‘Antigone’: Authority Versus Freedom
A review of ‘Antigone’, by Sophocles; 441 BC.
When Jean Anouilh staged his take on Antigone at the Théâtre de l’Atelier in Paris on February 6, 1944, both the occupied French and the Nazi occupiers enjoyed it. Although there were clear parallels between the heroine Antigone and the French resistance, the story was sufficiently ambiguous in respect of how it deals with the need for authority and the rejection of it to leave everyone satisfied. That, reader, tells us something about the play, as Sophocles conceived of it: that it asks enduring questions about duty, conscience and law, but doesn’t come down too hard on any one answer.
When the curtain opens (so to speak: the Ancient Greeks did not use drop curtains) the kingdom is in chaos. Antigone, daughter of the doomed Jocasta and her cursed, blinded son Oedipus, has just lost both her brothers in a civil war. Eteocles and Polynices fought one another for the Theban throne, with Cleon, their uncle, backing the former. Now, Eteocles is to be honoured as a hero; his brother, to be branded a traitor and denied burial. Antigone, driven by duty, defies Creon and buries her brother anyway. Thus she breaks the law to follow what, in her eyes, is a higher, divine command. This sets off a chain of events that pulls the rest of the cast — family, rulers, prophets — into its orbit, and leads inexorably to death, despair and the end of Cleon’s authority.
Antigone, daughter of the doomed Jocasta and her cursed son Oedipus, has just lost both ther brothers in a civil war.
The theme is clear from the start: What is right? And who says so? Antigone stands for loyalty to family and the gods; Cleon, for law, order and the state. Both see themselves as guardians of justice; but their stubbornness is their undoing. They are tragic: Antigone’s bravery shades into recklessness, and Cleon’s lawfulness is logical but cruel. A lasting concern of human communities plays out dramatically: What is the right relation between freedom and control?
The dialogue sharpens these themes. Antigone’s resolve is fierce. She tells her sister, Ismene, who fears defying Creon:
‘If that is what you think, / I should not want you, even if you asked to come. / You have made your choice; you can be what you want to be. / But I will bury him; and if I must die, / I say that this crime is holy: I shall lie down / With him in death, and I shall be as dear / To him as he to me. / It is the dead, / Not the living, who make the longest demands: / We die forever. . . . / You may do as you like, / Since apparently the laws of the gods mean nothing to you.’
Antigone draws her values from timeless authority. Cleon’s authority is tied to the present. He cares chiefly for keeping order:
‘Anarchy, anarchy! Show me a greater evil! / This is why cities tumble and the great houses rain down; / This is what scatters armies!’
Here Cleon raises the preservation of stability in Thebes to the level almost of the divine. He is enraged by Antigone because she threatens his need for order with an intransigence that is just as rigid. The tension between these two forces is so great that it heralds tragedy.
Here Cleon raises the preservation of stability in Thebes to the level almost of the divine.
The chorus, the bridge between audience and actor, shift from pity to fear to moral reflection. At first, they seems to side with Creon, whose opening speech prefigures the Funeral Oration of Pericles. But as Creon refuses to give ground, the stance of the chorus changes. By the time the blind prophet Tiresius arrives, warning Creon that if he proceeds with his plan it will all end in tears, the chorus is pleading with him to relent, as we, that is, the audience, are.
The whole play is charged with feeling, but the writing is spare. As Antigone calmly prepares for an unpleasant death, her acceptance of her fate, and her fidelity to her values, elicits both admiration and sorrow. At the last, she reflects, with sadness, that ‘unwept, unwed, unfriended, hence I go.’ Creon, too, is changed by his decisions. He is at first resolute; but the deaths of Antigone, his son Haemon, her betrothed, and Eurydice, his wife, shatter him. By the end he is broken. Both he and Antigone are damned by their pride, even if we sympathise more with the latter.
The chorus, the bridge between audience and actor, shift from pity to fear to moral reflection.
So they are flawed. And this makes the story more engaging than it might be otherwise. Antigone’s self-righteousness does not always come across as noble. Her sister, Ismene, is a useful foil, urging her to find a middle road between placating Cleon and carrying out her duty. It is suggested throughout the play that state power is needed: the state is not, as a hard libertarian might say, intrinsically criminal or unjust. But it can overreach; and order is not the be-all-and-end-all of sound governance. Antigone’s role is to show where the line between order and liberty might lie.
The tragedy of Antigone springs not just from the deaths of the characters but from the sense that their conflict was unavoidable. They are trapped by pride but also by their social roles, their choices directed by forces larger than themselves. Still, there are enduring questions here, pertaining to the right relation of order and freedom, and the importance or folly of an inflexible integrity. If you have ever faced a choice between what you believe is right and what others demand, you will find yourself in its pages.
