Polis and Tragedy in the "Antigone"

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POLIS AND TRAGEDY IN THE ANTIGONE
BY
PHILIP HOLT
I. Introduction
Sophokles' Antigone is an easy play for moderns, even modern
classicists, to get wrong.1) We are likely to see Antigone as the cham-
pion of moral right, or conscience, or religion against the authority
of the state, as represented by Kreon. She is then a martyr for a
cause, and our age is rather drawn to causes and martyrs. This
does much to explain the scholarly predilection for what Hester
called 'the orthodox view' of the play: Antigone right and noble,
Kreon wrong and tyrannical.2) But these terms for describing the
conflict?and even more the ethical weight and emotional coloring
these terms carry?are relatively modern. 'The state' to us means
a nation-state with extensive powers over the lives of its citizens
1) The following works are cited by author's name (and short title where nec-
essary) only: Giovanni Cerri, Ugislazione orale e tragediag reca (Naples 1979) (a slightly
abridged version of the first chapter?the most important for our purposes?is
more readily available as Ideologiaf uneraria ?^//'Antigone di Sofocle, in: Gherardo
Gnoli, Jean-Pierre Vernant (ed.), La mort,l es mortsd ans les soci?t?sa nciennes[ Cambridge
1982], 121-31); Helene Foley, Tragedya nd DemocraticI deology:T he Case of Sophocles'
Antigone, in: Barbara Goff (ed.), History, Tragedy,T heory:D iabgues on AthenianD rama
(Austin 1995), 131-50; Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 1986);
Bernard M.W. Knox, The Heroic Temper:S tudiesi n SophocleanT ragedy( Berkeley 1964);
Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, Assumptionsa nd the Creationo f Meaning:R eadingS ophocles'
Antigone, JHS 109 (1989), 134-48 and (with substantial overlap) SophoclesA' ntigone
as a 'Bad Woman', in: F. Dieteren, E. Kloek (ed.), Writing Women into History
(Amsterdam 1990), 11-38; and the commentaries of Brown (Warminster 1987),
Campbell2 (Oxford 1879), Jebb2 (Cambridge 1891), Kamerbeek (Leiden 1978), and
M?ller (Heidelberg 1967). I have used the text of Lloyd Jones and Wilson (Oxford
1990).
2) Hester's extensive review of scholarship on the play found this view to be
far more popular than what he called the 'Hegelian' view, which sees Antigone
and Kreon as being more evenly matched with flaws on both sides: D.A. Hester,
Sophoclest he UnphilosophicaLA? Study in the Antigone, Mnemosyne 24 (1971), 11-59.
For a similar tilt in Germany (Schlegel over Hegel), see Erich Eberlein, ?ber die
verschiedenenD eutungen des tragischen Konfliktsi n der Trag?die 'Antigone'd es Sophokles,
Gymnasium 68 (1961), 16-34 at 16-9.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1999 Mnemosyne,V ol. LII, Fase. 6
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POLIS AND TRAGEDY IN THE AKTIGONE 659
and an extensive apparatus of bureaucrats and police to enforce its
dictates. We worry about its powers and want to protect our free-
dom within it, especially after twentieth-century experience with
totalitarian regimes. 'Conscience' and 'morality' to us mean the per-
sonal values of an autonomous individuad, influenced by society but
often at variance with it. 'Religion' to us is likely to include notions
of divinely revealed truth and an organized body of believers, both
of them distinct from, and often at odds with, political authority.
For us, then, conscience, morality, and religion set the individual
apart from, perhaps even against, the state. It is easy for us to make
Antigone into a heroic dissident. She upholds principle against polit-
ical authority, and she is right.
