Parables are written to provoke social change by imagining the worst case scenario and then hoping the audience will steer clear of such a scenario. Sophocles' offered up the tragic character of Antigone as a role model to young Greece who died for her principles. When her brothers Etiocles and Polyneices quarreled for power they both died at each other's hand, as the ironically fought to live what they saw as enriched lives in power. Yet King Creon did not learn from this senseless act of violence and continued to agitate the situation, denying the right of proper burial for Polyneices. When their sister Antigone risks her life to make sure they both get a dignified passage, she is recognizing the “natural law” that governs that all humans deserve equal dignity and respect, in life and death. Symbolically, she is looking back into history and learning from earlier mistakes. Sophocles too was speaking from a broad perspective, saying that for Athens to avoid catastrophic conflict with its neighbors, young women like Antigone would have to question authority, and young men like her fiancé Haemon would have to support them. When natural justice is plainly ignored, a society runs the risk of growing too large for its own good, which can lead to isolation from its allies, and its ultimate demise. In the case of Sophocles' hometown, I would argue that his prophecy finally did come true as the Peloponnesian War broke out with Sparta and Athens was ultimately robbed of all the wealth it had amassed over the years. Stripped of its city walls, Athens must have felt as cold and naked as King Creon, stripped of his family.
Thebes was a wise place to set a tragedy like “Antigone” if inciting social ramifications was the goal. Widely seen as the “anti-polis,” this southern city of Hellas was seen by the Athenians as traitorous ever since it fought on behalf of King Xerxes I of Persia against their fellow Greeks at the battle of Plataea in 479.6 In short, Athenians were not fond of Thebans at the time of “Antigone”'s exhibition, so Sophocles could get away with inflicting an imagined tragedy upon a real society. In addition, the play's theatrical presentation at the Dionysus festival is also very telling. Greek tragedies had grown over the years from being told solely by choruses, to incorporating one, then two additional actors to tell the story. Sophocles, when trying to tell the tale of the dangerous fracturing of Hellas, was smart enough to add a third player to the mix, probably boggling the minds of the audience, whose eyes darted from one place to another as the characters' lives were lost in all the confusion. To reinforce the theme of the dangerous divisions growing between people at the time and on a larger scale, Greek city-states like Athens and Sparta, the bloodlines of the Sophocles' characters are incestuously muddled.
Antigone, the heroine, is both the daughter and granddaughter of Jocastes, and is one of the last living members of the royal house of Cardmem when the play begins with both her brothers slain. Marginalized both by the backwardness of a monarchy that contains its authority through incest and the fact that she was a woman in a time when even the most advanced societies like Athens did not let them vote. Sophocles made a moving and informative choice to place the voice of reason in the body of someone who must have been thought of at the time as a powerless, and therefore unlikely candidate. The message was that no democracy is perfect, and often times the truth comes from those placed at the bottom rungs of society where it can tragically never be heard. “Natural justice” is an absolute truth and therefore does not come from anywhere or anyone specifically. It just is. So the danger is that if a system is set up that is too rigid to let everyone's voice heard than you are at risk of self-destruction. Essentially, Sophocles was saying that the correct answer does not always come from the opinion of the majority. After Antigone, her fiancé Haemon, and his mother Eurydice all commit suicide, it became painfully clear to me that the needs of individuals had been unjustly trumped by the absolute right of the state. The true value of this story is its quality of timelessness, as applicable to today as it was thousands of years ago and with any luck, it has not fallen on too many deaf ears since its original release in Athens.
