This paper reads Sophocles' Antigone contextually, as an exploration of the politics of lamentation and larger conflicts these stand for. Antigone defies Creon's sovereign decree that her brother Polynices, who attacked the city with a foreign army and died in battle, be dishonoured - left unburied. But the play is not about Polynices' treason. It explores the clash in 5th century Athens between Homeric/ elite and democratic mourning practices. The former (represented by Antigone) memorialize the unique individuality of the dead, focus on the family's loss and bereavement and call for vengeance. The latter (represented by Creon) memorialize the dead's contribution to the immortal polis and emphasize (as in the Funeral Oration) the replaceability of those lost. Each economy of mourning sees the other as excessive and politically unstable. The remainders of both, managed by way of exception institutions such as tragedy and the Dionysian Festival, continue to haunt us now.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Antigone's Daughters: Reflections on Female Identity and the State" in Families, Politics, and Public Policy: A Feminist Dialogue on Women and the State, ed. Irene Diamond (New York: Longman, 1983), 300-11; Mary Dietz, "Citizenship with a Feminist Face: The Problem with Maternal Thinking," Political Theory 13, no. 1 (February 1985): 19-37.
2.
Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life & Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 68; hereafter abbreviated as AC.
3.
Joan Copjec, "The Tomb of Perseverance: On Antigone," in Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 12-47; Samuel Weber, "Antigone's Nomos," in Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 121-40; Luce Irigaray, "The Eternal Irony of the Community," in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Jill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 2001). Another recent reader emphasizes Antigone's explosive power: for Philippe Nonet, Antigone's importance is as a representative of singularity. Nonet also explicitly claims this play is not about mourning. I argue here that the contrary is the case: this is its central topic. "Antigone's Law," Law, Culture and the Humanities 2, no. 3 (2006): 314-35.
4.
In short, the play does what Jean-Pierre Vernant says all tragedy does: "The true subject matter of tragedy is social thought and most especially juridical thought in the very process of elaboration. Tragedy poses problems of law, and the question of what justice is." Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation," in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 273-95. David Roselli and H. A. Shapiro document the contestedness of new burial legislation that limited the size and appearance of grave markers. The forbidden markers are Homeric/heroic, the permitted markers feature citizens in their civic rather than martial roles and feature women, for the first time, perhaps because of the new domestic ideology of the polis or perhaps, Roselli argues, because new citizenship laws require citizen mothers as well as fathers, and grave markers are a way of marking (maternal) citizenship. David Kawalko Roselli, "Polyneices' Body and His Monument: Class, Social Status, and Funerary Commemoration in Sophocles's Antigone," Helios 33s (2006): 135-77. H. A. Shapiro, "The Wrath of Creon: Witholding Burial in Homer and Sophocles," Helios 33s (2006): 119-34.
5.
I use the term Homeric here and throughout not to assume a specific reference to Homer in fifth-century elite practices of burial but rather to suggest that if, as I argue here, Sophocles sought (among other things) to explore the contestedness of fifth-century funerary practice, he may well have found in Homeric epic an alternative form of life, still powerful to audiences in the fifth century, that he might have drawn on for its provision of powerful resources for such an intervention. This admittedly speculative possibility stages the reading of the play presented here and is, in my view, rendered justifiable or not by that reading. But it is also buttressed by Roselli's tracking of remnants of archaic burial practices in the fifth century.
6.
See Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), on the analogous use of the foreigner or outsider to explore domestic political problems.
7.
Arlene Saxonhouse seeks to de-exceptionalize Antigone's dissidence too. She turns to Euripides's version because she finds in him but not in Sophocles an account of the "conditions" under which Antigone acquires political agency. Arlene Saxonhouse , "Another Antigone: The Emergence of the Female Actor in Euripides' Phoenician Women,"Political Theory33, no. 4 (2005): 472-94.
8.
Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom!; Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 (Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1988); Derrida reads Oedipus at Colonus in Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000 ). That Antigone is deprived of lamentation rites for both her father/brother and her brother calls to attention another pair of details: Oedipus's body mysteriously disappears (in Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus) while that of Polynices refuses to disappear and repeatedly turns up as carrion in the city. Both circumstances make proper lament impossible.
