It has recently occurred to me that I work up to twelve hours on an essay for English or Literature class, and the only one who ever gets to read it is my teacher. And that's just messed up. Surely my hard work and sweat and tears deserves more than that.
So I've decided to start posting the essays I'm particularly proud of on my blog. "But they're so long!" you say. Well, the joke's on you, because my essays average at about 2000-3000 words, and my Hamilton post was 1000 words longer than that. I've written Spike meta at 6000 words, I think. Point is, I'm writing stuff like this all the time. Just not as formally, or about things as academic.
But I put just as much work and just as much heart into my academic essays, so I want to share them with the world. This is the first one I'm going to post. It's about Sophocles' Antigone, the third play in his trilogy of tragedies about the house of Oedipus (whom you may know from the titular complex popularized by Freud. I have issues with this, but I'm not going to get into it right now).
Enjoy.
The
War After the War: A Battle of Principles in Antigone
Throughout
history, there have been many battles and many wars fought for reasons that
were perhaps not so important as the principles they stood to represent. This
concept of fighting more on principle than on the actions themselves, goes back
for centuries, and perhaps one of the first recorded instances of this,
fictional or otherwise, is in Sophocles’ Antigone.
In Antigone, the titular character
buries her brother ceremonially, in the traditional belief that this will allow
him access to the afterlife. This is in direct defiance to a law which the
newly crowned king of Thebes, Creon, put in place, claiming that her brother
had been a traitor and did not deserve such a burial. Seeing his law disobeyed,
he demands justice, and sentences Antigone to death for her crime, despite many
people voicing their disagreement to him. At first glance, this would appear to
be a relatively simple conflict between a king and his subject about civil
disobedience. But looking closer, it is evident that there is more to this
story than a woman’s defiance. In fact, their argument hinges on disagreement
of a much larger issue, which is the importance of the law of their gods, and
whether or not Creon himself, as king, must also obey these laws. Divine law
was important for these characters, and though it is possible that neither
Creon nor Antigone were exclusively concerned with this matter, it is evident
from the structure of the story and the general beliefs of society that
Antigone is the one fighting on the correct side of this issue, and Creon is
not.
Firstly, it is necessary to
understand what divine law is in order to understand what it is that Creon and
Antigone are truly arguing about. Divine law is the concept that aside from
earthly, man-made laws, there are also a set of laws put in place by a god or
many gods which dictate not only how to live a lawful existence, but also a
moral one. In slightly more recent theology, one might think of the Ten
Commandments as an example of divine law, as they were allegedly codified by a
divine being, the Judeo-Christian God. Within the setting of Antigone, it was not this God, but the
ancient Greek gods who were being worshipped, and whose words were divine. What
makes this concept potentially difficult for a modern audience is that, in
recent history, divine law and earthly law have become almost synonymous. For
instance, in keeping with the Judeo-Christian God’s Ten Commandments, it is
against earthly law as well as divine law to kill, or to steal. However, for a
citizen of ancient Greece, earthly law and divine law were not so identical,
making it possible to live a lawful life without necessarily always living a
moral life. This was due to the fact that much of ancient Greek divine law was
inherently ritualistic, which was not enforced by earthly laws (Le Bel). The
most obvious example of this is the very thing which Creon and Antigone are
fighting over, which is the question of how important it is to bury the dead.
From a theological point of view, it was necessary to ensure passage to the
afterlife, but from a purely mortal point of view, it was not. Another example
is the more extreme case of human sacrifice. This features in a different
series of plays written around the same time as Antigone, Aeschylus’s The
Oresteia. In the first installment of The
Oresteia, Agamemnon is punished for sacrificing his daughter to the gods, a
punishment presumably orchestrated by the gods themselves for his despicable
act (Talukdar). This is in contrast with the fact that there were actually no
earthly laws preventing Agamemnon from doing such a thing – what he did was, at
the time, lawful. However, it was also indisputably immoral, even in ancient
Greece. Therefore, it is with the knowledge of these regulatory discrepancies
that one must regard the conflict which Sophocles brings to light in Antigone, the principle which both Creon
and Antigone are willing to die – or kill – over: the question, “Is it enough
to live lawfully if one does not live morally?” or, put another way, “Does the
unspoken, yet understood, law of the gods hold precedent over a law clearly
codified by an earthly authority?”
