Law and Justice - Antigone and the Defense of Tradition - 6.3 The Theban Cycle

Greek tragedy, a classic form of literature. Drama, a spoken form of dialogue performed on a stage. These plays produced in classical Athens would raise timeless questions of justice. And no play has had such an enduring impact as Sophocles' Antigone. Sophocles' Antigone raises profound questions about the nature and grounding of political justice. Sophocles' play The Antigone is part of what's called the Theban cycle. That is the cycle of stories set in ancient Thebes. It's one of the characteristics of Athenian tragedy that it's almost never set in contemporary times. That is to say that the subject of tragedy is myth. Tragedies are set in distant times and places. They're part of myths, cycles of stories that were known to the Greeks. And in fact tragedies aren't suspense stories. That is, you know the ending in most of these cases. These are part of the public shared systems of belief. But in the hands of the playwrights they're used to create stories that ask profound questions. The cycle of Thebes, the stories about Thebes, would produce some of the greatest tragedies of 5th century Athens. Like The Antigone, like Oedipus the King, and like Oedipus at Colonus. Three of the most famous plays of the great tragic playwright Sophocles. The story of Oedipus is well known. It's where we get the phrase Oedipus complex, where Freud draws this language. It's, it's simply part of the Western literary tradition. The story is that there was once a man named Oedipus who'd been exposed by his parents who feared a prophecy that their son would kill them. Oedipus was raised as a foundling, that is he's collected as a, as an infant in the wild and raised by a shepherd and grows up not knowing his true birth or his true parentage. And ultimately, in fulfillment of the prophecy, he unknowingly kills his own father and moves to Thebes where he unknowingly marries his own mother. These are the sort of stories that give Greek tragedy its reputation for excess, for violence, for wild story plots. And so Oedipus kills his father, marries his mother. Eventually a plague falls upon the city of Thebes and Oedipus seeks out the cause of this plague. Ultimately he realizes, he comes to learn his true identity and realizes that he's slain his father and married his mother. Horrified, Jocasta, his wife, kills herself. Oedipus blinds himself and sends himself into exile. These are the background stories to the plays that Sophocles would compose in the 5th century. The Theban cycle continues with the sons of Oedipus in power in Thebes. Oedipus and Jocasta had four children, two boys and two girls. The two sons are named Ateacles and Polyneices. The two daughters Antigone and Ismene. There are different accounts of exactly what happened after the exile of Oedipus, but it's clear that succession passed in some sense to the two sons of Oedipus, Ateacles and Polyneices. In the version of the myth that Sophocles uses, Ateacles and Polyneices come to an agreement that Ateacles will be king and Polyneices will leave the city. But in fact, Polyneices has become jealous, has raised an army and has attacked his brother, has attacked his native city with an army of foreign Argive soldiers. He ultimately kills his brother who kills him simultaneously in a one-on-one combat on the city walls, leaving them both dead. After their death, the rule of Thebes passes to their uncle, Creon. And it's in this situation, in this context, that the poet Sophocles sets his story of Antigone.