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Antigone does not deny that Polynices has betrayed the state, she simply acts as if this betrayal does not rob him of the connection that he would have otherwise had with the city. Creon, on the other hand, believes that citizenship is a contract; it is not absolute or inalienable, and can be lost in certain circumstances.
Antigone appears in the three 5th century BC tragic plays written by Sophocles, known collectively as the three Theban plays, being the protagonist of the eponymous tragedy Antigone. She makes a brief appearance at the end of Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes, while her story was also the subject of Euripides' now lost play with the same name.
Ismene does not stop her sister, but makes her opinion of her foolishness clear. Once Antigone is caught, in spite of her betrothal to his son Haemon, Creon decrees that she is to be buried alive. Ismene then declares that she has aided Antigone and wants to share her fate, though she did not participate in the crime.
Antigone on the side of Polynices, Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, 1868. In Greek mythology, Polynices (also Polyneices) (/ ˌ p ɒ l ɪ ˈ n aɪ s iː z /; Ancient Greek: Πολυνείκης, romanized: Polyneíkes, lit. 'manifold strife' or 'much strife' [1]) was the son of Oedipus and either Jocasta or Euryganeia and the older brother of ...
Creon, Antigone's uncle and newly appointed King of Thebes, buries Eteocles, who fought on the Theban side of the war, hailing him as a great hero. He refuses to bury Polyneices, proclaiming that any who attempt to defy his wishes will be made an example of, on the grounds that he was a 'traitor' fighting on the opposing side in the war.
The play describes the end of Oedipus's tragic life. Legends differ as to the site of Oedipus's death; Sophocles set the place at Colonus, a village near Athens and also Sophocles's own birthplace, where the blinded Oedipus has come with his daughters Antigone and Ismene as suppliants of the Erinyes and of Theseus, the king of Athens.
Antigone by Frederic Leighton, 1882. Antigone cremates Polynices by night. Haemon comes to warn her just before Adrastus and his guards arrive. Adrastus realises Creon's orders have been disobeyed. He believes Haemon is the culprit and arrests him. Creon sentences him to death, but Antigone arrives to explain that the cremation is all her own work.
Examples include the final section (lines 908–1077) of Aeschylus' The Persians (472 BCE) in which Xerxes laments the defeat of his Persian army, the final appearance of Antigone in Sophocles' Antigone (c.442 BCE), the interaction between the chorus and Oedipus when he returns having blinded himself in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (c.429 BCE), and ...