Antigone

The subtractive test finds very little. The prologue’s two sisters set the two courses the play will test; the Guard’s two entrances put the burial and the capture in the city’s view; Haemon turns the conflict into the house, and Teiresias turns it to the gods. Eurydice, who speaks a handful of lines and goes in silence, completes Creon’s punishment: the man who set the city above kin is left with neither. Each part is required by the argument. Held below the top by three things: the first burial, dustless and unseen, never explained; the fourth stasimon, whose exempla bear on Antigone obliquely; and 904 to 920, where she reasons that a husband or a child could be replaced but a brother, her parents dead, could not. Aristotle knew those lines. They are the text, and they jar.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: there are claims on a person, of kin, of the dead and of the gods, that no edict of a city can cancel, and a ruler who takes his will for the city’s law destroys what he means to defend. Antigone says it plainly: “ou gar ti moi Zeus ēn ho kēryxas tade”
“It was not Zeus who proclaimed this to me” (450). Haemon gives the political half: “polis gar ouk esth’ hētis andros esth’ henos”
“It is no city that belongs to one man” (737). The play is fairer than its heroine. Creon’s case for the city as the ship on which all friendships sail (175 to 190) is argued well enough that Demosthenes quoted it as wisdom. The disclosure is the collision, not a slogan. Held below the top by a social ground narrower than a novel’s.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Height is reached often, and in every register the form allows. The parodos opens on the sun over the seven gates, “aktis aeliou”, “beam of the sun” (100), and the routed army. The Ode to Man climbs through sea, plough, hunt, speech and city to its one limit: “Haida monon pheuxin ouk epaxetai”
“From Hades alone he will bring no escape” (361 to 362). Then Eros “unconquered in battle” (781); the bride walking to her tomb; Teiresias’ birds tearing one another and the sacrifice that will not burn; the joyous call to the god “of many names” (1115), set just before the news of the deaths; and Eurydice’s silence. The dreadful and the exalted alternate to the end. Held off the top because the metres are not heard here and the music is lost: the height credited is of action, image and situation.

Score: 9.4 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The structure is an inversion of the cosmic order, and Teiresias names it: Creon has thrust below one who belongs above, lodging a living soul in a tomb, and kept above one who belongs to the gods below, a corpse unburied and unmourned (about 1068 to 1071). The whole action carries the inversion: the living bride walled into rock, the marriage to Hades that her lament keeps sounding and that Haemon consummates in death beside her; the dead brother left to the dogs and birds, whose pollution reaches the altars. Behind it stand the curse on the house of Labdacus and the pattern of Persephone, the maiden taken below. The particular stays particular: Antigone is harsh to Ismene, and Creon suspects a bribe. And the play made an archetype of its own, conscience against the state, in use for two and a half thousand years.

Score: 9.5 / 10

The inheritance is Attic tragedy as Aeschylus left it, built in connected trilogies around the fate of a house. The turn is a single self-contained play in which a young woman’s defiance of the city is the action, staged at the city’s own festival; a heroine who leaves the stage some seventy per cent of the way through and dies offstage, while the play turns to her opponent and makes him its sufferer, so that the tragedy has two centres; and a chorus of elders whose odes misread the moment they are sung in. The stake was real. Held lowest of the five gated axes because the self-contained play and the isolated hero belong to Sophocles’ practice as a whole rather than to this play alone, and Oedipus Tyrannus carried the method further.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. Told as Antigone’s tragedy alone the play would be a martyrdom; told as Creon’s alone, a fall of pride. With two centres it knows that the two claims destroy each other, and that the one who survives learns. The form buries her as the city does: she is led into the rock and the play goes on without her. The modes carry the conflict. Antigone sings her lament with the chorus while Creon answers in spoken iambics; at the end it is Creon who breaks into lyric over his son, the lament passing to the man who refused it. Stichomythia makes each confrontation a contest of single lines. Held off the top by the oblique fourth stasimon and by 904 to 920, where the form holds content it does not need.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over two and a half millennia, and densest in the last two centuries. Aristotle used the play in the Poetics (14, on Haemon’s sword drawn against his father and not used) and in the Rhetoric (on unwritten law, and on 911 to 912). Hegel built his theory of tragedy, the collision of two partial rights, on it; Hölderlin translated it (1804) and wrote notes on it; Kierkegaard rewrote its heroine in Either/Or; Heidegger read the Ode to Man in the Introduction to Metaphysics (1935); Lacan, Irigaray, Derrida’s Glas, Nussbaum and Butler’s Antigone’s Claim (2000) followed, and Steiner’s Antigones (1984) surveyed the whole. The questions stay open: who performed the first burial; whether Antigone acts for the gods, for kin, for this brother only, or for death; whether Creon is wholly wrong; whether 904 to 920 are hers.

