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SophoclesAntigone
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Symbols & Motifs
Burial, the Grave, and the Underworld
Burial and burial rites were an important part of ancient Greek culture, and the completion of these rites through burial was considered integral to the safe passage of the dead to the underworld. A good Greek citizen must respect death. As Teiresias says, one must “give way to the dead” in order to please the gods (1,090).
In this play, several characters die because of the disrespect of the burial necessities of one character, Polyneikes. In this sense, Polyneikes’ lack of burial essentially digs the grave of several subsequent characters: Antigone, Haimon, and Eurydike. Duty to the dead compels Antigone to seal her own fate. She declares the common Greek ideology that the underworld, though shady and unknown, is a deeper reality than the life lived here on Earth, since the underworld is the domain of both the ancestors and the gods: “I / Must please those down below for a longer time / Than those up here, since there I’ll lie forever (91-93). In burying her brother, Antigone also figuratively buries herself. In refusing this burial, Kreon figuratively buries his wife and son.
The House, or Oikos
In the ancient Greek world, the house, the family, and the property and lineage of the family were all referred to by the same word, oikos. It is through this word that we come to call Oedipus and his children the “house of Oedipus,” as this play does several times. Throughout the compendium of Greek tragedies, the theme of a family being doomed for several generations is common, always due to the initial sin of a founding member. In the case of Antigone, her father’s sin of killing his own father and marrying his mother sealed her fate, and she is destined to live out the bad luck that has come to Oedipus and his line through these acts.
In Antigone, the doom of the oikos of Oedipus is consistently referred to by the Chorus, most prominently in the ode that closes Scene 3. Beyond the oikos as family line, the very object of the house is a prominent symbol in the text. In the first scene, Antigone and Ismene are standing outside of the house of Kreon. Outside these doors, they are also outside the walls of the city. Their status here symbolizes the lawlessness of Antigone’s actions, her defiance to the norm of women always staying within the house, and the lack of familial mercy she will find when Kreon learns of her deed. Antigone’s tomb is also consistently referred to as her final house or bed-chamber, and her sealing up in this house of death marks her exclusion from continuing her own family line. As Kreon states, she will be “deprived of any house up here” by Kreon (950), both a literal home and a family.
The Polis
The ancient Greek world was not a uniform one; it was made of a system of poleis (singular: polis): city-states with amorphous borders that often fought and made temporary alliances with each other. One of the largest and most influential of the period was Athens, the home of Sophocles. Thebes was another, and the two poleis had very separate administrations.
In Antigone, since Kreon rules Thebes, the polis of Thebes is an extension of the house of Kreon. Therefore, in standing outside of Kreon’s walls, Antigone also stands outside the city walls. This means not only that she is outside of Kreon’s mercy, but that she is acting outside the bounds of the city’s laws, as decreed by Kreon. Indeed, she is about to break these laws in burying her dead brother.
The fates of the house of Oedipus and the polis of Thebes are intertwined throughout Sophocles’ Theban plays. In Antigone, we feel this threat already in the action preceding the play: Polyneikes, a member of the royal house of Thebes, fought with his own family in attacking Thebes. The royal house, and the city, is at war with itself.
Because of Kreon’s sin against his own nephew, Teiresias tells Kreon that gods are spurning all the prayers of all the citizens of Thebes, a punishment for the entire city due to the actions of its ruler. This doomed fate of the city is another reminder to the original Athenian audience of the superiority of its own system of democracy to the governments of other Greek states.
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