end of the ode, it is clear that the chorus believe that the power of contrivance which
is the subject of the song can lead to evil as well as to good. The song is prompted
by the news that the edict of King Creon (that the body of Polyneices, the son of
Oedipus, be not buried), has been flouted. Polyneices with his Argive allies had
stormed the gates of Thebes and been killed in battle by his twin brother Eteocles.
Creon, who at the beginning of the play has inherited the throne of Thebes, decrees
the penalty of death for anyone burying Polyneices, whom he regards as an enemy
of the city. At this point the chorus do not know what the audience already knows,
that Antigone, the sister of Polyneices, has done the deed. The distinction they make
at the end of their song between the man who is hypsipolis, high in state, in revering
justice and the laws of the land (nomous chthonos) and the city-less outcast, the apolis,
who does wrong for the sake of daring may seem at first to suggest Creon and
Antigone respectively. Creon has already asserted that he is acting on behalf of the
highest interests of the city whose laws he is protecting (ll. 184–195). But Antigone,
who feels compelled to honour the rights of her kin, in confessing the deed to Creon,
invokes justice that dwells with the gods below (chthonic powers) and draws a
distinction between human proclamations and the unwritten and unfailing ordinances
of the gods that are age-old and everlasting (ll. 450–457). Sophocles might therefore
be said to have constructed his tragedy upon the conflicting claims of family and city
represented in two individuals of strong and uncompromising will. There is no
movement towards the resolution of the conflicting claims as in the Oresteia of
Aeschylus, nor do the gods intervene to mark a way forward. Creon becomes more
tyrannical, condemning Antigone to be immured in a cave. He refuses to heed the
pleas of his son Haemon, who is betrothed to Antigone. After a fierce confrontation
with the prophet Tiresias, who tells him that the gods are affronted by the unburied
corpse, he finally relents, fearing the force of established laws (l. 1114), and sets out to
free Antigone only to find Haemon clasping her dead body, for she has committed
suicide. Haemon thrusts at Creon with his sword, but misses and then kills himself.
Creon returns to the palace to find that his wife Eurydice has hanged herself in
despair. No longer, if ever, the man who is hypsipolis,at the end, Creon recognizes
that his fate has reduced him to less than nothing.
Antigone, probably written in the 440s, is one of the three surviving plays, written
at different periods, featuring members of the house of Oedipus, often printed
together and given the title The Theban Plays. Not only were they not a trilogy in
themselves, but the individual plays were not parts of other trilogies. Aristotle seems
to have had Oedipus the King (c. 429) particularly in mind when he gave his famous
account of ‘the best sort’ of tragedy in his Poetics. Much of what he has to say is by
way of comment on the plot.
Oedipus the King certainly embodies the Classical ideal of the well-made play.
Everything follows on logically and naturally from the plague, which sets the plot in
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