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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2019
Antigone's defiant words might be regarded as an archetypal statement of tragic heroism. Faced with a human instruction to leave her dead brother unburied, she fulfils the rites owed to the corpse knowing that this will lead to her death; when the time comes, she treats the tyrant who menaces her, Creon, with disdain. She does this as a powerless young woman, facing an older man in a position of total authority; the contrast between the figures on stage, evident in their costumes and masks, will have accentuated the shocking nature of her response. The chorus show her no sympathy. They are even older men, which makes the female Antigone seem all the more alone; other female characters who challenge the power of males, such as Procne or Euripides’ Medea, at least have a supportive chorus of the same gender. So the circumstances in which Antigone finds herself emphasize the bravery evident in her speech, where she shows herself willing to give up her life to treat her brother's corpse as she believes the laws of the gods demand.
1 Knox 1964: 94.
2 Sourvinou-Inwood 1989a: 143.
3 Antigone 1113–14. For a more positive assessment of Antigone see Foley 1995.
4 Griffith 1999 on 469–70.
5 Knox 1964; see also Knox 1961 = 1979: 125–60.
6 Reinhardt 1947: 1 = 1979: 1.
7 Perrotta 1935.
8 Perrotta 1935: 637: ‘Nel dramma sofocleo…il protagonista è tutto: esso non è soltanto il centro dell'azione, ma è il centro poetico della tragedia’.
9 Perrotta 1935: 160: ‘Sofocle ha amato questo suo eroe e gli ha dato una personalità gigantesca, in modo che dominasse assolutamente nel dramma. Tecmessa non ha personalità vera, perchè Aiace è tutto.’
10 Perrotta 1935: 125: ‘Nella tragedia, effettivamente la colpa dell'eroe sembra impallidire fin quasi a svanire…il poeta ha voluto mettere in rilievo l'infelicità dell'eroe, non la sua colpa…Sofocle poeta voleva esaltare l'eroe.’
11 Webster 1936a/1969: 55.
12 Webster 1936a/1969: 20.
13 Webster 1936a/1969: 70–1.
14 Whitman 1951: 31.
15 Whitman 1951: 14.
16 Whitman 1951: 40.
17 Whitman 1951: 80.
18 Knox 1964: 44, 27.
19 Finglass 2014d.
20 Burian 2012: 81.
21 Carter 2005.
22 Garvie 1998; March 2001. Also Garvie 2016; and March 1991–3 on Ajax.
23 Winnington-Ingram 1980: 303.
24 R. Parker 1999.
25 Buxton 1984/1995: 5.
26 See Finglass 2007d on El. 1398–1441, and pp. 8–10; also pp. 103–4 below.
27 Sommerstein 2012a: 209. See Sommerstein in Sommerstein and Talboy 2012: xxv for an argument that portrayals of Achilles and Neoptolemus in four fragmentary plays ‘tell strongly against the view that for Sophocles an exceptional endowment of one or another virtue (courage, wisdom, endurance, familial devotion) could serve as a free pass to commit any indignity or atrocity’.