Antigone – Strong and Powerful or Spoiled and Stubborn?

Antigone – Strong and Powerful or Spoiled and Stubborn?

Of the tragic figures in Antigone, Creon is the most obviously evil because his motives are self-serving and his fate the worst. As the play begins, we learn that Antigone has defied Creon's royal decree by performing sacred burial rites for her exiled brother, Polyneices. Polyneices has been declared an enemy of the state by Creon. The sentence for anyone attempting to bury him is death by stoning.

Creon has become King of Thebes by default, as a result of Oedipus' fate as previously predicted by the Oracle at Delphi: Oedipus murders his father and unknowingly marries his mother. Jocaste, his mother and wife and Creon's sister, commits suicide upon learning the truth. Between Oedipus' two sons, Creon sides with Etocles in his claim for Oedipus' throne and exiles Polyneices. Polyneices, in exile, raises an army against Thebes, attempting to seize the throne for himself. The two brothers fight and slay one another. Etocles is awarded an honorable burial by Creon for bravely defending the city, but Polyneices is denied any burial because of his act of treason. Denial of a ritual burial was damming and nearly sacrilegious to the ancient Greeks.

Creon is enraged to discover his decree has been disobeyed. When he learns it is Antigone, his niece, he asks her if she has heard the decree. She says yes, that the decree was declared publicly and openly -- she answers that she understands the consequences. Creon further asks Antigone if she is blatantly defying him. She replies that she is answering and obeying a higher law. Creon condemns her, and in doing so violates the unspoken law of loyalty to the family. Creon's will be done!

Creon: Do you want me to show m...

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...th her death.

Chorus: You has passed beyond human daring and come at last

Into a place of stone where justice sits.

I cannot tell

What shape your father's guilt appears in this.

Antigone: You have touched it at last: the bridal bed

Unspeakable, horror of son and mother mingling:

Their crime, infection of all our family!

Your marriage strikes from the grace to murder mine.

I have been a stranger here in my own land:

All my life

The blasphemy of my birth has followed me.

(Sophocles 4,33-44).

Perhaps this self-sentencing is her noble moral cause, or the very extreme of evil indulgence in self-pity and stupidity; self absorption at the eminent loss of human life, including her own. Maybe she's just spoiled and stubborn.

Works Cited

Sophocles. Antigone Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 1984.