These terms for describing the conflict of the Antigone cannot be
applied to ancient Greece without considerable modification. The
original audience of the play?participants in a public festival of
Dionysos in Athens around 440 B.C.3)?brought their own mentad
and emotional baggage into the theatre with them: the assumptions
and outlook of their culture, their experience as a community, their
norms, expectations, and values. They did not think as we do, and
it is no accident that critics who pay the most attention to the
differences between them and us read the play very differently from
their 'orthodox' colleagues. Such critics are a varied lot and do not
all speak with one voice,4) but they tend to have two things in com-
3) The play is usually dated to the late 440s, but there is a strong case for 438:
see R.G. Lewis, An AlternativeD ate for Sophocles'A ntigone, GRBS 29 (1988), 35-50.
4) Most recently Sourvinou-Inwood, to which this essay is principally addressed;
also important are William M. Calder III, Sophokles'P olitical Tragedy, Antigone,
GRBS 9 (1968), 389-407; Vittorio Citti, Strutturee tensioni sociali nell'Antigone di
Sofocle,A IV 134 (1975-76), 477-501 (a Marxist analysis); Foley (distinctly 'Hegelian');
Knox; T.C.W. ?udemans and A.P.M.H. Lardinois, Tragic Ambiguity:A nthropology,
Philosophya nd SophoclesA' ntigone( Leiden 1987) (an anthropological analysis). Historicist
and strongly pro-Antigone are Nicolas P. Gross, Antigone and Archaic Thought:A
Reading of the Antigone, Selecta 3 (1982), 17-25; Wm. Blake Tyrrell and Larry J.
Bennett, RecapturingS ophocles'A ntigone (Lanham, Md. 1998). My discussion will
read the history differently, and I must disagree with both. Gross sees Antigone
as the exponent of an 'archaic world-view', a concept which needs to be more
clearly defined and applied. Briefly, Tyrrell and Bennett draw heavily for their his-
tory on Athenian funerary discourse (I think misapplied; see below, n. 31), women's
supposed resentment against state control of funerals (undocumented), and the
Athenian stereotype of nasty Thebans (pertinent, but of doubtful use in judging a
conflict between two Thebans, and too heavily imposed upon the text of the play).
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660 PHILIP HOLT
mon. First, they make a thorough and conscientious effort to read
the play through Greek eyes. This is not as easy as it sounds. In
principle, of course, classicists are trained in historical approaches,
but in practice, we follow them unevenly, and Antigone slips into
modern dress far more readily than, say, Aias or Elektra or the old
Oidipous. Second, they tend to see Antigone's action as problem-
atic, even shocking, to fifth-century sensibilities. By contrast, Kreon
appears fairly reasonable by Greek standards, at least until he cracks
under the pressure of Antigone's intransigence (so Knox), or until
Teiresias reveals that he has misjudged the will of the gods despite
his best intentions (so Sourvinou-Inwood), or perhaps even right up
until the end (so Calder).
This study attempts to take proper account of fifth-century Greek
sensibilities and explain how the play makes Antigone's case, more
in spite of them than through them. We begin on historical foun-
dations. We must understand fifth-century Athenian beliefs about
the state, the role of the individual within it, and its relations to
religion, funerals, and related matters?the 'polis' part of my tide?
before we can make sense of the Antigone. These will be surveyed,
with some large debts to previous work, in part II. Here the 'ortho-
dox' view is particularly weak, and its weaknesses still need atten-
tion. Over a quarter-century of scholarship since Hester has done
litde to tilt the balance against it. It has found recent champions,5)
but more often it is bypassed and ignored rather than faced and
refuted. It deserves closer scrutiny, both for its influence and because,
despite its frequent weaknesses in handling history, it is not so far
wrong.
Still, understanding Greek beliefs and attitudes is only a first
step towards interpretation. We need to consider not so much what
Greeks thought and felt generally as how they are likely to have
thought and felt under the conditions of a tragic performance,
this tragedy in particular. Hence the 'tragedy' part of my tide: a
discussion of how decent Greek opinion fares over the course of
the Antigone (part HI) and a coda on how it might fare in tragedy
5) E.g., Warren J. Lane and Ann M. Lane, The Politics of Antigone, in: J. Peter
Euben (ed.), Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley 1986), 162-82; Jens-Uwe
Schmidt, Gr??e und Grenze der Antigone, Saeculum 31 (1980), 345-79; Tyrrell and
Bennett (?. 4).
