ANTIGONE — THE BURIAL THE KING FORBADE
Most laws are written down. Antigone’s is not, and she dies for it.
She is the daughter of Oedipus, the last of a cursed royal house, living in Thebes after her two brothers have killed each other. Her uncle, the new king, has made a decree. One brother gets a state funeral. The other is to be left in the open for the birds and the dogs. Anyone who buries him will be put to death.
She buries him anyway. Sophocles’ Antigone is the Greek story of what happens when a person is told to choose between the king and the dead, and chooses the dead.
THE HOUSE OF OEDIPUS
Antigone was born into the most unlucky family in Greek myth. Her father, Oedipus, king of Thebes, had killed his own father and married his own mother without knowing who either of them was. When the truth came out, her mother Jocasta took her own life and Oedipus blinded himself.
Oedipus had four children: two sons, Eteocles and Polynices, and two daughters, Antigone and Ismene. When he was driven out of the city, Antigone went with him as his guide. She walked the roads beside a blind exile until he died, then went home to Thebes.
THE WAR AT THE GATES
Her brothers had agreed to share the throne, ruling in turns. Eteocles took the first turn and would not give it up. Polynices went to Argos, married into the royal house there, and came back at the head of an army. The story of that attack is the “Seven Against Thebes”: seven champions, one at each of the seven gates of the city.
The attack failed. At one of the gates the two brothers met in single combat, and each killed the other. With the royal line broken, the throne passed to their uncle Creon, Jocasta’s brother.
THE DECREE
Creon buried Eteocles with full honours. Polynices, he declared, was a traitor who had led a foreign army against his own city. His body was to stay where it fell, unburied and unmourned. Guards were posted. The penalty for disobedience was death by stoning.
For the Greeks this was far worse than an insult. A body had to be given to the earth and honoured with offerings poured out for the dead, or the soul could not find rest. The duty belonged to the family, and Polynices had no family left in the city except two sisters.
THE NIGHT IN THE FIELD
Antigone asked Ismene to help her. Ismene refused. She was afraid, and she argued that they were women and could not stand against a king. Antigone told her to stay out of it, and went alone.
In Sophocles’ play a frightened guard reports what he found at dawn. Someone had been to the body in the night and covered it with a thin layer of dust, enough to count as a burial. No animal had touched it. Creon was furious. He ordered the dust swept away and the body watched.
Antigone came back. She found the body bare again, and she did not turn away. She covered it a second time and poured out the offerings for the dead. That is where the guards caught her, still kneeling in the field.
THE KING AND THE GIRL
They brought her to Creon, and she did not deny it. Asked how she dared break his law, she answered that his decree was a man’s and the unwritten laws of the gods were older than any king. No one knows when they were first made. She would rather die than leave her brother lying there.
Creon did not move. He sentenced her to be shut alive in a cave of rock with a little food, so that the city would not be stained by her blood. His own son Haemon, who was engaged to Antigone, begged him to reconsider and told him the people of Thebes were whispering in her favour. Creon refused to be lectured by a younger man.
Then the blind seer Tiresias came to him with a warning. The gods were refusing the city’s offerings, and the birds were carrying the flesh of Polynices to the altars. Creon’s house would pay a death for a death. Only then did the king give way. He ordered Polynices buried and went to free Antigone himself.
TOO LATE
He was too late. In the tomb Antigone had already taken her own life. Haemon was there, grieving beside her. He turned his sword on his father, missed, and then fell on the blade himself. When the news reached the palace, Creon’s wife Eurydice, the queen of Thebes, killed herself as well, with a curse on her husband’s name.
Creon had kept his law and lost everything it was meant to protect. The play ends with a king who has nobody left to rule.
WHAT ANTIGONE MEANS
Sophocles does not make Creon a cartoon. Thebes has just survived an invasion, and a ruler who lets the invader be honoured is asking for the next one. His argument is a real one. What the play will not allow is that the law can be the last word on a person.
Antigone is not defending an idea. She is doing a thing her family owes the dead, with her own hands, in the open, knowing what it will cost. That is why readers have kept coming back to her whenever a state has asked someone to turn away from the dead. She has no army and no argument that wins. She has a handful of earth and a jar to pour from.
THE NEOLITHIC CONNECTION
The right of the dead to a burial runs all through Greek Legends. The Iliad ends with it: Priam walks into the enemy camp to beg Achilles for the body of his son. We wrote about that scene in Hector, and it is on the back of The Last Wall.
Antigone’s story is now a tee. She Buried Him Anyway puts her on the back, kneeling in a pool of red below the walls of Thebes. On the chest is the jar, tipped over, the offering running out of it.
Other tees in the collection follow the dead past the grave. The Silence Behind Him carries Orpheus into the fields below, and our Orpheus and Eurydice post tells that whole story.
— Neolithic Store