9.
Citations to the play indicate first the Greek lines and then, in the square brackets, the lines from the Fagles translation, which, unless otherwise noted, is the one used throughout. If, as Butler notes, when Antigone refers to her brother she also or really speaks of Oedipus (AC, 60-61), we can read her mention of the marriages in two ways. The passage could be referring twice to the same marriage-oh father, and, later, oh brother, refers to the same marriage twice: that of Oedipus. In favor of this reading: Antigone begins this passage saying to the chorus, "Now you raise the agony that hurts my mind the most: grief for my father." This suggests Oedipus remains the theme for the rest of the speech. On the contrary side, Antigone then says her grief for the whole Labdacus family is like "raw earth plowed three times," suggesting that when she goes on here to speak of marriages, she does not repeatedly redescribe one, her father's, but rather lists three in turn: Oedipus's, Polynices's, and her own (which will be a marriage to death): "Oh brother, your marriage murders mine." Her claim that "your death snuffed out my life" applies to both Oedipus and Polynices and so does not shift the reading in favor of either option.
10.
Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Also see Peter Euben, "Antigone and the Languages of Politics," in Corrupting the Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
11.
On this point as on others, I differ from Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, one of the few to suggest Creon represents the democracy. She focuses in her reading not on the ban on lamentation but on the classical democracy's demand for unity and obedience. She seems to think these are represented in the play in a way that endorses the democratic ideology. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, " Assumptions and the Creation of Meaning: Reading Sophocles' Antigone," Journal of Hellenic Studies109 ( 1989): 143-48.
12.
Helene Foley, "Tragedy and Democratic Ideology: The Case of Sophocles' Antigone," in History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama, ed. Barbara Goff (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 134. As Rush Rehm puts it, "It seems to have been standard Athenian practice to refuse burial on Attic soil to traitors and those guilty of sacrilege. . . . Against this practice however was the pan-Hellenic custom that the dead were owed burial somewhere. . . a compulsion that was magnified if the dead were kin." Rush Rehm, Marriage to Death (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 181n9.
13.
Thus, on this reading, we do not have to choose between Creon as democrat versus Creon as tyrant nor need we say that the audience was divided between these two options, as most classicists do.
14.
Creon's focus is on Polynices's treason, as Rush Rehm points out, but Polynices confounds the effort to binarize: he is "both philos to Antigone and echthros to Thebes." Antigone makes the point clear when she says to Ismene in the first scene of the play: "The doom reserved for enemies marches on the ones we love the most" (10 [12-13]). Rehm, Marriage to Death, 12-13. The confusion is unfortunate for Creon since (as Rehm says in the context of a discussion of Medea) his "principle of doing `harm to your enemies and good to your friends' . . . demands a clear distinction between the two end-terms, `friends' and `enemies.'" Rehm, Marriage to Death, 148. Also see Foley: "Antigone and Creon use the same vocabulary in subtly different ways-the words philos (friend) and echthros (enemy), for example, develop different connotations in the context in which each character deploys them." Helene Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 173. Elsewhere, Creon is sensitive to the flux of status and identity, more so than Antigone who argues for Polynices's burial by reference to his status: "it was . . . not some slave that died" (518 [581]). Her point is challenged avant la lettre, when Creon subtly points to the flux of the identity "slave" saying of Polynices "he thirsted to drink his kinsmen's blood and sell the rest to slavery." Those who are free citizens one day may be slaves the next, if their city is conquered. Thus, for Creon, action or deeds and not, contra Antigone, status, are what matter most. (Jill Frank's treatment of this idea in Aristotle alerted me to it here.) See Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1996), chap. 5. The flux of status argues against Roselli, who reads Creon and Antigone as offering different views of Polynices's (static) class status. (Notably, Roselli quotes only the part of Creon's speech that says "he thirsted to drink his kinsmen's blood" but not the part about selling the rest to slavery. Roselli, "Polyneices' Body," 144.) Roselli, however, is right to see that the mid-fifth-century regulation of burial, specifically what I am calling Homeric burial, is at issue in this play. He offers a wealth of material evidence that supports the claims made here. I differ from him, however, in emphasizing in my reading of the play specifically the ban on lamentation and the several dirges sung in the play (not just the burial of Polynices) and in treating the Homeric as not just an elite fashion statement but a rival table of values under pressure from the democracy in this period. 168n85.
