Antigone Flashcards
thinks that Antigone is wholly right
Jebb 1902
maxims of government lose all validity when opposed to the higher law
Jebb 1902
thinks that Creon is wholly wrong
Jebb 1902
closes with a moral on the lips of the Chorus which tells the audience what to think (regarding wisdom)
Bowra 1944
Sophocles has taken great care to show the issues in their full difficulty before he provides a solution for them.
Bowra 1944
When a play is written round a moral issue, that issue must be a real problem about which more than one view is tenable until all the relevant facts are known.
Bowra 1944
Believes that Hegel was writing as he did due to innate German nationalistic views
Knox 1982
his (Hegel’s) views on loyalty to the state were very much those of Creon. “Creon,” he says, “is not a tyrant, he is really a moral power. He is not in the wrong.”
Knox 1982
Creon is forced at last to recognize the strength of those social and religious imperatives that Antigone obeys, but long before this happens he has abandoned the principles which he had proclaimed as authority for his own actions.
Knox 1982
Antigone, on her side, is just as indifferent to Creon’s principles of action as he is to hers
Knox 1982
Unlike Creon, who after proclaiming the predominance of the city’s interests rides roughshod over them, speaking and acting like a tyrant, who after extolling the city’s gods dismisses Tiresias, their spokesman, with a blasphemous insult, Antigone does not betray the loyalties she spoke for. No word of compromise or surrender comes to her lips, no plea for mercy.
Knox 1982
This figure of the tragic hero [. . .] seems, as far as we can tell from what remains of Attic tragedy, to have been a peculiarly Sophoclean creation. In his plays he explores time and again the destinies of human beings who refuse to recognize the limits imposed on the individual will by men and gods, and go to death or triumph, magnificently defiant to the last.
Knox 1982
Antigone asked the gods to punish Creon if he was wrong [975–79], and they have. They have shown to all the world that her action was right.
Knox 1982
in certain heroic natures unmerited suffering and death can be met with a greatness of soul which, because it is purely human, brings honor to us all.
Knox 1982
I should like to claim that there is at least some justification for the Hegelian assimilation—though the criticism needs to be focused more clearly and specifically than it is in Hegel’s brief remarks. I want to suggest that Antigone, like Creon, has engaged in a ruthless simplification of the world of value which effectively eliminates conflicting obligations. Like Creon, she can be blamed for refusal of vision. But there are important differences, as well, between her project and Creon’s. When these are seen, it will also emerge that this criticism of Antigone is not incompatible with the judgment that she is morally superior to Creon.
Nussbaum 1986, 2001
Antigone’s rigid adherence to a single narrow set of duties (family dead) has caused her to misinterpret the nature of piety itself, a virtue within which a more comprehensive understanding would see the possibility of conflict.
Nussbaum 1986, 2001
Creon’s strategy of simplification led him to regard others as material for his aggressive exploitation. Antigone’s dutiful subservience to the dead leads to an equally strange, though different (and certainly less hideous) result.
Nussbaum 1986, 2001
We have, then, two narrowly limited practical worlds, two strategies of avoidance and simplification. In one, a single human value has become the final end; in the other, a single set of duties has eclipsed all others.
Nussbaum 1986, 2001
it seems clear that Antigone’s actual choice is preferable to Creon’s. The dishonour to civic values involved in giving pious burial to an enemy’s corpse is far less radical than the violation of religion involved in Creon’s act.
Nussbaum 1986, 2001
Antigone’s pursuit of virtue is her own. It involves nobody else and commits her to abusing no other person.
Nussbaum 1986, 2001
Sophocles’ Antigone is an easy play for moderns, even modern classicists, to get wrong. We are likely to see Antigone as the champion of moral right, or con-science, or religion against the authority of the state, as represented by Creon. She is then a martyr for a cause, and our age is rather drawn to causes and martyrs.
Holt 1999
We need to consider not so much what Greeks thought and felt generally as how they are likely to have thought and felt under the conditions of a tragic performance, this tragedy in particular. Hence the “tragedy” part of my title: a discussion of how decent Greek opinion fares over the course of the Anti-gone (part III) and a coda on how it might fare in tragedy generally (part IV). Tragedy is the polis’ partner in an intricate dialogue. She has her own agenda and her own ways of making her points, some of them quite sly, and she is rather more on Antigone’s side than the polis is. The main burden of this essay is to understand better her side of the conversation, an area where history-minded critics, straining to catch the voice of the polis, often miss things.
Holt 1999
Athenian law forbade the burial of traitors and sacrilegious people in Athenian territory.
Holt 1999
To sum up, in fifth-century terms Creon is within his rights as the leader of his polis, and his ban on burying Polyneices is a reasonable sanction. In fifth-century terms, Antigone’s defiance of that ban is seriously, perhaps even shockingly, out of line: an individual defying due authority in the polis, in time of crisis, on behalf of a national enemy, and moreover a woman defying due male authority.
Holt 1999
