma. He has responsibilities in a way that Antigone does not. Compromise is not always the right solution. Sometimes the inadequate employee must be fired. The sympathetic criminal defendant must be condemned. The lazy or dim student must be failed. And the traitor must face humiliating punishment, whether in life or death. The possession of authority imposes obligations, sometimes unwelcome ones. Creon is facing two such situations. First, mercy toward the corpse of a traitor would show weakness and invite threats to the state. Second, as a king, especially as a new king, he must show resolve and stand by his decision. The person in authority who can be easily swayed is a threat to everyone beneath him. This is particularly true for a ruler whose place is not yet secure. Creon, we might reasonably argue, was right in his decisions. Antigone in her defiance of the king was wrong. She was willing to endanger the whole community for a good that, even if not purely personal, was only a family obligation. For Creon to show mercy to Antigone and the corpse of her brother would be a betrayal of his higher responsibilities.
In the end, of course, Creon does have to compromise. He has, in effect, been overruled by a higher authority, for Tiresias speaks for the gods. His decision is thus shown to be wrong, but that is by an argument from authority. The moral of the play is thus that prideful insistence that one is right can bring disaster. That sin infected both Antigone and Creon and brought death to Antigone and to Creon’s son and wife. It is not difficult to think of examples from life and literature that illustrate this.
But suppose Sophocles had not included Tiresias. After all, the blind prophet arrives too late to avert the disaster. What would the moral then have been? Perhaps Creon would still have repented of his decision, showing himself to be weak enough to be swayed by pity and family ties. But a more interesting conclusion would have been to show a grief-stricken but stoic Creon bravely facing the awful price that comes with responsibility, whether it be great, like an officer ordering his troops into battle knowing that some or all will inevitably be killed, or small, like a businessman firing an inadequate employee knowing that the man has a family dependent on him.
Arnold, a product of a mighty, cultured, and complacent Europe, was certainly not the man to understand the tensions in this play. Brecht and Anouilh, products of a century that saw the pointless barbarism of the First World War and the fanaticism driving the Second, were better placed to feel the contradictory forces at work in the play. They, and we, have no difficulty imagining those in authority making immoral demands and the fates awaiting those who defy them.
In religious terms, this is the conflict between justice and mercy. Compromise, the option Creon initially rejects, would have been mercy, but this mercy would arguably have been injustice to the community as a whole, even though the community as a whole had come to sympathize with Antigone. Creon understands this, flawed though he is by pride and even though he is eventually forced to back down. After all, it is only the arrival of Tiresias, the spokesman for the gods, that invalidates Creon’s position.
I think this is what changed for me in my understanding of the play: In the years since I first read it, I have had occasion to exercise authority—not, thank God, involving the exposure of corpses or ordering troops into battle, but in smaller things, making decisions that I would rather not have had to make about students and colleagues. I had come, at least a little, to stand in Creon’s larger shoes.
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