The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone

by Sophocles

I’m filled with . . .

  ISMENE

  With what?

  ANTIGONE

  . . . longing. To see the earthly resting place . . .

  ISMENE

  Whose?

  ANTIGONE

  Our father’s! 1900

  ISMENE

  Such a thing can’t possibly

  be right. Can’t you see that?

  ANTIGONE

  Why are you judging me?

  ISMENE

  There’s one more thing that you don’t know . . .

  ANTIGONE

  What will you tell me next?

  ISMENE

  No one saw him die! There’s no tomb!

  ANTIGONE

  Take me out there, and kill me too.

  ISMENE

  That would kill me! With no friends and no strength,

  where would I live out my deserted life?

  LEADER

  Children, you have nothing to fear. 1910

  ANTIGONE

  Then where can we go?

  LEADER

  We know of a refuge . . .

  ANTIGONE

  What do you mean?

  LEADER

  . . . where you’ll be safe.

  ANTIGONE

  I think I know it . . .

  LEADER

  What are you thinking?

  ANTIGONE

  I don’t see how we can go home.

  LEADER

  Then I don’t think you should try.

  ANTIGONE

  Trouble pursues us.

  LEADER

  It has from the start. 1920

  ANTIGONE

  It was horrible. Now it’s worse.

  LEADER

  Your life has been a huge sea of hardship.

  ANTIGONE

  So it has.

  Enter THESEUS with his Men.

  THESEUS

  Stop weeping, children. When the Earth Powers

  have shown all of us so much grace,

  grief is uncalled for. Don’t anger them.

  ANTIGONE

  Son of Aigeus, please help us.

  THESEUS

  What do you want me to do, children?

  ANTIGONE

  Let us see Father’s tomb with our own eyes.

  THESEUS

  That would violate divine law. 1930

  ANTIGONE

  What do you mean, my lord?

  THESEUS

  Daughters, his orders were to let no one

  approach that place, to let no one

  speak to the sacred tomb where he’s sleeping.

  If I keep my word, this land

  will never be harmed. Horkos,

  the servant of Zeus

  who hears all oaths,

  heard mine. He misses nothing.

  ANTIGONE

  I’m content, if my father’s wishes 1940

  are fulfilled. Now send us home

  to prevent, if we can, the slaughter

  that threatens our brothers.

  THESEUS

  I will do that. I’ll give you all the help

  you may need: anything the dead man,

  now gone under the earth, would approve.

  LEADER

  Stop mourning now. Let it be. In all

  that’s happened, there’s nothing you can change.

  ALL leave.

  Antigone

  INTRODUCTION

  “FROM WHAT KIND OF PARENTS WAS I BORN?”

  Antigone opens just before dawn in Thebes, on the day after the city’s defenders have repelled a massive assault by fighters from seven Argive cities. The Argive objective had been to return the Theban throne to Polyneikes, elder son of Oedipus. But Polyneikes and his younger brother, Eteokles, Thebes’ reigning king, killed each other with simultaneous spear-thrusts during the failed assault.1 Antigone, the sister of the slain men, returns fierce and agitated from the battlefield with news for their sister Ismene: Kreon has just become Thebes’ ruler following the deaths of his two nephews. He has apparently already honored and buried the loyal Eteokles, but has vilified Polyneikes for attacking his own city and now forbids his burial. Antigone declares she will bury her brother, no matter what it costs her.

  Antigone thrived throughout the twentieth century as the perfect ancient play to dramatize rebellion against tyrants. Kreon could be costumed and directed to represent any number of oppressors, and Antigone’s fearless eloquence inflected to expose their evil and banality. Productions have reimagined her as a martyred fighter in various righteous causes: she’s been a member of the French resistance, the sister of an IRA terrorist or an Argentinean desaparacido, and a Vietnam War resister. Antigone will undoubtedly be drafted to face down tyrants yet unborn.

  There’s a downside, however, to interpreting Antigone solely through its capacity for embodying contemporary political battles. None of the play’s clashes is as clear-cut, or its characters as consistent, as they first seem. (Thebes’ resident prophet—Tiresias, who appears in a single scene as the play’s most commanding figure and who delivers an unambiguous condemnation of Kreon—is the sole exception.) Kreon, for instance, addressing his aristocratic peers hours after assuming power, reassuringly articulates his democratic principles and policies. He promises to accept good advice, act on it, avoid and denounce policies that would lead Thebes to destruction, and punish any citizen who betrays Thebes, including his traitorous and deceased nephew. But Kreon will fail to follow every one of his precepts. In the end, the consequences of his own actions will even force him to order a proper burial for Polyneikes. A look into Kreon’s soul to locate his core beliefs—opening him up like a wax writing tablet in its case, to paraphrase Kreon’s son Haimon—would reveal his moral emptiness. As Kreon puts his crowd-pleasing but insincere inaugural speech behind him, he acts on intense and ugly prejudices, not principles.