15.
And, notes Charles Segal, "Plutarch adds that even [500 years after Antigone] the gunaikonomoi could punish those who indulged in `unmanly and womanly expressions of emotion and grieving.'" Charles Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 63. For more on the gunaikonomoi, see Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, with the Essay "Of Amnesty and its Opposite," trans. Corinne Pache (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 23-24.
16.
Robert Garland , The Greek Way of Death ( London: Duckworth, 1985), 30.
17.
Gail Holst-Warhaft , Dangerous Voices: Women's Laments and Greek Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), 114.
18.
Olga Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity, and Mourning (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 176; Garland, The Greek Way of Death, cf. 33 and throughout; Douglas MacDowell, The Law in Classical Athens (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 109ff; Foley, Female Acts, 22-27.
19.
The ritual was "intended at least partly to satisfy the soul of the deceased. . . . The deceased's passage to the next world had yet to begin." Garland, The Greek Way of Death, 30-31, citing a study of surviving dirges.
20.
Taxidou, Tragedy , Modernity, and Mourning, 176. Although, as Garland points out, drawing on Eberhard Friedrich Bruck's Totenteil und Seelgerät im Griechischen Recht (Munich, Germany: C.H. Beck, 1926), the regulation of excess in funerary practice may cut both ways, as far as democracy is concerned: limiting "the amount which goes into a tomb increases the amount which can be inherited by the heirs." Garland, The Greek Way of Death, xxii. Aubrey Cannon suggests another counterintuitive explanation, parsed by Foley, Female Acts, 23n8: rather than democratize, rules against ostentatious funerals may have guarded a class distinction under pressure, protecting "symbolic distinctions in death rituals" from being blurred by lower class imitations of the wealthy.
21.
cf. Foley, Female Acts, 23n8, 27; and Loraux, Mothers in Mourning.
22.
The shift is noted by Holst-Warhaft, most pointedly, but tracked as well by Foley and Taxidou. Vernant explicates the Homeric episteme in detail but attends less to the shift. Testifying to the contestedness of this shift over a century or more, Plato in the Republic has Socrates argue for the erasure from Homer of all the passages that describe death or the dead in ways that arouse emotions: "We shall ask Homer and the rest of the poets not to be too angry with us if we strike out these passages and any others like them. Not that they lack poetic merit, or that they don't give pleasure to most people. They do. But the more merit they have, the less suitable they are for boys and men who are expected to be free and fear slavery more than death." Plato, Republic, trans. Tom Griffin, ed. G. R. F. Ferrari (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 387b. For a contrary view, see Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1994). Shay finds in Homer inspiration for soldiers today. Also in the Republic, Plato has Socrates rewrite into indirect speech or narration a part of the Iliad that Homer presents as direct speech. The aim of the rewrite is to mute Agamemnon's rage and a priest's call for revenge. In Book X, 603-6, Socrates worries about the dangers of Homeric mourning as represented in tragedy. Jill Frank called Plato's relevance to my attention. On the shift from vengeance to law in classical Athens, see Danielle Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
23.
Horst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 113-14.
24.
Perhaps they had become such; but apart from empirics, the point is they were experienced as excessive.
25.
The laments, especially the kinswomen's, "are not filled with praise of [the dead's] heroic feats but generally focus on the plight of the bereaved." Horst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 114. This fits the pattern of Antigone's goos for Polynices (his treason would make it difficult to praise his deeds, in any case). Historical evidence suggests that in the wake of Solon's ban on laments, a culture war may have followed: The mourning outlawed at home and gendered feminine is cast as excessive, barbaric, and "eastern." With the Persian War, more than a century later, the referent of these traits-excessive, barbaric, and eastern- becomes: "Persian." Depicted as prone to excess in mourning, Persia was figured as vulnerable to Greek power and this further secured the Greek resolve to mourn, by contrast, moderately and patriotically; "The longest and most intense lamentation by tragic males is to be found in Aeschylus' Persians [where] the mourners are defeated barbarians, and as Edith Hall has demonstrated, their lament clearly feminizes them, makes them from the Greek perspective the antitype of the idealized male. Unlike Greek men, Xerxes and the Persian elders tear their beards and their clothes (feminine peploi) and beat their flesh." Foley, Female Acts, 29. The lamentations, nearly equally the property of men and women in Homer, then cast as the domain of women in Greece, are rendered Other, in Aeschylus's Persians.
