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    ANTIGONE AND GREEK  TRAGEDY

The tragedies are myths, mythos, which means the sacred stories of the Greeks.  Greeks attended the plays much as we would today attend a religious service.  The Chorus served the function of spectator.  It was involved in the action, yet distanced from it. The three great writers we know of are Aeschykus, Sophocles, and Euripides.  "The tragic" is a situation of conflict where man (or woman) finds himself in a position of conflicting obligations.  Hence, suffering will occur no matter the resolve.  How the character bears this suffering, or acts in face of an impossible situation
 
         
 		 At the heart of tragedy is choice.   What matters is not the the final result (i.e. thought) but the deliberative or reckless manner in which one thinks in making a choice.  Antigone is a classic example of a kind of recklessness both on the part of Antigone and Creon.  Martha Nussbaum calls this tragic condition the fragility of Goodness and has written extensively on the matter (She is at the University Chicago Law School though a classics scholar).
Antigone's Family History

The family history is complicated; and the play assumes the audience's knowledge much as today we assume that all know the relation of family members in our Scripture or mythos.
Antigone is the daughter of Oedipus.  Oedipus was abandoned at birth by his father Laios because of a prophecy that Oedipus would kill his father.  Oedipus grew to manhood, delivered the Thebeans from the Spinx's threat, unwittingly kills his own father and marries Jocasta, his mother.  Jocasta kills herself
when she realizes she has married her son.

They have four children, Antigone, Isemene, Eteokles and Polyneikes. Oedipus left his throne to his two sons (his brother is Creon) and left Thebes seeking sanctuary. 
 
The brothers fight over who should rule.  It had been agreed that Eteokles would give the throne to his brother, but he refused.  Polynices rebels and amasses troops: the seven against Thebes.  Oedipus dies near Athens.  At Thebes, a civil war occurred and both were killed.  Creon became king, and considered Polynices as traitor.
 
 
  Supplemental Reading Suggestions
 
  Patricia Lines, Antigone's flaw (Linked)
  James Boyle, Anachronism of Moral Sentiment? Integrity, Postmodernism, and Justice, 51 Stanford Law Review, 493 (1999)
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy (cambridge 1986) (EXCELLENT ESSAY ON ANTIGONE)
Hegel, Antigone (London 1920) reprinted in A. and H. Paolucci ed.  Hegel On Tragedy (New York 1975) 

 
 
 
 

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