Antigone – Extremes of Passion and Reason
AP English Literature
Law and Chaos
The chains may be overdoing it, but they have made their opinion of ‘the Man’
very clear—him and his senseless, clearly detrimental laws have got to go. ‘The Man’
has also made his opinion very clear—those protestors are destroying what little order
exists in society with their illogical defiance of law. Thousands of years ago, Sophocles
addressed this conflict in his tragedy Antigone, a battlefield between those that govern
with pure rationality and those that believe with emotion. The new king of Thebes,
Creon, in hoping to establish order and squash any remaining dissenters after a bloody
civil war, decrees that no one shall bury his treacherous nephew Polyneices. Opposing
him is the traitor’s sister Antigone, who follows her own morals and buries her brother at
the price of live burial. The conflict forces the whole city from the citizens to Haemon,
Creon’s son and Antigone’s fiancée, to choose the justice of morals or practicality. The
tragic ends of the characters as they stray to one extreme or the other shows that neither
pure rationality nor unbridled emotions leads to justice. Rather, society achieves justice
by synthesizing the two, motivating practical reasoning with morals and virtue.
Charles Paul Segal’s interpretation of the central conflict reflects our modern
opinions towards the individual and the state, but one giving a skewed version of what
Sophocles really believed. Ever since the catastrophe of Nixon’s Watergate, the public
lost faith in authority. Segal believes Antigone “defends those relations and aspects of
life that man possesses by the given conditions of his birth against those which he creates
by strength and force” (Segal165). In this view, she stands for every man’s god-given
rights, the “conditions of his birth” like burial and rest in the afterlife that no mortal has
the power to deny. Creon, on the other hand, acts as the “strength and force” of law
attempting to thwart the gods and thus he is inherently wrong. But this interpretation
simplifies the tragedy into a ‘man falls before gods’ fable. To the Greeks, Creon’s edict
is not so shocking and out-of-line. Philip Holt notes “abundant evidence” (Holt 6) of
edicts barring funerals for traitors being passed in Athenian lands in the same period of
the play—burying a traitor was “a threat to the survival of the community” (6) since it
could be read as condoning the traitor’s actions. The Athenians did not follow the law
out of meekness, but “honestly believed” (5) in the better judgment of the government. In
marking one side as right and the other wrong, Segal makes it seem Antigone is a clear
winner from the start, when in fact she must fight (and die) for her support.
C. M. Bowra’s analysis of the Chorus of Elders, who she sees as representative of
the “qualms and misgivings” of the “ordinary man” (Bowra 65) towards Antigone,
further explains how the tragedy shows signs of the Grecian attitude that “men are
sustained and improved by law […] because law brings with it moral virtues” (66). In
light of her analysis, at first the audience may feel pity for Antigone, a girl who suffered
the loss of her parents and brothers, but not support her cause. Through the eyes of
Ismene and the Chorus, the audience undermines and belittles her actions as girlish
whims, the “hopeless quest” (Sophocles 84) of a “passionate child” (92), “folly in speech,
and frenzy at the heart” (95). Despite using sympathetic terms such as “child” and
“folly”, rationally, they still side with the authority and order as the source of virtue.
However, Sophocles redefines this cause-effect relationship; law doesn’t lead to virtue,
virtue is the source of law. Richmond Y. Hathorn helps clarify the conflict between the
order of law and the justice of emotions in his discussion of ethics. Creon follows the
ethics of calculation, “the light of natural reason” (Hathorn 76), which focuses on the
goal and concrete “probabilities” (72) and never goes beyond physical manifestations.
Antigone, thinking in terms of the ethics of love and faith, is always “valuing the object
or action for itself alone” (69) for she believes that the ideals and hopes embodied by
actions are most important. With these definitions, the flaw of rational law is that it
works towards creating and establishing an end at all moral and sacrilegious costs,
ignoring the moral virtue in the act itself, which, ironically, is what law strives for in the
first place.
From the beginning of the tragedy, Sophocles makes this flaw in reasoning clear
and casts doubt on the justice of the edict. Bowra notes that the Chorus’s support for the
edict bordered on irrational and fanatical, believing it would save them from “the menace
of anarchy” (Bowra 67). In the text of the tragedy, their words do reflect more of an
interest in following the law just to follow law, not to reach virtue. When addressing the
Chorus, Creon praises how “true and constant was your reverence for the royal power of
Laius” (Sophocles 86), failing to mention any possible moral benefits, indicating that the
Chorus’s loyalty is gained through fear and power. “No man is so foolish that he is
enamored of death” (87), whether in punishment for defying the law or from the chaos of
anarchy. But even Creon’s staunchest supporters eventually realize that laws are made
by men, and thus not guaranteed to be morally correct. Moved by humanistic pity as
Antigone is led to her death, the Chorus is “carried beyond the bounds of loyalty, and can
no more keep back the streaming tears” (99). Their “loyalty” falters as it wars with their
values. When the gods, the very basis of Greek values and emotions, express their
disapproval, the Chorus outright defaults, seeing Creon’s stubbornness as the “folly of
men” (105). They still respect his authority as “King” and “son of Menoeceus” (105),
but instead of focusing on who has the power, they focus on what is “the right” (109)
action reflecting their values. The strictly rational approach to justice ultimately fails to
truly reflect the virtue that springs from emotion. Thus when Antigone, the symbol of
emotion, dies, so does the legitimacy of the edict—it spurs on more defiance of the law
and rationality. The act itself is a form of defiance; condemned to die by wasting away in
a tomb, she commits suicide, freeing her fate from the control of rationality.