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POUS AND TRAGEDY IN THE AKTIGONE 661
generally (part TV). Tragedy is the polis' partner in an intricate dia-
logue. She has her own agenda and her own ways of making her
points, some of them quite sly,6) and she is rather more on Antigone's
side than the polis is. The main burden of this essay is to under-
stand better her side of the conversation, an area where history-
minded critics, straining to catch the voice of the polis, often miss
things.
II. Polis
"Why, then, have so many critics?most of them, no doubt, sober,
respectable men, who would be aghast if a sister of theirs behaved
like Antigone?accepted her at her own valuation? ... I do not think
we do the play any credit by missing the sense of shock and dismay
which her behaviour must have caused among the first audience and
which it could, perhaps, cause today."7)
Let us begin with a sketch of Athenian ideas on the state and cit-
izenship, ca. 440 B.C., and a more detailed discussion of some per-
tinent funerary matters. 'The state' meant the polis, the city-state, a
much smaller, more cohesive community than the sprawling mod-
ern nation-state. The citizen was an important part of it (especially
since Athens was a democracy), far less likely than citizens today
to feel neglected by, or alienated from, the ruling power. He was
also less likely to feel oppressed by it. Its police powers over him
were less developed, and he was more likely to share his neighbors'
oudook and values than we are in our diverse, and fragmented,
modern world. Athens was a community 'characterized by consen-
sus rather than coercion, participation rather than delegation'.8)
Hence the city-state was far less likely than the nation-state to be
6) 'Drama .. . unfolds as a complex dialogue that refuses to be bound in any
direct fashion by the discourses of the agora' (Foley, 132); it provides a 'radical
critique' of 'the city's discourse' (Goldhill, 78; on how this applies to some par-
ticular issues in the Antigone,s ee 104-6, 174-80).
7) Brown, 9.
8) Virginia J. Hunter, Policing Athens: Social Controli n the Attic Lawsuits, 420-320
B.C. (Princeton 1994), 188. Hence the rudimentary police apparatus and heavy
reliance on self-help and citizen participation in law enforcement, detailed by
Hunter in chapter 5.
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662 PHILIP HOLT
an object of fear. 'It is doubtful whether the Greeks would have
recognized the essentially romantic problem of the individual in
revolt against the state'.9) The modern civil-libertarian idea that the
state needs to protect its citizens from itself would most likely have
been alien to them.10)
By modern individualistic standards, the solidarity of the citizens
with their state, their duties towards it, and the expectation that
they contribute to it were remarkable.11) In a world where warfare
was a constant fact of life, fighting was an important civic activity,
basic to a citizen's upbringing and his conception of himself.12) A
citizen was expected to show courage in batde and endurance under
hardship, expected to be useful to the community in peacetime.13)
He was not considered to have an extensive list of rights to lead
his life his own way, without regard for the needs or opinions of
the community.14) If Athenians valued personal freedom more than
most Greeks, they also stressed, in the words of Perikles' funeral
oration, the importance of 'obedience to the magistrates and the
laws, especially . . . those which, although unwritten, bring acknowl-
edged shame' (Thuc. 2.37.3). This need not have troubled many;
in a community that is held together by a large body of shared
attitudes and values, norms tend to be internalized and honesdy
believed, not imposed. The unwritten laws had their own enforce-
ment mechanism ('acknowledged shame'), unofficial but effective.
9) Oudemans and Lardinois (?. 4), 3.
10) A state could, of course, be taken over by a tyrant, but the problem with
tyrants was their supposed disregardo f law and tradition, the foundations of a Greek
constitution: Hdt. 3.80.5 (???a?? te ????e? p?t??a), Eur. Supp. 429-37 (??? e?s??
????? / ??????); cf. Arist. Pol. 5.1310b 17-20 (pa?e??a????t?? ta p?t??a). Since ty-
ranny disregards these foundations, constitutional safeguards against it are useless.
