Text Access
Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays. Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. (Available via bookstore.)
Background
SOPHOCLES: ca. 496-ca. 406 BCE. Athenian tragic playwright, successful and popular.
The Antigone produced 442/1 (probably!).
It belongs to a group of three plays, Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, that go together as a story, but do not represent a unified trilogy.
In terms of story order, the sequence is:
- Oedipus the King (Oedipus, king of Thebes, suffers terrible reversals and a fall from power).
- Oedipus at Colonus (Oedipus, now a wandering beggar, undergoes a transformation in fulfillment of his destiny).
- Antigone (Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, has returned to Thebes, where she places the law of the gods above that of humans).
But in terms of order of composition, the order is:
- Antigone 442/1 BCE.
- Oedipus the King some time after 429.
- Oedipus at Colonus around 406.
In other words, Antigone, though last in story order, was first in order of composition and production. We're reading the plays in chronological order of composition to trace Sophocles' development as a tragic poet, and his development of themes pertaining to the larger story.
Background: Mythological
Most of the following can be got from study guides to Oedipus the King and to Oedipus at Colonus. But just to sum up, . . .
Oedipus was king of Thebes, a city in Greece. Laius, Oed's father, had been warned by Apollo that if he would have a son, that son would kill him.
Oedipus ends up killing his father, marrying his mother, by whom he has four children — his chidren and sublings: daughters Antigone and Ismene, and sons Eteocles and Polynices. Oedipus dies in exile. Eteocles, his younger son, eventually assumes the throne.
Bur Polynices, the exiled older son, challenges Eteocles. They fight and kill each other. Creon (their uncle) rules in their stead.
Creon decrees that Eteocles may receive proper burial, but not Polynices . . . you'll see why.
Characters include
- Antigone, Oedipus' daughter, betrothed to Haemon
- Ismene, Oedipus' other daughter
- Creon, Oedipus' brother-in-law and thus the uncle of Oed's children
- Haemon, Creon's son (betrothed to Antigone)
- Tiresias, a blind seer (yes, a paradox)
- Eurydice, Creon's wife
- Chorus of male Theban elders. As a group, they have much to say in the play. They also sing and dance most of it (ancient Athenian dramas were musicals)
- Leader, that's a member of the Chorus, in Greek he's called the koruphaios, who is the head chorus member. His special job is to engage in dialogue with characters of the drama
Persons, other stuff often mentioned:
- Zeus, king of the Greek gods
- Oedipus (see above)
- Eteocles (see above)
- Polynices (see above)
- The Seven against Thebes, the seven heroes, Polynices and his allies, who had joined ranks to take Thebes from Eteocles and hand it over to Eteo's brother Polynices
- Just before the action of the play, those Seven were defeated by seven Theban heroes, including Eteocles, defending the city
- Ares, god of war
- Dionysus/Bacchus, god of wine (and of drama) and a native son of Thebes
Background: Historical-Political
The Antigone, like the other two plays in what I'll informally call the Oedipus Cycle, treats themes resonating with realities on the ground in Athens in the mid 400s BCE.
One of those realities was that "Greece" didn't exist as a coherent political unit under a single government. Rather, it included a whole set of relatively small city-states, called poleis.
Another of those realities, one specific to Athens, the city sponsoring this and the other two plays in Sophocles' Oedipus Cycle, was that Athens itself was a radical democracy, by which is meant:
- Sovereignty held by a citizenry, known collectively as a demos (the "people") consisting of adult Athenian males
- Direct participation by that demos — in numbers, perhaps some fifteen-thousand strong — in governing
- I.e., not representative democracy but direct participation by any and all enfranchised Athenians in legislative and similar functions. Athenians didn't elect leaders. They all led themselves, at least in theory, by attending assemblies of the entire demos.
As Athenian tragedy tended to put the institutions of the sponsoring city (Athens) on trial, political themes abound in Athenian tragedy, and so they do the Oedipus Cycle. As Athenian politics and society was about a whole set of inclusions AND exclusions, don't be surprised if you see the following come up as concerns:
- Gender. (Women were excluded from politics)
- Tyranny. (In many ways, tyranny, unconstitutional or unjust rule excised by an unusually power individual within the city, could be viewed as the OPPOSITE of democracy, indeed as that which threatened democracy)
And so on — what do you see happening as themes?
Word Notes
p. 64. "Yes if you can, but you're in love with impossibility" — that's Ismene to Antigone. This idea of "love" or "lust" (the Greek is erōs, as in "erotic") as motivation for madness pervades the play. Here, the concept of erōs lies close to that of atē, the delusion that descends on one destined for self-inflicted ruin, also called atē.
p. 76. "Numberless wonders, / terrible wonders walk the world but none the match for man" — "man" here translates anthrōpos, which really means "human being," "person," not an adult, male "man." This is the famous polla ta deina chorus; what do you think it means? Compare Shakespeare's "What a piece of work is a man" speech from Hamlet. Not the same, but maybe similar.