Read this if you…
- are interested in how humans throughout time have really cared about burying the dead
- want the best female protagonist in Greek Tragedy
- like the exploration of duty to family vs. state
- are reading the Oedipus Trilogy
Skip this if you…
- need a fast moving plot
The 
Take
Always interesting how all these ancient texts, proper burial rites are paramount. Great inspection of family vs state. Classic Greek tragic ending. Super short and easy read
The lineage through Antigone
- The Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus. Antigone built on it. - *Antigone* opens on the aftermath of the battle Aeschylus dramatized in *The Seven Against Thebes* - The brothers' mutual slaughter — the climax of Aeschylus's play — is Sophocles's starting premise; he assumes you already know how they died - Reading the *Seven* first puts you in the seat of Sophocles's original audience, who carried Aeschylus's version into the theater with them
- Poetics by Aristotle. Antigone shaped it. - *Antigone* becomes a teaching example in the foundational work of literary theory - In *Poetics* Ch. 14 Aristotle reaches for the Haemon-Creon scene — but as a cautionary case: Haemon threatens his father, then nothing follows, so Aristotle ranks it the worst, least-tragic kind of dramatic intent - A reminder that even the greats supply theory with its negative examples
Depicted in Art
Antigone kneels beside her brother's bare corpse on a rocky shore, hand raised toward the sky in grief, the battlefield receding behind.
Nikiforos Lytras, 1865
Creon enthroned at left passes sentence on Antigone, who stands bound at center beneath a colonnade as courtiers recoil.
Giuseppe Diotti, 1845
Bust-length portrait of Antigone gazing skyward in profile, draped in white against a dark richly patterned ground, expression caught between sorrow and resolve.
Frederic Leighton, 1882
Antigone bends to sprinkle dust over Polynices's body as guards rush from the background to seize her.
Sébastien Norblin, 1825
Recommended Editions
Robert Fagles
Penguin Classics · 1984
Fagles in the Three Theban Plays volume, with Bernard Knox's introduction doing real critical work. Antigone's defiance lands like a modern voice without losing the weight of the ritual it's set inside.
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Notable Quotes
Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man; the power that crosses the white sea, driven by the stormy south-wind.
Screen & Stage
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- G.W.F. Hegel, philosopher, 1770–1831: "Of all the masterpieces … the Antigone seems to me to be the most magnificent and satisfying work of art."
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, 1749–1832: "That is the very thing in which Sophocles is a master, and in which consists the very life of the dramatic in general."
- Nelson Mandela, South African president, anti-apartheid leader, 1918–2013: "Antigone … symbolised our struggle; she was, in her own way, a freedom fighter."
- Martin Heidegger, philosopher, 1889–1976: Heidegger built his reading of Western metaphysics on the Antigone's ode to man as the uncanniest of beings.
- Søren Kierkegaard, philosopher, 1813–1855: Kierkegaard took Sophocles' Antigone as the paradigm of the ancient tragic in his essay 'The Ancient Tragical Motif as Reflected in the Modern'.
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