Antigone- Greek FigureMortal"Princess of Thebes"

Birth and the Curse of Oedipus

Antigone was born in Thebes, the eldest daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta. Neither parent knew their marriage was incestuous. When the truth emerged, Jocasta hanged herself and Oedipus put out his own eyes. Their children bore the weight of what their parents had done, and of what their grandfather Laius had done before them: Laius had violated the bond of guest-friendship by abducting the boy Chrysippus, bringing a curse upon the house of Labdacus that would not be exhausted for generations.

Guide to the Blind King

After Oedipus's self-blinding and exile from Thebes, Antigone accompanied her father as his guide during years of wandering. Through Attica and the Peloponnese they traveled. They slept by roadsides and begged at temple doors. In Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, the aged Oedipus arrives at the sacred grove of the Eumenides near Colonus, supported by Antigone. She had been his eyes throughout the journey. She endured poverty and the hostility of communities that feared the polluted king. She tells the chorus she has learned to be content with little, that her father's needs come before her own.

Antigone spoke for her father to the world outside the grove. When Creon arrived with armed men to seize Oedipus, Antigone and Ismene were captured before Theseus, king of Athens, rescued them by force. When Polynices came to beg his father's blessing for his campaign against Thebes, Antigone urged Oedipus to hear him. Oedipus cursed both sons for their neglect and Polynices departed to his doom.

Oedipus died at Colonus. The gods took him into the earth in a passage witnessed only by Theseus. Antigone returned to Thebes.

The War of the Seven

Antigone returned to Thebes during the catastrophic war of the Seven against Thebes. Her brothers had quarreled over the throne: Eteocles refused to yield power at the end of his agreed term of alternating rule, and Polynices raised an Argive army to take the city by force. The city survived. The brothers killed each other in single combat at the seventh gate. Their father's curse was fulfilled: they divided their inheritance by the sword.

Creon, now king, decreed that Eteocles would receive honorable burial as the city's defender. Polynices would be left unburied as a traitor, his body exposed to dogs and birds. A guard was set to ensure no one approached the corpse.

The Burial of Polynices

In Sophocles' Antigone, Antigone resolved to bury Polynices. She approached her sister Ismene for help. Ismene refused. They were women, she said, powerless against the state, and their family had already suffered enough. Antigone would act alone.

She performed the burial twice. The first time, she sprinkled dust over Polynices's body and poured libations. When guards discovered the burial and swept the dust away, Antigone returned and was caught performing the rites a second time during a dust storm.

Brought before Creon, she made no attempt to deny what she had done. She had known the edict and known the penalty. She had buried her brother with open eyes. Creon's decree could not override the unwritten laws of the gods, she said, laws that existed before any king and would outlast every king. They were not of today or yesterday. They had always been. If she died for this, so much the better: life among such sufferings was a kind of death, and the real grief would have been to leave her mother's son unburied. She would rather please the dead, with whom she would spend eternity, than the living.

The Tomb and Death

Creon sentenced Antigone to be sealed alive in a rocky cave outside the city, supplied with just enough food that he could claim he had not directly killed her. The chorus compared her to Danaë, sealed in a bronze chamber, and to Cleopatra daughter of Boreas, imprisoned by a wrathful king.

In her final speech, Antigone lamented that she would die unwed, never hearing the marriage hymn, never bearing children. Within the tomb, she hanged herself rather than await starvation.

The Fall of Creon's House

Antigone's death destroyed Creon's family. Haemon, his son and Antigone's betrothed, rushed to the tomb after the blind prophet Tiresias warned Creon that the gods demanded Polynices's burial and Antigone's release. Creon relented, but too late. Haemon found Antigone hanging dead. He tried to strike his father with his sword, missed, then turned the blade on himself and died embracing her body.

When news of Haemon's death reached the palace, Creon's wife Eurydice killed herself at the household altar. She cursed Creon with her last breath. Creon was left alone.

Variant Traditions

Sophocles' version became canonical, but other traditions existed. In Euripides' lost Antigone, known from fragments, Haemon and Antigone survived and had a son, Maeon. Hyginus records a version in which they were condemned to death together, and another in which Heracles interceded to save them. Euripides' Phoenician Women shows Antigone acting with Argeia, the wife of Polynices, to place the body on Eteocles's pyre.

In Apollodorus, Antigone was discovered because she tried to drag the body onto an already-burning pyre.