11) Knox, 83-6; idem, Sophoclesa nd the Polis, in: Sophocle( Entretiens sur l'anti-
quit? classique, 29; Geneva 1983), 1-27 at 1-4.
12) Goldhill, 63 f.; idem, The GreatD ionysia and Civic Ideology,i n: John J. Winkler,
Froma I. Zeitlin (ed.), Nothing to Do with Dionysos?A thenianD rama in its Social Context
(Princeton 1990), 97-129 at 106-12.
13) K.J. Dover, GreekP opular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Berkeley
1974), 161-4, 292-9.
14) Dover (n. 13), 157-60. Both critics and advocates of democracy pointed, for
blame or praise, to how much personal freedom it permitted: A.H.M. Jones, Athenian
Democracy( Oxford 1957), 43-5. But this means freedom relative to other forms of
government in Greece, not to modern standards of individual liberty, and we must
avoid anachronistic ideas about how much personal freedom Athenians enjoyed.
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POLIS AND TRAGEDY IN THE AXTIGONE 663
'There does not seem to have been any limit... to the com-
munity's rights over the property and lives of the individuals who
composed it'.15) Broad construction of the public interest gave the
Athenian polis considerable power to regulate what its citizens did.
Among other things, the polis could regulate funerals. A funeral was
basically a family function, but the display and ostentation which
the family could employ were restricted by the state.16) The state
could also restrict funeral rites for certain classes of people?sui-
cides, for example.17)
This brings us to a fact which is troublesome for devotees of St.
Antigone the Martyr but important for assessing how an Athenian
audience would respond to the play: Athenian law forbade the bur-
ial of traitors and sacrilegious people in Athenian territory. There
is abundant evidence of this law, and of similar laws in other states.18)
Now, Polyneikes, who led an army against his homeland, was cer-
tainly a traitor, and if Kreon is right that he planned to burn the
temples of the gods (Ant. 199-201, 284-7), he aspired to sacrilege
as well. Hence in refusing him burial, Kreon was imposing a sanc-
tion that was recognizable to the audience as part of their law. He
had good reasons for it. In a small city-state, defeat in war could
mean civic destruction and the loss of everything one had; treason
was a serious business, a threat to the survival of the community.
The development of the law and its bearing on the play are
much debated and need further discussion. First, was the law in
effect at the time of the play? Probably?or at least, the principle
behind it was. Our plainest statement of the law comes from
Xenophon's account of a debate in the assembly in 406 B.C. (Xen.
Hell. 1.7.22), well after the Antigone, and most attested cases of the
law in action come from late in the fifth century and after. But at
an earlier date, Themistokles, who died as an exile for treason (ep?
15) Dover (?. 13), 289.
16) Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult ofSouL?a nd Belief in Immortalitya mong the Greeks,
English trans. (London 1925), 164 f.; Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death
(Ithaca, N.Y. 1985), 21-3.
17) Thalheim, Selbstmord,R E II Al (1921), 1134 f.
18) Gustave Glotz, La solidarit? de la famille dans le droit criminel en Gr?ce (Paris
1904), 460 f. gives an extensive collection of evidence; also basic, and long neglected
for bringing the issue into discussion of the Antigone, is W. Vischer, Zu Sophokles
Antigone, RhM 20 (1865), 444-54 at 445-9.
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664 PHILIP HOLT
p??d?s?a fe????t??, Thucydides explains), was forbidden burial in
Attika; his kinsmen smuggled his bones in and buried them in secret,
or so they claimed. The Alkmeonidai are said to have suffered a
posthumous counterpart to the same punishment, with their bones
dug up and cast out of Attika, for the murder of the Kylonian con-
spirators.19)
Fuscagni20) has argued that these were isolated cases occurring in
times of severe political strife: denying burial to traitors (although
not to sacrilegious people) was unknown before the death of
Themistokles, and it was not applied after that (thanks partly to
Sophokles' efforts in the Aias and the Antigone) until the pressures of
war and mean times brought it back after the Sicilian disaster and
the coup of the Four Hundred. This scenario depends rather heav-
ily on the argument from silence for an unevenly attested period
of history. If denial of burial to traitors is better attested during and
after the Peloponnesian War than before it, this may well mean
simply that we have more evidence, not more incidents. Or if more
incidents, perhaps more traitors, not a change in people's minds
about how to treat them. More likely denial of burial was an early
practice, descended from the epic warrior's exposure of enemy
corpses.21) The developing polis took over corpse-abuse (as it took
over much else), institutionalized it, and regulated it; it did not
invent it. Whatever the letter of the law, the pnncipk that burial
could be denied to particularly egregious offenders was established
19) On Themistokles, see Thuc. 1.138.6 (other versions in Thuc. 1.138.5; Diod.