That being said, it is important to
realize that neither Antigone nor Creon were driven entirely by the strength of
their conviction on this issue when they acted. To understand the complexity of
their motivations, one must first take into account the nature of the
relationship between these two characters. Antigone and Creon are not strangers;
in fact, it was Creon who enacted the exile of Antigone’s father, Oedipus. It
was also Creon who, later, made to kidnap Antigone and her sister when Oedipus
would not return to Thebes. With this in mind, there develops a new layer
entirely to the conflict when Antigone hears of Creon’s law forbidding people
from burying her brother. To Antigone, this is a move which, as well as
dishonouring one of her own, also directly targets her and her sister, who,
traditionally, would have been the ones most likely to bury one of their family
with the proper ceremonial rites. Antigone says, “Such I hear is the martial
law our good Creon lays down for you and me – yes, me, I tell you – and he’s
coming here to alert the uninformed in no uncertain terms, and he won’t treat
the matter lightly,” (Sophocles 37-41). Antigone feels that this law was not
created to control Thebes, but to control her, which she does not take kindly
to. It appears to her as though Creon has victimized her family, starting with
her father, then she and her sister, and now her brother, all of whom she loves
very much, and because of this history, it seems natural that she would wish to
rebel against such a person. Antigone herself says, “If I had been the mother
of children or if my husband died […] I’d never have taken this ordeal upon
myself. […] But mother and father both lost in the halls of Death, no brother
could ever spring to life again,” (Sophocles 995-1004).This all but confirms
that Antigone is far more concerned with her family than with the principle. Similarly,
Creon is also not innocent of ulterior motives. He claims that his law is based
on the principle of not providing privileges to people proven to be traitors
(Sophocles 222-231). This would have been unusual for the time, however, as the
consequences of not being buried were so strong that generally, even ones
enemies were buried with the appropriate ceremony (Retief and Cilliers). It
seems probable, then, that Creon’s law had less to do with the etiquette of war
and more to do with Creon’s opinion of Oedipus’s children. From Creon’s
perspective, the house of Oedipus has been cursed due to Oedipus’s infamous
crime, and Thebes has been paying for it with the war waged by Oedipus’s sons.
Targeting Oedipus’s remaining offspring, his daughters, with such a
controversial law would appear to be an effective way to remove them as
potential problems immediately. This is not to say that Creon planned to murder
the children of Oedipus – merely that he is an opportunist who wishes to free
himself of a problem, as Oedipus and his children have, in the past, done
nothing but jeopardize Creon’s various plans, which, until this point, were
usually intended to be in the best interest of Thebes.
Despite
Antigone not being entirely pure in her motives, it is clear to see that it is
she who must be seen as ultimately right, even if it is solely by chance of a
miscalculated decision on Creon’s part rather than because she stands for
justice in general. Regardless of what drove them, Creon directly disobeyed
divine law, and divine law, more so than earthly law, was what kept order at
the time. It is true that, not only as a subject of a king, but even more so as
a woman, Antigone transgressed her rights – this is made reference to by her
sister Ismene, who says, “Remember, we are women, we’re not born to contend
with men. Then too, we’re underlings […] so we must submit in this, and things
still worse,” (Sophocles 74-77). Nonetheless, it is Creon who overstepped
further, as he did not only break a law, but a sacred law. Laws such as these
were created in an attempt to unite society under a set of values, and Creon
shows immense, reprehensible pride by placing his own ideas at greater
importance than, essentially, common morality. There is one irrefutable fact
about this situation which ultimately turns Antigone from a common criminal to a
heroine – the people agree with her. This is shown when the Chorus of Thebans
says, as Antigone is escorted from the palace to her death, “But now, even I
would rebel against the king, I would break all bounds when I see this – I fill
with tears, I cannot hold them back,” (Sophocles 895-897). The people of Thebes
are sympathetic to Antigone’s plight because she held true to their common
values, whereas Creon, even when told of the concerns of his subjects by his
son, who outright tells him, “[…] the city mourns for this young girl,”
(Sophocles 776) refuses to yield. Instead, he says, “And is Thebes about to
tell me how to rule?” (Sophocles 821), showing that he does not wish to be a
voice of the people. This is what makes the difference between Creon being
wrong and Antigone being right – Creon defied the values of society at large,
and Antigone upheld them. This makes for an interesting reversal of roles -
despite their respective stations, it becomes Creon who did not know his place,
while Antigone represents the people. Antigone is not a heroine because she is
objectively right, but because her actions, far more than Creon's, align with
the values of the people Creon rules, and is unafraid to confront him for that
principle.
