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Polis and Tragedy in the Antigone

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Polis and Tragedy in the Antigone Mne(DS)1001/Holt/658-690 11/19/99 1:44 PM Page 658 POLIS AND TRAGEDY IN THE ANTIGONE PHILIP HOLT I. Introduction Sophokles’ Antigone is an easy play for moderns, even modern classicists, to get wrong.1) We are likely to see Antigone as the cham- pion of moral right, or conscience, or religion against the authority of the state, as represented by Kreon. She is then a martyr for a cause, and our age is rather drawn to causes and martyrs. This does much to explain the scholarly predilection for what Hester called ‘the orthodox view’ of the play: Antigone right and noble, Kreon wrong and tyrannical.2) But these terms for describing the conflict—and even more the ethical weight and emotional coloring these terms carry—are relatively modern. ‘The state’ to us means a nation-state with extensive powers over the lives of its citizens 1) The following works are cited by author’s name (and short title where nec- essary) only: Giovanni Cerri, Legislazione orale e tragedia greca (Naples 1979) (a slightly abridged version of the first chapter—the most important for our purposes—is more readily available as Ideologia funeraria nell’Antigone di Sofocle, in: Gherardo Gnoli, Jean-Pierre Vernant (ed.), La mort, les morts dans les sociétés anciennes [Cambridge 1982], 121-31); Helene Foley, Tragedy and Democratic Ideology: The Case of Sophocles’ Antigone, in: Barbara Goff (ed.), History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama (Austin 1995), 131-50; Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge 1986); Bernard M.W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley 1964); Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, Assumptions and the Creation of Meaning: Reading Sophocles’ Antigone, JHS 109 (1989), 134-48 and (with substantial overlap) Sophocles’ Antigone as a ‘Bad Woman’, in: F. Dieteren, E. Kloek (ed.), Writing Women into History (Amsterdam 1990), 11-38; and the commentaries of Brown (Warminster 1987), Campbell2 (Oxford 1879), Jebb2 (Cambridge 1891), Kamerbeek (Leiden 1978), and Müller (Heidelberg 1967). I have used the text of Lloyd-Jones and Wilson (Oxford 1990). 2) Hester’s extensive review of scholarship on the play found this view to be far more popular than what he called the ‘Hegelian’ view, which sees Antigone and Kreon as being more evenly matched with flaws on both sides: D.A. Hester, Sophocles the Unphilosophical: A Study in the Antigone, Mnemosyne 24 (1971), 11-59. For a similar tilt in Germany (Schlegel over Hegel), see Erich Eberlein, Über die verschiedenen Deutungen des tragischen Konflikts in der Tragödie ‘Antigone’ des Sophokles, Gymnasium 68 (1961), 16-34 at 16-9. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1999 Mnemosyne, Vol. LII, Fasc. 6 Mne(DS)1001/Holt/658-690 11/19/99 1:44 PM Page 659 POLIS AND TRAGEDY IN THE ANTIGONE 659 and an extensive apparatus of bureaucrats and police to enforce its dictates. We worry about its powers and want to protect our free- dom within it, especially after twentieth-century experience with totalitarian regimes. ‘Conscience’ and ‘morality’ to us mean the per- sonal values of an autonomous individual, influenced by society but often at variance with it. ‘Religion’ to us is likely to include notions of divinely revealed truth and an organized body of believers, both of them distinct from, and often at odds with, political authority. For us, then, conscience, morality, and religion set the individual apart from, perhaps even against, the state. It is easy for us to make Antigone into a heroic dissident. She upholds principle against polit- ical authority, and she is right. These terms for describing the conflict of the Antigone cannot be applied to ancient Greece without considerable modification. The original audience of the play—participants in a public festival of Dionysos in Athens around 440 B.C.3)—brought their own mental and emotional baggage into the theatre with them: the assumptions and outlook of their culture, their experience as a community, their norms, expectations, and values. They did not think as we do, and it is no accident that critics who pay the most attention to the differences between them and us read the play very differently from their ‘orthodox’ colleagues. Such critics are a varied lot and do not all speak with one voice,4) but they tend to have two things in com- 3) The play is usually dated to the late 440s, but there is a strong case for 438: see R.G. Lewis, An Alternative Date for Sophocles’ Antigone, GRBS 29 (1988), 35-50. 4) Most recently Sourvinou-Inwood, to which this essay is principally addressed; also important are William M. Calder III, Sophokles’ Political Tragedy, Antigone, GRBS 9 (1968), 389-407; Vittorio Citti, Strutture e tensioni sociali nell’Antigone di Sofocle, AIV 134 (1975-76), 477-501 (a Marxist analysis); Foley (distinctly ‘Hegelian’); Knox; T.C.W. Oudemans and A.P.M.H. Lardinois, Tragic Ambiguity: Anthropology, Philosophy and Sophocles’ Antigone (Leiden 1987) (an anthropological analysis). Historicist and strongly pro-Antigone are Nicolas P. Gross, Antigone and Archaic Thought: A Reading of the Antigone, Selecta 3 (1982), 17-25; Wm. Blake Tyrrell and Larry J. Bennett, Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone (Lanham, Md. 1998). My discussion will read the history differently, and I must disagree with both. Gross sees Antigone as the exponent of an ‘archaic world-view’, a concept which needs to be more clearly defined and applied. Briefly, Tyrrell and Bennett draw heavily for their his- tory on Athenian funerary discourse (I think misapplied; see below, n. 31), women’s supposed resentment against state control of funerals (undocumented), and the Athenian stereotype of nasty Thebans (pertinent, but of doubtful use in judging a conflict between two Thebans, and too heavily imposed upon the text of the play)..
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