Antigone

Greek Homeric Greek and Early Greek Poetry
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I just finished reading Antigone. It took me a long time, mostly reading in the evenings. Also, at first, coming from Euripides, I thought Sophocles’ language was inifinitely more complicated, a feeling that gradually subsided.

I had read Antigone in the third year of my study at Leiden. I have no memory of how I did that, which books I used. Now, I used Jebb and Griffith. I have a hard time imagining how highschool kids used to read this back in the Fifties and Sixties, but they did. Of course they used to read a shitload of Homer back then, too, like 6 to 8 books…

Used to be people viewed Antigone (the princess) as a kind of avant la lettre Anne Frank. Now I’m not so sure. I have come to see Greek tragedy as a way 5th and 4th century Greeks looked and critized at the Bronze Age ethics handed down via Homer. Antigone is of course a woman and a very young one, and yet she seems possessed by those same warrior ethics as her male tragedy peers, which make her say to Ismene she’s going to spend more time being dead than alive, and so she prefers to please the dead, like Polyneikes, rather than the living, like her sister or Kreon.

And yet, her last words are (obviously) most affecting.

λεύσσετε, Θήβης οἱ κοιρανίδαι
τὴν βασιλειδᾶν μούνην λοιπήν,
οἷα πρὸς οἵων ἀνδρῶν πάσχω,
τὴν εὐσεβίαν σεβίσασα.

The first two lines are Antigone insisting on her elevated status, but those fingerpointing last ones are the words of a child. “They did it, not me!”

And there’s Kreon (via the Messenger) groaning ἆρ᾽ εἰμὶ μάντις!
If only I would have been able to tell the consequences in advance!
Yes, if only…

Big question (for me) is where did Ismene go? Everybody, starting with Antigone acts as if this is the end of the Labda Kids, but of course there’s still Ismene.

I’m going to mull over this play for a couple of days, and then move on to Philoctetes.

Anybody any recent experience with reading Sophocles?

Thanks
Herman

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The Labda Kids. I love it.

Does it much matter where Ismene went? The myth gives us a pair of brothers (Eteocles and Polynices), counterbalanced by a pair of sisters, and Sophocles creates a fascinating interaction between the two sisters (just as other plays do between the two brothers). By the end of the play Ismene’s role is over.

Enjoy Sophocles’ Philoctetes, a very different play but again with fascinating and volatile interaction among the characters. No women (which is unusual), just three guys in an interesting situation and with differing aims and attitudes. I’d say the play explores contemporary ethics more than Bronze Age ones (whatever they were).

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Perhaps a Labda Kids t-shirt would be fun.


Enjoy Sophocles’ Philoctetes, a very different play but again with fascinating and volatile interaction among the characters. No women (which is unusual), just three guys in an interesting situation and with differing aims and attitudes. I’d say the play explores contemporary ethics more than Bronze Age ones (whatever they were).

Thanks, I wonder how an all-male play will feel. I recall having some sort of fascination with Philoctetes’ plight when I was a teenager, so that’s why.

After that I have teeed up the fairly recent Kyriakou commentary on Iphigeneia in Tauris, one of those huge De Gruyter books, so I’ll be an island-dweller for the next ten months (at least).

Herman

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Even without women Sophocles’ Philoctetes is a great play. The IT, while earlier, could almost be from another universe. It won Aristotle’s approval, which the Philoctetes wouldn’t have. Good luck with Kyriakou, which looked like an awful slog to me.

I must say I’d rather be marooned on Lemnos than on the Crimean peninsula.

Michael

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I remember IT as a wonderful play, from my translation-reading many a decade ago.

With Philoctetes I’m using a virtually mint copy (90 years old) of the Jebb, and Seth Schein in the yellow and greens, and it looks like the latter is an excellent modern addition.

Those De Gruyter commentaries seem to operate along the lines of “everything you need to know and then some”, which I’m fine with. There’s no obligation to read every single thing.

Herman

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To return to Antigone, I was a little surprised to read “Used to be people viewed Antigone (the princess) as a kind of avant la lettre Anne Frank.” As André Lardinois explains in Kirk Ormand, A Companion to Sophocles. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Literature and Culture. Malden, MA; Oxford: Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012:

“The interpretation of Antigone has been dominated by two mutually exclusive traditions, both of which go back at least to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Their main point of contention is the question of who is right and who is wrong in the conflict between Antigone and Creon. The tradition that has attracted most followers in the past has been labeled “the orthodox view” (Hester 1971: 12). Proponents of this view maintain that, on the whole, Antigone is right and Creon is wrong. The other interpretive tradition is called “the Hegelian view,” after the famous German philosopher, who argued that Antigone and Creon are both equally right and wrong.”

Its not easy to see how Anne Frank might be accommodated to these “traditional views”. Indeed Jebb a proponent of the first view "compared Antigone to a Christian martyr, ready to defy death for a higher cause (Jebb 1900: xxv) ( Lardinois p 59). Enough said about that I think.

I once saw a performance (in Greek) where Antigone was portrayed as a punk replete with safety pins and a performance that started at full tilt and had nowhere to go. The idea presumably was that Antigone was a rebellious figure standing out against authority. This seemed misplaced too, as Antigone arguably represents something very traditional both in terms of gender performance and religious observation.

