How Ancient Athenians Might React

Antigone is one of the most regularly staged Greek tragedies with great actors lining up to play the part. Juliette Binoche, Juliet Stevenson and Gillian Anderson have all had a crack in recent years. In this episode, Mary and Charlotte look at why Antigone is such an enduringly interesting role. She is sometimes framed as a female Hamlet caught between family loyalties and the needs of the state. 

Antigone was written by Sophocles in the mid-5th Century BCE. It tells the story of King Creon’s attempts to restore order to the city of Thebes following a civil war. He orders that the body of the defeated rebel Polynices should lie unburied as punishment. Antigone, sister of Polynices, disobeys this order and gives her brother proper burial rites (as the gods demand). Creon sentences her to death for betrayal. 

Antigone is often portrayed as a proto-feminist icon - the brave woman standing up to the patriarchy. But is this really what Sophocles intended? King Creon has far more lines and is, like Antigone, caught in an impossible situation. There’s even one way of viewing the play as a parable on what happens when women meddle in the affairs of the state. 

It is, of course, precisely these ambiguities that make Antigone so popular. It raises questions that can never be answered and its relevance shifts from generation to generation. 

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

There is a big book by George Steiner on the history of Antigone: Antigones (Oxford UP, pb, 1986), including Hegel and much more.

More approachable are sections of Helen Morales, Antigone Rising: the subversive power of Greek myth (Wildfire, pb, 2021) and the video lecture by Simon Goldhill, https://www.cambridgegreekplay.com/talk-wheres-the-tragedy-in-antigone-by-prof-simon-goldhill

Nelson Mandela mentions the performance on Robben Island in his Long Walk to Freedom (Back Bay Books, pb, 1995).

Mary describes her own changing views of the play in Talking Classics (Profile books, 2026)

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