In the Library
Antigone
Sophocles, 441 BCE
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 45 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by F. Storr
- Original
- Original grc
- Chapters
- Chapters 13
- Length
- Length 10k words
£1.99
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Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man;
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About the book
A handful of dust is all it takes. Polynices fell attacking his own city, and the new king of Thebes has ruled that the traitor's body stay above ground, food for the dogs and the noon sun, a punishment built to outlast death. His sister Antigone scatters dust over him anyway, sealing her fate in an act briefer than the sentence that describes it. What makes Sophocles' play unbearable is that neither of them is wrong. Antigone obeys the gods of the dead, who were old before any throne existed; Creon is holding a city together after civil war, and a king whose edicts mean nothing rules nothing. The play takes no side. It destroys them both and keeps Creon on stage long after the girl is walled alive into her rock tomb, so he can total what his principle has cost. Twenty-five centuries on, no one has untied the knot: the law of the city stands, and the city is empty of everyone worth saving.