Law and Justice - Antigone and the Defense of Tradition - 6.4 Antigone

Sophocles' Antigone, a tragedy, was performed in the year 442 BC in Athens. It raises profound questions about the grounding of law and the nature of justice. When the play begins, Antigone and Esmenes are at the gates of the palace of Thebes. Their two brothers, Atiocles and Polyneices, have slain each other. Atiocles was king of Thebes. Polyneices had been exiled, raised an army, and attacked his own city and his own brother in an attempt to establish his rule. The rule of Thebes, the kingship, passed to their uncle Creon. And when the play begins, Antigone and Esmenes are outside the gates of the palace. Creon, the king, has passed a decree that the body of Polyneices, the brother who had attacked his own city, would go unburied. This sets up the action of the play. In ancient Greece, burial was fundamentally important. It was not only a ritual of enormous respect for the dead, but it was also of enormous religious significance. The ancient Greeks had beliefs about the body and what happened to it after it died. They believed that it would suffer, that it wouldn't be able to enter the realm of the dead in peace until it had been properly buried and the proper religious rites had been observed in the burial of the body. The decree of Creon that declared that the body of Polyneices would not be buried was, in fact, a way not only of dishonoring this man that he saw as a traitor, but also of punishing him even after his death. Now Antigone and Esmenes, as the sisters of Polyneices, are debating whether or not to bury their brother. And you see a contrast between these two sisters. Antigone, who's the heroine of the play and who wishes to bury her brother's body despite the decrees of the king, and Esmenes, who's weak and passive and who looks for excuses not to act in, in contrast to the king's decree. And so the play unravels with this tension between the king, Creon, and Antigone. Word is brought to Creon that in fact a, the body of Polyneices had been subjected to certain religious rituals, that someone had disobeyed his decree. He seeks out the perpetrator and is able to lay the blame at the hands of Antigone, the sister of Polyneices. Antigone is hauled before Creon, and in one of the great speeches in all of tragedy, she openly defends herself, confessing her deed, admitting that she had violated the law, a law that was enacted by a legitimate king, a legitimate authority. She had acted in direct violation of this decree, and she said that she would, had not done it in secret, and that she was willing to accept the consequences. But she also directly defies the legitimacy of this law. She never questions the legitimacy of Creon, rather the legitimacy of his decree. She says this law was not made of Zeus. This is the high god for the Greeks, the god who ensures justice, the god that's the highest, the king of the pantheon of gods. She says this decree was not of Zeus. This was not one of God's laws, eternal and immutable, unchanging, the same today and tomorrow. Antigone defends her actions as just, even though they violate the law. This is the classic act of what has been called civil disobedience. She violates the law because she says the law is not a just law. Antigone invokes an order of justice. She invokes a natural order, God's laws, divine laws, and says that she is acting in accordance with eternal, objective, natural laws of justice, and that the laws of this king are in contrast with those true laws. Now as the tragedy unravels, Sophocles develops exceptional drama around this conflict between the king and this young woman who defies his orders. The chorus, that is the group who comes and sings the choral odes, offers in the play the Antigone one of the great poems in all of Greek literature, the second choral ode of the play, known as the Ode to Man, one of the most famous passages of Greek literature. It's a hymn that extols the greatness of humans, their amazing intelligence, their amazing resourcefulness. What a wonder is man, what a wondrous thing is this creature. He has invented agriculture, he's invented shipbuilding that allows him to sail the seas, he's invented cities, and he's invented laws. And in this Ode to Man we see posed the question, are laws simply human creations? Are they conventions? Or are they part of nature? Do they belong to the order of God? Are they somehow objective and natural? We see as the play unravels this contrast between true law and man-made law play out in tragic form. It ultimately results in Creon, who is stubbornly committed to his decree, ordering that Antigone be put to death for her crimes. And being a Greek tragedy, it ends in a bloody mess. Antigone dies, Creon's son, whom we learn is engaged to Antigone, kills himself, and Creon's wife kills herself, and at the end on stage, Creon is left with the chorus, lamenting his stubbornness, lamenting the fact that he had persisted in enforcing this law. The final words of the chorus, the final words of the play itself, are extraordinarily resonant. The greatest part of happiness, eudaimonia, a word that we'll return to, the greatest part of happiness is wisdom, phronēn. It's the verb that provides the word phronēsis that we invoked in the very first lesson. Practical wisdom. The chorus says that human happiness depends on a kind of virtue, practical wisdom, and holiness, respect for the gods. And this tragedy ends with this awful events that result in bloodshed again at Thebes. A lawful king with an unjust act ends in a bloody tragedy.