Score: 9.6 / 10

The field is Attic tragedy of the fifth century BC, beside Aeschylus, the young Euripides and the lyric of Pindar. The intrinsic force is a new possibility for tragedy: the conflict of two claims each with right in it, carried by one conscience against the city, in a self-contained play with two centres. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in its own century Euripides closed his Phoenician Women on Antigone’s resolve to bury her brother and wrote a lost Antigone; Aristotle cites it; Demosthenes quotes Creon to a jury; Accius made a Roman Antigona, lost. The larger reach came late, credited and discounted as delayed: Garnier (1580), Alfieri, Hölderlin, Mendelssohn (1841), Anouilh (1944), Brecht (1948), Orff (1949), Fugard’s The Island (1973), Gambaro, Heaney, and the modern theory of tragedy through Hegel. Held below the top because Aristotle took Oedipus Tyrannus, not this play, as his model.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries, and the text survives whole, every scene and ode in place. The play was among the seven of Sophocles kept for reading in later antiquity and is copied in the tenth-century Laurentian manuscript, but it stood outside the Byzantine school selection of three, so its thread through Byzantium is thinner. From the Aldine of 1502 it has been printed, taught and translated without a break, and since 1800 its presence has been as wide as any ancient play’s, on the stage of every continent and in political use wherever a state forbids mourning. What has perished is part of the work itself: the music and dance of the odes, lost as for all Greek tragedy. Some lines are suspected. The lost music and the thinner Byzantine thread hold it below the highest.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Judged on the Greek, with the metres of the lyric neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact. The ironies are timed: the “man” of the chorus’s Ode is a woman, and Creon’s guess at bribery meets the Guard’s bewildered honesty. The reversal is placed with cruelty. Creon, yielding to Teiresias, goes first to bury Polyneices and only then to free Antigone, and the Messenger’s speech lets the time he lost be counted. The stichomythia is cut to the line. The Guard, garrulous, frightened and comic, speaks in a register no Aeschylean messenger has. Eurydice’s exit without a word, and the chorus’s unease at the silence, is the craft of omission. Charged: the obscurity of the double burial; Eurydice brought in so late that she exists only to die; and the clumsy logic of 904 to 920, if they are Sophocles’.

Score: 9.3 / 10

One law governs the whole: human power, however inventive, meets a limit it did not make, in death, in the gods below, in kinship, and whoever will not yield to the limit is broken by it. The Ode states it: “aporos ep’ ouden erchetai”
“Without resource he meets nothing that is to come” (360), Hades the one exception. The two most distant elements obey it. The Guard’s comic report of drawing lots for who must tell the king is ruled by fear of the same power that buries Antigone; and the god of the hymn, called to come and cleanse the city, arrives as catastrophe. The range is wide for one play: comedy, argument, love lyric, prophecy, lament. Charged: the fourth stasimon’s loose tether and the reasoning of 904 to 920.

Score: 9.3 / 10

A single play of about 1,350 lines, in one place over one day, and it holds more orders than its size allows. The family: two sisters, two dead brothers, a father and son, a betrothal, a wife and mother, the cursed house behind them. The state: the edict, the ruler’s first speech on the city, the citizen chorus, a war just ended at the gates, the question whose the city is. The sacred: the gods below and Zeus, rite and pollution, prophecy, Dionysus as the city’s god. The natural order of the Ode, and the bodies left to dogs and birds. Each is load-bearing in the one conflict. What holds it lowest of the twelve is the form, and what the form leaves out: labour but for the Ode’s plough, economy, history beyond the myth’s war, the inner life except as spoken.

Score: 8.4 / 10