11.58.1; Plut. Them. 32.3-5; Paus. 1.1.2). On the Alkmeonidai, see Thuc. 1.126.12;
Isok. 16.26; [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 1; Plut. Sol. 12.2-4 and Mor. 549a. These versions
differ, but the existence of the tradition should be noted.
20) Stefania Fuscagni, La condannad i Temistoclee /Aiace di Sofocle,R IL 113 (1979),
167-87, with further discussion in Sacrilegioe tradimenton ell'Atened el V secolo,i n: Marta
Sordi (ed.), Religionee politica nel mondo antico (Milan 1981), 64-72.
21) H. H?ppener, Het begrafenisverboidn Sophokles'A ntigone, Hermeneus 9 (1937),
73-8; Vincent J. Rosivach, On Creon,A ntigone and Not Burying the Dead, RhM 126
(1983), 193-211 at 196-9, 208 f. It has been pointed out that in Homer the expo-
sure of corpses is often threatened but rarely carried out and generally condemned:
Fuscagni, Condanna (?. 20), 167; J.E.G. Whitehorne, The Backgroundt o Polyneices'
Disintermenta nd Reburial, G&R 30 (1983), 129-42 at 133-5. But it would be mis-
leading to describe epic (or for that matter later) treatment of the body as chival-
rous or high-minded: see Emily Vermeide, Aspects of Death in Early GreekA rt and
Poetry( Berkeley 1979), 93-116, especially 103-8, on mistreating corpses, and 114-6,
on massacring noncombatants.
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POLIS AND TRAGEDY IN THE ANTIGONE 665
in people's minds well before Sophokles' day, and it stayed in their
minds well after. Given sufficient provocation, it could be awak-
ened and put into action in generad laws or in sanctions against
people or families in particular cases. The Alkmeonidai and Themis-
tokles were hit by recurring applications of a continuing principle,
not by isolated incidents.22)
Second, is Kreon within the law? Basically, with some allowance
for dramatic intensification, yes. It has been pointed out that Kreon
goes further than Athenian law since he forbids Polyneikes to be
buried at all and posts soldiers to ensure that the body is devoured
by birds and dogs. The Athenians forbade traitors to be buried in
Attika, but at least in theory, the bodies could be buried elsewhere
by pious relatives. The importance of this distinction has been much
debated. It is sometimes argued that Kreon should have allowed
Polyneikes to be buried outside Theban territory, or he should have
thrown the corpse over the border or into a pit, rather than leave
the body exposed; thus he could have disgraced Polyneikes without
offending the gods.23) We should reject this as a judgment of what
Kreon should have done. No such course of action is considered
in the play, where we find only the stark extremes of exposure and
a full burial, and in fact Polyneikes is eventually buried in his own
land (???e?a? ??????, Ant. 1203). It is poor criticism to say that a
character in a play ought to have done something which he is never
given a chance to do and which is never proposed by anybody on
stage. We would do better to note that Kreon's severity might color
his action in Athenian eyes.24) Still, his edict is in keeping with the
law. The law might have permitted the burial of traitors and the like
outside Attika (for it could not control what went on outside Athenian
22) Cerri, Legislazioneo rale, 28 f. = Ideologiaf uneraria, 129.