  Antigone, who possesses both character and principle in abundance, also has suppressed something of her nature in order to steel herself against Kreon’s power and arrogance. She will accept nothing less than giving Polyneikes his full burial rights and will welcome her own death, if that’s what it takes. But as she elaborates her view of the world, she reveals the life-suppressing extremity of her allegiances. The deaths of her parents and brothers have made her passionate to rejoin them in Hades. But when actually facing death, Antigone suddenly yearns for the marriage and childbearing she has denied herself. The number and decisiveness of his characters’ reversals suggest that Sophocles views human nature as often unsure or unaware of its own deepest desires. As the pressure of catastrophic events increases, sudden surges of desire reveal the major characters’ contradictions, their second thoughts, and their consequent desperation. The conflicted Guard, who debates whether it’s safe or suicidal to bring Kreon the bad news that Polyneikes’ body has been illegally buried, comically prefigures Sophocles’ encompassing vision: events can overpower the persons mortals think they are. Staging Antigone exclusively to unsettle contemporary political orthodoxies risks turning a blazing but nuanced play into propaganda.

  Greek dramatists in the fifth century BCE, and certainly Sophocles, did in fact reflect the impact of political issues in their plays, though they did so invariably by shaping an ancient myth to illuminate their audience’s present-day concerns. This strategy both aroused and distanced emotional response. Antigone itself, for instance, has at its core a bitter and sometimes deadly public issue in Athenian life: the burial of war casualties. Athens’ pro-war ruling party had tried to suppress the resentment of the bereaved and limit mourning of fallen soldiers to a once-a-year ceremony at which a chosen orator gave a patriotic speech. The women of Athens resented both the wars and the deprivation of their chance to give their dead proper burials. Aristophanes, who was, like most of his fellow aristocrats, anti-war, turns their resentment into a full-scale comic rebellion in Lysistrata.

  Though Sophocles is wholly sympathetic to Antigone’s rebellion and her contempt for Kreon, he shows us she
still possesses desires and emotions normal to a woman. As she faces death, she feels these intensely and expresses them in her farewell speeches. Antigone, as it unfolds, has become less about dictatorship and honoring the dead than about love’s destructive powers.

  In the play’s opening scene, Antigone explains to Ismene how and why she must bury her brother:

  I’ll bury Polyneikes myself. I’ll do

  what’s honorable, and then I’ll die.

  I who love him will lie down

  next to him who loves me—

  my criminal conduct blameless!—

  for I owe more to the dead, with whom

  I will spend a much longer time,

  than I will ever owe to the living. (85–92)

  The Greek verb Antigone uses for “lie down,” keisomai, is equally appropriate to describe lying down in death (either before burial or in Hades) or having sexual relations with a lover. The English phrase, of course, has a similar range. The words she uses to describe their kinship, philê with philou (translated here as “I who love him” next to “him who loves me”), accentuate both the emotional bond and the comforting physical proximity of siblings.2 The Greek words translated as “my criminal conduct blameless,” hosia panourgesas (literally, “sacred transgressions”), refer primarily to the outlawed act of burying her “traitor” brother, but as some scholars have argued, they could also suggest, given the way they are embedded in the sentence, incestuous love. They may convey simply a sister’s need to embrace her brother. Her family’s incestuous history does haunt Antigone, as she says at lines 946–949. If Sophocles did intend the erotic implication, it allows him to heighten Antigone’s passionate feelings for her dead brother beyond any conventional intrafamilial love. Antigone ends this conversation with her sister Ismene by permanently disowning her cautious sister for refusing to help and then heads to the battlefield alone.

  When, after performing the forbidden rituals, Antigone is caught, she admits and then fiercely defends her crime, citing immutable laws of philia that require a family to bury and honor its dead. Unmoved, Kreon condemns her to die, confident that only those who support Thebes may claim true philia. The Greek conception of philia, which involves the loyalty and affection binding friends and loved ones in one community, and the city and its citizens in another, will become a central battleground in the play. In the following lines Kreon and Antigone each invoke philia to justify their position:

  Kreon The brave deserve better than the vile.

  Antigone Who knows what matters to the dead?

  Kreon Not even death reconciles enemies.

  Antigone I made no enemies by being born!

  I made my lifelong friends at birth.

  Kreon Then go down to them! Love your dead brothers! (564–569)

  Shared birth parents and nothing else, Antigone declares, determines her philoi (friends and loved ones) for life. Audiences (and Kreon, of course) know Antigone and her siblings were born of incestuous sexual intercourse, and that the pollution incurred is sure to pass from one generation to the next. Kreon’s taunt, that she should “go down to” her dead brothers, resonates with disgust—not only for her lack of shame but because it infuriates Kreon that his son Haimon plans to marry this distasteful rebel. When Haimon arrives to defend Antigone, Kreon denounces her as both a traitor and an unsuitable wife, warning Haimon that she will be spiteful in the house and frigid in bed. Love now takes center stage. A choral hymn to the power of Eros and Aphrodite immediately follows the father-son conflict. Addressing Eros directly, they sing:

  And those you seize go mad.

  You wrench even good men’s minds

  so far off course they crash in ruins.