Creon, for
his part, seems to be either unaware of his fatal miscalculation of strategy,
or too stubborn to repair it, and this is the wrong for which he is ultimately
punished. In fact, when it is pointed out to Creon that the people of Thebes
not only disagree with his verdict, but also that they believe the law itself
to be unjust, he becomes indignant. Rather than fixing his mistake, he begins
to make statements such as, “The city is the king’s – that’s the law!”
(Sophocles 825), and when his son accuses him of offending justice, Creon
responds, “[Is it] Wrong? To protect my royal rights?” (Sophocles 832-833).
From these examples, it is plain that Creon is choosing not to believe that
anything could come above the law that he created. This attitude remains even
when he is told the gods themselves disagree – he replies with, “You’ll never
bury that body in the grave, not even if Zeus’s eagles rip the corpse and wing
their rotten pickings off to the throne of god!” (Sophocles 1151-1153). Here,
he is no longer simply ignorant to the extent of the laws he has broken – he
does not care. He is putting his own will above that of the gods, and this is
his fatal mistake. It appears as though Creon expects to be protected by his
kingship, knowing that as an authority, he is within his rights to make his own
laws. But in the stories of this time period, kinghood rarely protects people
if they have broken an important law of the gods. For example, in the story of
Sisyphus, king of Corinth, he defied death, breaking a fundamental law of the
gods – people are not meant to return from the dead. For this crime, he was
severely punished, and faced an eternity of suffering (Salverda). As an
alternative example, there was also the story of Tantalus, king of Sipylus, who
broke the gods’ laws by bringing their food down to mortals, and like Sisyphus,
was also punished eternally (Boedeker). These are fantastical stories, but at
the time, it was stories like these which were integral to the beliefs of
society. These are myths in which a king finds himself wholly at the mercy of
the gods for not respecting the laws they put in place, and it is with the
knowledge that these stories existed and were aplenty that one must realize the
foolishness of Creon’s mistake. Kings before him had never been protected by
virtue of their earthly authority – it appears to be pure hubris which gives
Creon the impression that he could be the exception. It is for this refusal to
humble himself, for his absolute certainty in his own infallibility, that Creon
is punished – notably, a crueler punishment than even Oedipus received, as
Oedipus ended his original ordeal with his children still intact and without
blame, while Creon ends the play with both his wife and son dead, and loathing
him in death. It is because Creon is punished so severely that one is certain
that Creon was wrong in this argument, and Antigone was right.
This is a complex story with many
layers necessary to understanding exactly the implications of what is
happening. Firstly, one must understand what exactly divine law was in ancient
Greece, and that it was not as automatic as it is, arguably, in the present
day. One must also realize that, though both Creon and Antigone claim to be
warring about a principle, they are both also warring on the subject of
something else: namely, their unforgiving opinions toward each other. This,
however, does not eliminate the moral principles they represent – because
Antigone represents the values of the people, she is in the right, while Creon
refuses to even consider the concerns of his own subjects, an anti-democratic
notion which the ancient Greeks would have abhorred, putting him firmly and
relentlessly in the wrong. Therefore, despite the possibility that Antigone was
doing the right thing for entirely the wrong reasons, it is still true that
divine law outweighs the rights of kings, and Antigone becomes a courageous
heroine of literature, while Creon, in the truest form of eternal punishment,
is despised still, thousands of years later, by those who read the play.
Endnotes
Boedeker,
Deborah. "Drinking from the Sources: Tantalus, Epic and Myth."Didaskalia.
Randolph College, 30 Oct. 2000. Web. 8 Mar. 2016.
Le
Bel, Maurice. "Natural Law in the Greek Period." Web. 8 Mar. 2016.
Retief,
F. P., and L. Cilliers. "Burial Customs, the Afterlife, and the Pollution
of Death in Ancient Greece." Acta Theologica. African Journals
Online. Web. 8 Mar. 2016.
Salverda,
John R. "Sisyphus, the "Joseph" of Greek Myth." Academia.
Academia. Web. 8 Mar. 2016.
Sophocles. “Antigone”. The Three Theban Plays. Trans. Robert Fagles. Harmondsworth,
Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1984. Print.
Talukdar,
Monideepa. "The Patriarchal Nature of Justice in The Oresteia."Southeastern
Louisiana University. Southeastern Louisiana University. Web. 8 Mar. 2016.
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