Of course there are many ways of viewing this play as Griffith makes clear in his introduction to the commentary you used. There is a substantial body (couldn’t resist it) of work on the gender issues raised by the play and the Ormand Companion has a good discussion of these. There is also a chapter on “Sophocles with Lacan” where Mark Buchan gives prominence to “Lacan’s 1960 seminar “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,” where he offers a commentary on Antigone”. If you are interested in getting a good overview of current scholarship on Sophocles I recommend this Companion. The Brill companion is also helpful.

You ask what happens to Ismene? This is a natural enough question although as mythic time does not always follow chronological time its not easy to answer. Pherekydes says Ismene is killed by Tydeus by a spring that is then named after her. (3F95). (See Gantz Early Greek Myth vol 2 p 514). Ganz describes the slaying as one of the “more baffling situations in Greek myth”.

I am grateful that you asked this question. I discovered that Timothy Ganz died in 2004 which is very sad. I have used his work on early Greek myth a lot. I also discovered http://www.dfhg-project.org the DFHG PROJECT where one can read the Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum on line.

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“Where did Ismene go?” I answered this in terms of Sophocles’ play, Seneca addresses it without reference to the play or the rest of Greek drama. (But I agree with him on the value of Ganz’s work on early Greek myth.)

The view that Antigone was ready to defy death for what she sees as a higher cause is hard to quarrel with (except for the idea of “defying death” perhaps). Enough said about that I think.

As to the Philoctetes, Ghermanius, yes Schein’s commentary is excellent; you probably won’t need Jebb. The latter part of the play, once Odysseus is off the scene, tends to be underappreciated. I recommend Taplin, and there’s a thoroughgoing discussion on the ethical issues in Blondell’s Helping Friends book.

But as with many things it’s best if you first experience the Philoctetes without knowing what’s going to happen next. This is a play of high drama, constantly shifting and often unpredictable..

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The 'Anne Frank-view" is not mine, it’s just that I was a teen in 1965 - 1975 Western Europe, when pretty much all ethical issues were retro-actively compared to WWII and in this myopia Antigone was a young righteous person who stood up to the bad guys. So I’d say that is more or less in line with the “orthodox” view.

I believe it’s Griffith who says that we should not be too sure that the original audience did not think Antigone went too far in her resistance to her uncle.

This time around (third time I’ve read the piece) I did not feel the need to pick a side. Why would I? (And how do you measure that A and K are both exactly “equally wrong”, the way Hegel did?) The thing that grabbed me most was, banally put, Antigone’s death wish, or perhaps one could call it the otherworldly, Eleusinian line that runs through this play. Albert Henrichs and Charles Segal have some stuff about this. However I need to read some more recent work on this, and I have ordered the Ormand Companion, thanks, Seneca, for the recommendation.

Herman

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I’d say the question of who’s right and who’s wrong is a secondary one, and not one that admits of a definitive answer either. Primarily the play presents a dynamic clash of attitudes and actions (as many plays do). We may want to judge the choices the characters make, probably will want to (and probably in Antigone’s favor, whether or not we think she “goes too far”), but that’s a subjective matter, not an objective black-and-white one.

We’re perfectly free to pick a side, or not to, or to vacillate between one side and the other, but that’s our choice, our response. Antigone may well elicit more sympathy than Creon’s law-and-order stance, initially if not finally, but the play is a thing in motion, changing as it goes along (and with Ismene and Haemon successively complicating things), and it does not dictate an unequivocal response, nor a uniform one. Some responses will be more sensitive and better informed than others, but still. It’s a drama (and a very good one), not a moral tract.

I hope we’re not stuck with discussing the Antigone in isolation. That would be blinkering ourselves.

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Oh, please, feel free to say anything you like on tragic poetry.

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Thanks Herman for your reply.

I was struck that superficially at least Antigone and Anne Frank are quite unalike at least in respect of their agency. Anne Frank’s story is one of bravely facing a situation she had no say in getting into. Antigone makes a choice about what she values most - duty or life. Anne had no choice. I am sure someone might argue that Antigone felt that she had no choice (by reason of upbringing?) but I think that undermines her independence of character. Ismene is clearly a foil for her and shows the possibility of a more conventional female approach to authority. (Perhaps Chrysothemis and Electra are another similar pair. Chrysothemis counsels her sister not not murder their mother and wishes no part in her plot.)

Antigone and Ajax seem kindred spirits. They both might be seen as having beliefs which are inimical to the society they live in. They are unable to bend or compromise so they die. The obstinacy of Sophoclean “heroes” is an old chestnut. :smiley:

Enjoy Philoctetes. I have Schein too and must get around to using it! I have posted before about The Center for Hellenic Studies series “Reading Greek Tragedy Online” https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/7081. I enjoyed the Philoctetes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhRZjWyBfow&feature=youtu.be. Its not a complete performance but it was a moving experience and the discussion was interesting. I applaud the actors and the organisers who have thought of producing these Zoom performances. Bear in mind that they are done with little or no rehearsal and the actors are not classicists. Their reaction to the play they have performed is therefore fresh and unencumbered with other people’s ideas.