  Now you ignite hatred in men

  of the same blood—but allure flashing

  from the keen eyes of the bride

  always wins, for Desire wields

  all the power of ancient law:

  Aphrodite the implacable

  plays cruel games with our lives. (871–880)

  Antigone’s outward expression of erotic feeling remains limited to her fleeting wish, in the first scene, to embrace the dead Polyneikes. She never acknowledges that she is betrothed to Haimon, or so much as mentions his name. She pursues a different commitment: “Long ago / I dedicated [my life] to the dead” (604–605). Although she never abandons this dedication, she soon dramatizes both its costs and its ironies. Just before she’s led away to be entombed in a cave, Antigone (who might have changed her costume and returned to the stage wearing a bridal gown) reaches up to lift her veil, uncovering her whole head and addressing the Chorus: ”Look at me, princely citizens of Thebes” (1032). This gesture echoes the climactic moment of a traditional Greek marriage celebration: after the bride exposes her face to all in attendance, the groom lifts her onto a mule cart (or chariot) that carries them to his family home and the nuptial bed. Antigone, however, announces she will consummate an anti-marriage, one she achingly describes:

  Hades, who chills each one of us to sleep,

  will guide me down to Acheron’s shore.

  I’ll go hearing no wedding hymn

  to carry me to my bridal chamber, or songs

  girls sing when flowers crown a bride’s hair;

  I’m going to marry the River of Pain. (890–895)

  Her perplexed outburst “From what kind of parents was I born?” (950) recalls Oedipus’ sweeping denunciation of marriage in Oedipus the King (1591–1596). She has always known that her parents’ incestuous marriage will have an evil impact on her. Since in ancient Greek culture only the women were blamed for incestuous sexual relationships, even if men or gods initiated them, she attributes her family’s curse solely to her mother’s “horrendous . . . coupling” with her father (948–949).

  Kreon, an extended member of this family, seems cursed as well. Not until Tiresias appears does Kreon understand how wrong he was to oppose Antigone. Thebes’ perennial prophet denounces Kreon in both secular and religious terms:

  You have thrown children from the sunlight

  down to the shades of Hades, ruthlessly

  housing a living person in a tomb,

  while you detain here, among us, something

  that belongs to the gods who live below

  our world—the naked unwept corpse you’ve robbed

  of the solemn grieving we owe our dead.

  None of this should have been any concern

  of yours—or of the Olympian gods—

  but you have involved them in your outrage!

  Therefore, avengers wait to ambush you—

  the Furies sent by Hades and its gods

  will punish you for the crimes I have named. (1180–1192)

  Kreon himself rushes to release Antigone. But it’s too late. Haimon, next to Antigone’s corpse, lunges to kill his father, misses, and then falls on his own sword. Hearing the news, Kreon’s wife runs into the palace and kills herself, thrusting a blade into her side. The play continues to its swift conclusion with Kreon’s belated self-castigation. Antigone, as she predicted, receives no mourning from what’s left of her Theban royal family. Her absence, during the play’s final scene, from Kreon’s and the Elders’ remorse, is a masterstroke. The damage that their denial of her passion has inflicted on the Theban community is bitter testimony enough to her courage and its cost.

  —RB

  NOTES

  1. Eteokles is never named as the king whom Kreon succeeds, but it is implicit in 203–206.

  2. Winnington-Ingram (92–116) has explored erotic passion’s decisive impact on the characters’ actions as well as its powerful presence in several choral odes.

  Antigone

  Translated by Robert Bagg

  CHARACTERS

  ANTIGONE, daughter of Oedipus

  ISMENE, daughter of Oedipus

  ELDERS of Thebes (Chorus)

  LEADER of the Chorus

  KREON, king of Thebes, uncle of Antigone, Polyneikes, and Eteokles<
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  GUARD

  Kreon’s Men

  HAIMON, son of Kreon

  TIRESIAS, prophet of Thebes

  Lad

  MESSENGER

  EURYDIKE, wife of Kreon

  It is dawn in front of KREON’s palace in Thebes, the day after the battle in which the Theban defenders repelled an attack on the city by an Argive coalition that included the rebel Polyneikes, elder son of Oedipus. Polyneikes and his younger brother, Eteokles, who has remained loyal to Thebes, have killed each other simultaneously in face-to-face combat at one of Thebes’ seven gates. KREON has suddenly seized the throne. In dim, streaky light, ANTIGONE runs from offstage and calls out ISMENE’s name. ISMENE enters through the central doors.

  ANTIGONE

  Ismene, love! My own kind! Born

  like me from that same womb!

  Can you think of one evil—

  of all those Oedipus started—

  that Zeus hasn’t used our own lives

  to finish? There’s nothing—no pain,

  no shame, no terror, no humiliation!—

  you and I haven’t seen and shared.

  Now there’s this new command

  our commander in chief 10

  imposes on the whole city—

  do you know about it?

  Have you heard? You don’t know,

  do you? It threatens our loved ones

  as if they were our enemies!

  ANTIGONE is out of breath. ISMENE is startled but slow to comprehend the reason for her sister’s agitation.

  ISMENE

  Not a word about our family has reached me,

  Antigone—encouraging or horrible.

  Not since we sisters lost our brothers

  on the day their hands struck

  the double blow that killed them both. 20

  And since the Argive army fled last night

  I’ve not heard anything that could improve

  our luck—or make it any worse.