Antigone

A Play That Is Almost All Argument

Antigone has no life outside the text. She is the daughter of Oedipus, the former king whose own downfall set this war between his sons in motion, and she appears in a play by the Athenian playwright Sophocles, staged in Athens in 441 BC. The play is short and it is almost entirely argument: Antigone against her sister Ismene, who wants to survive; Antigone against Creon, her uncle and the new king, who has just ended a civil war and needs the difference between a loyal death and a traitor's death to mean something. Both of them are partly right, which is the point — Sophocles does not write Creon as a tyrant. He writes him as a man with a real problem, who chooses to solve it in a way that destroys his family.

Walled Up, Alive, With Food for Days

Creon has her walled up alive in a rock tomb with a little food, so the city can say it did not kill her. A prophet warns him, he argues, and eventually relents. When the tomb is opened, she has already hanged herself. She did not wait to find out whether he would change his mind — which is either the last act of her conviction or the first sign of what it costs, and the play refuses to tell you which.