Eurydice, Creon’s wife, also defies rationality through suicide to express her
emotions, showing how pervasive is passion despite attempts to remove it in the name of
order. Segal claims that Eurydice, killing herself in vengeful rage at her son’s death, is an
“older Antigone” who “defies the rational order of justice in the polis while fulfilling a
justice of another sort” (193). Resentful of her long suppression by male logic, the
passionate woman expresses herself in the way most painful to her oppressors, death.
This analysis, though focusing on the male versus female dynamic of the tragedy, is
eerily similar to Hathorn’s ethics; Segal divides justice into “rational order” and the
passionate, emotional woman just as Hathorn divided ethics. In further application of
this interpretation, Eurydice cursing her husband as “the slayer of her sons” (110) blames
over-rationalizing logic for destroying all emotion in society that makes man human. To
show Creon the magnitude of the loss, she strips Creon of all human relationships,
leaving him alone with his reason. The resulting despair of the once-proud king “whose
life is but death” (110) shows just how empty an existence completely devoid of emotion
is, proving what Hathorn believes is Antigone’s philosophy, “he who acts only in the
light of natural reason is aligning himself with a power that is certain, even in the light of
that reason, to be no power at all” (Hathorn 76).
In this conflict between rational and emotional ethics, Haemon’s suicide next to
Antigone’s corpse becomes the collapse of justice without virtue to support it. In Ruth
Scodel’s interpretation, his attachments to the opposing parties are “in ultimate conflict”
(Scodel 51) which leads to his doom, because his father cannot understand his motives, as
the following passage shows:
CREON: All your words, at least, plead for the girl.
HAEMON: And for you, and for me, and for the gods below. (Sophocles
98)
In Creon’s me-versus-you perspective, Haemon could either support his rational order or
Antigone’s irrational virtue, not possibly both. The son, however, is not “in ultimate
conflict”. In his rebuttal, he neither denies his support for his lover nor turns on his
father, but affirms both with no sign of contradiction or hypocrisy. This makes him the
just man who succeeds where Creon and Antigone fail, acting rationally out of love.
Haemon’s reasoning prowess rivals his father’s, as he watches the mood of the Thebian
people, listening to “all that men say and find to blame” (97) and appropriately stakes
importance on his father’s declining popularity. When the two fight with their logic, the
Chorus comments, “There has been wise speech on both parts” (97), proving that the
son’s rationality is equal to his father’s. But contrasting Creon’s die-hard practicality,
Haemon’s reason is motivated by emotion. While Creon praises his son’s loyalty
because he believes “disobedience is the worst of all evils”, not revealing any personal
feeling, Haemon’s respect does not spring from a desire to obey, but from emotional
attachment, for “no treasure is so precious as your welfare” (97). Both follow the same
law, piety towards the father, but the emotional grounding makes one’s action feel right
while the other wrong.
But the amoral edict upsets his perfect balance. Antigone’s death was the death
of virtue in the law, and thus Haemon, “in wrath with his sire for the murder” (108) of his
love, kills himself. His degenerative transformation is astonishing; once calm and
reasoning, he becomes all “fierce eyes” (108) capable of attempting to strike down his
father. The image of the “corpse enfolding corpse” (108) twists the pure bridal chamber
into a sickeningly morbid reflection of it. Strangely, considering how strongly Greeks
felt about parricide, the scene does not reflect badly on Haemon, “poor youth” (108), but
his father; Creon himself cries “the sire who has slain, the son who has perished” (109),
clearly casting the blame for such a grotesque sight on his “folly” of rationality. By
inspiring pity towards the dead lovers, Sophocles shows that reason is despicable without
values to support it.
Though Antigone is arguably “more in the right”, especially to our ‘take it to the
man’ political climate, her tragic end questions the validity of her path. It leads to a
hollow husk of a royal family, a king whose present and future family are destroyed in
the Punic victory. Though her emotions prove far more influential and powerful than
man’s laws, as she does eventually get her way through suicide, it is a synthesis of the
two, not any one extreme, that leads to a healthy state. Sophocles’s ultimate message
denounces such overt battles between rationality and virtue. He instead promotes a
resolution, a Haemon-like state of balance, for only then do we find true justice. It is a
message we would do well to pay attention to the next time we raise our picket signs.
Works Cited
Bowra, C. M. “The Community Stands or Falls on the Rule of Law.” Readings on
Antigone. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1999. 64-70.
Hathorn, Richmond Y. Tragedy, Myth, and Mystery. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1963.
Holt, Phillip. “Polis and Tragedy in the Antigone.” Mnemosyne. Dec 1999: 658+.
Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. 6 Mar 2007.
Scodel, Ruth. Sophocles. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.
Segal, Charles. “Antigone: Death and Love, Hades and Dionysus.” Sophocles. Ed.
Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1990.161-206.
Sophocles. Antigone. Greek Drama. Ed. Moses Hadas. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.
80-110.