Antigone

At dawn the sentries came back to a body they had been ordered to leave alone, and found it changed. Polynices still lay where he had fallen outside the walls of Thebes, but a thin film of dry earth now covered him, scattered by hand, just enough to satisfy the gods and to condemn whoever had dared. There were no footprints, no tools, no broken ground. Only the dust, and the smell of a corpse a day in the sun, and the birds that had been driven off and were circling back.

She was the daughter of Oedipus, which is to say the daughter of a man who married his own mother. Antigone came from the most poisoned bloodline in Greek story, child of Oedipus and Jocasta, sister to Ismene and to the brothers Eteocles and Polynices. The curse on the house of Thebes ran through her before she did anything at all. What she did with the little room left to her is the reason her name survived.

Before the burial there was the road. When Oedipus blinded himself and was driven out of Thebes, it was Antigone who went with him, a girl leading a ruined king across the countryside, year after year, into old age. She was his eyes. She told him when the ground turned rough, when strangers approached, when it was Creon or Ismene or his own son Polynices coming over the rise. At Colonus, near Athens, she stayed beside him until the earth itself took him in a death no mortal was allowed to witness, and then she turned back toward the city that had thrown them out.

Thebes was at war with itself by the time she returned. Eteocles and Polynices had agreed to share their father’s throne in alternating years and had failed at it, as brothers in these stories tend to. Polynices marched on the city with six allied champions in the campaign remembered as the Seven against Thebes. The brothers met in the fighting and killed each other, each man’s spear in the other’s body. Creon, their uncle, took the crown over the wreckage and issued his decree. Eteocles, who had defended the city, would be buried with full honors. Polynices, who had attacked it, would be left in the open for the dogs and the carrion birds, and anyone who tried to bury him would be put to death.

Antigone buried him anyway. She told Ismene first, in the grey hour before the day began, and her sister begged her not to and would not help. So she went alone, scattered the dust, poured out the libations, and was caught when the guards swept the dust away and waited for the culprit to return and renew the rites. She did return. Brought before Creon, she did not deny it or plead. She told him that his edict was the word of one man, and that the laws she had obeyed were older and belonged to the gods below, and that she had always known she would die and counted the loss of a brother left to rot worse than the loss of her own life. Ismene, too late, tried to claim a share of the guilt; Antigone refused to let her, sparing her and shutting her out in the same breath.

Creon would not be moved by a woman, least of all this one. He had her sealed alive in a tomb cut into rock, walled up with a little food so the city could claim it had not technically killed her. The blind prophet Tiresias came to him and warned that the gods were sickened, that the altars were fouled with the flesh the birds had carried from the unburied body, that Creon’s own house would answer for it. The king broke and ran to undo the order. He buried Polynices first and went to free Antigone second, and the order was wrong.

Inside the tomb she had not waited. She had hanged herself with a noose torn from her linen dress. Haemon, Creon’s son and the man betrothed to her, was already there, holding her body. He drew his sword on his father, missed, and turned the blade on himself. When word reached Eurydice, Creon’s wife, that her son was dead, she killed herself as well, cursing her husband as she went. Creon was left alive, which was the harshest thing the story could do to him.

Not every version ends in the rock tomb. A play by Euripides, now mostly lost, let the god Dionysus intervene so that Antigone and Haemon married and lived, and had a son. Hyginus tells a stranger tale: Haemon is ordered to execute her, hides her instead in a shepherd’s hut, and fathers a boy named Maeon, who is recognized years later at funeral games in Thebes by a birthmark in the shape of a dragon, the mark borne by descendants of the Spartoi, the sown men from whom the city’s first families sprang; Creon discovers the deception, and Haemon kills Antigone and then himself. The Roman poet Statius, in his Thebaid, gives her a partner in the crime: Polynices’ widow Argia, searching the battlefield for her husband by night, meets Antigone over the same body, and together they carry him to the still-burning pyre of Eteocles, where the flame splits in two and recoils, the brothers refusing each other even as ash.

Her name has been read as anti and gone, against birth or in place of a mother, and also glossed as one of contrary mind, the woman of the opposite opinion. Both readings fit. She mothered a father who had become a child, and she set herself against the ruling of the state with a stubbornness that was the mirror image of Creon’s own.

Her strength was never force. She had no army, no magic, no weapon but a handful of dust and the certainty that the dead are owed their rites. That certainty made her immovable, and it carried her calmly to a death she had named in advance. Her weakness was the same thing. She was mortal and alone, walled into stone by a power she could not fight, and the very rigidity that made her noble left her no path but the noose. She buries her brother knowing it will kill her. The tragedy turns on two people who would not bend, and only one of them dies still believing she was right.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Antigone in Greek mythology?

Antigone is a Theban princess, the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta and sister to Ismene, Eteocles, and Polynices. She is best known from Sophocles’ tragedy for burying her brother Polynices against the orders of King Creon, and earlier for guiding her blind, exiled father Oedipus during his final years.

Why did Antigone bury Polynices?

After Polynices died attacking Thebes, King Creon decreed that his body be left unburied as a traitor, on pain of death. Antigone defied the order because she believed the unwritten laws of the gods and the duty owed to a dead brother outranked any human king’s edict. She performed symbolic burial rites by scattering dust over his body.

How did Antigone die?

In Sophocles’ version, Creon had Antigone sealed alive inside a rock tomb. Rather than wait to starve, she hanged herself with a noose made from her own linen dress. Her betrothed, Creon’s son Haemon, found her dead and killed himself beside her body.

Who was Antigone engaged to?

Antigone was betrothed to Haemon, the son of King Creon. When Haemon discovered that Antigone had taken her own life in the tomb, he tried to kill his father, failed, and then stabbed himself, after which his mother Eurydice also took her own life.

Are there different versions of Antigone’s story?

Yes. Sophocles’ tragedy ends with her death in the tomb, but other sources differ. A lost play by Euripides had the god Dionysus save Antigone and Haemon so they could marry, while Hyginus records a version in which Haemon hides Antigone and fathers a son with her. The Roman poet Statius describes Antigone burying Polynices alongside his widow Argia.

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Oedipus, Cadmus, Sphinx, Echion, Dionysus, Semele, Niobe, Erinyes (Furies), Hades, Persephone, Achilles, Helen, Acis, Daphne, Arachne