23) Lane and Lane (n. 5), 169; Sourvinou-Inwood, Assumptions, 146 f. and Bad
Woman, 26-8; Vischer (n. 18), 450-2. Contra, Cerri, Legislazioneo rale, 18 f. = Ideologia
funeraria, 121-3; Hester (?. 2), 19-21; Oudemans and Lardinois (?. 4), 162. Rohde
(?. 16), 163 (with ??. 34 and 35) considers denial of burial in one's homeland
quite a severe sanction even if the body was given a proper funeral abroad.
24) Draheim, Die Bestattungd es Landesfeindesb ei Sophokles,W KPh 33 (1916), 447-
54 at 452; H?ppener (?. 21), 76-8; Rosivach (?. 21), 208-11; Whitehorne (?. 21),
135 and 138. Similar but more complex arguments in P.E. Easterling, Constructing
the Heroic, in: Christopher Pelling (ed.), GreekT ragedya nd the Historian (Oxford 1997),
21-37 at 26-8; Eberlein (?. 2), 26.
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666 PHILIP HOLT
territory), but it is unlikely that the law envisioned it, and the law
certainly did not provide for it.25) Likewise, the Athenian practice
of throwing criminals into the barathron appears to have implied that
there would be no burial.26)
Kreon's edict, then, is not the monstrous piece of impiety which
many critics assume. In Greek terms, it is thinkable, doable, and
legal. Indeed, Kreon is not a particularly impious person, for he
has followed Teiresias' advice before (Ant. 993 f), and he has his
reasons for believing that the gods hate Polyneikes (282-9).27) His
edict is severe, and we will need to consider its severity more fully.
It will also turn out to be mistaken, but only at the end, after the
plot of the Antigone has fully unwound. We must give Kreon credit
for starting from a reasonable position, even a strong one.28)
In fact, in his presentation of the myth Sophokles places Kreon
in a far stronger position than Athenian tradition did otherwise.
There was another version of the myth, according to which the
Thebans refused burial to the Argive chiefs generally, not just to
Polyneikes, until the Athenians intervened and secured their burial
by persuasion or force. Our fullest extant treatment of this story is
Euripides' Suppliants, but Aischylos had dealt with it earlier in the
lost Eleusinians, and it became a staple of Athenian patriotic rhetoric.29)
This story is probably an Athenian invention, counter to a tradition
25) Cerri, LeguUvjoneo rale,2 1 = Ideologifau neraria,1 24; Louis Gernet, The Anthropology
of Ancient Greece,E nglish trans. (Baltimore 1981), 257 f.; Rosivach (n. 21), 193 f.
and 208, n. 49. Tyrrell and Bennett (n. 4), 131 assert that 'it was generally under-
stood that the bodies of such men would be retrieved by their philoi and, if pos-
sible, buried secretly in Attica'. But there is no evidence that this was 'generally
understood', and the last clause rests on the questionable idea that Themistokles'
secret burial in Attika was legal.
26) Cerri, Legislazioneo rale,2 4-6 (= Ideof ogiaf uneraria, 126-8) and 40 f.; cf. H?ppener
(?. 21), 74 f. Throwing bodies into the barataronr emoves them from the upper
world, as a funeral does, but it denies the dead their due honor. Some claim that
bodies thrown into the barathronc ould be retrieved for burial (Rohde [n. 16], 187,
n. 32) or sprinkled with dust (Fuscagni, Sacrilegio[ ?. 20], 67, ?. 16), but I see no
evidence of this.
27) Knox, 101 f.
28) This much emerges through the 'heroic vagueness' in which Easterling
(n. 24), 26-8 finds the issue enveloped.
29) On Aischylos (and Philochoros), see Plut. Thes. 29.4 f. In patriotic rhetoric,
the fullest treatments of the story are Lys. 2.7-10 and Isok. 12.168-74, but see also
Hdt. 9.27.3; Xen. Hell. 6.5.46; PI. Menex. 239b; [Dem.] 60.8; Isok. 4.54 f., 10.31,
and 14.54 f.; Paus. 1.39.2.
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