26.
Some had in them names to be cursed: "In certain cases as many as ten or fifteen persons are cursed on a single tablet. Other tablets are more explicit, containing formulae which curse the tongue, the eyes, the mouth, the psyche, the sanity, the arms and the legs of the named person, and invoke the assistance of the underworld deities, Persephone and Hermes." The same may be true of another innovation, a "form of cursing [that] set a small lead figure with bound hands inside a lead coffin with an inscription on the inside lid." Plato refers to the practice at 364c in the Republic, as Garland points out. "Often the reason for cursing appears to have been a lawcourt testimony," says Garland, The Greek Way of Death, 6-7. The katadesmoi may have been an iteration of the earlier, now-forbidden, revenge-seeking laments.
27.
But not just women's lamentations: "Male lament in Homer does not carry the connotations of femininity and theatricality that are attached to it after Solon's laws are implemented." Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity, and Mourning, 176. Still, there may have been gendered differences in mourning: "The two main gestures of mourning on Geometric vases [were] the female attitude of holding both hands to the head and tearing the hair, and the male attitude of holding one hand to the head, apparently beating it but not actually tearing the hair." Garland, The Greek Way of Death, 29.
28.
Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity, and Mourning, 30. Also at issue, speculate some commentators, was a power struggle among women's clans, the aristocracy, Solon, and the new polis form. On this, see Foley, Female Acts, 23-25; and Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 114-19. Two centuries later, Plato identified women with loud mourning, while acknowledging that men so weep too. In Plato's Phaedo (117d) when Socrates drinks the poison, the men who surround him begin to weep but he quickly calls them to order: "What is this strange outcry?" asks Socrates, "I sent away the women mainly in order that they might not offend in this way." Monicka Patterson-Tutschka, taking a cue from Iris Young, comments on this as an instance of logos disciplining emotion in a review of Lisa Pace Vetter's "Women's Work" as Political Art; Weaving and Dialectical Politics in Homer, Aristophanes, and Plato (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005). Patterson-Tutschka, "Silencing Xanthippe," The Review of Politics 69, no. 3 (June 2007): 466-68. cf. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 10-11, on Plato's hostility to maternal mourning.
29.
Larry J. Bennett and William Blake Tyrrell, "Sophocles' Antigone and Funeral Oratory," American Journal of Philology111, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 443. Students in Tina Chanter's Antigone seminar alerted me to this passage.
30.
On this, see Loraux, whose work is foundational for all the contemporary authors referred to here.
31.
This distinction is hard to maintain since we only know about the beauteous bodies because of Homer's beautiful words. Still Homer's words do not call attention to themselves as a source of solace in the way that the language of the Funeral Oration does. See also Saxonhouse on "the bodiless world of" Pericles's Funeral Oration where "death is unfelt" and whose "model of democracy," she says, "abstracts from history, from particularistic ties, and most especially from bodies." Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy, 64, 60. Pericles, she adds, "does not talk of training bodies or fashioning arms but instead discusses the Athenian policy of openness." His underestimation of the importance of bodies is brought home with a vengeance, she notes, when Thucydides turns to discuss the plague and its effects on Athenian bodies. Ibid., 63-64.
32.
"Phrynicus himself, as a corrective gesture, wrote the Phoenician Women twenty years later." Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity, and Mourning, 97. Phrynicus's error, says Loraux, was to elicit a mourning with which Athenians, who shared an identity as Ions with the Miletans, identified too closely, and to replay events in which Athenians were implicated. Tragedy requires distance (in space and time) to be safe. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 85, 87. For Taxidou, Persians, also historically based, "needs to be read in the shadow of that extraordinary ban." Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity, and Mourning, 96-97.
33.
On the active role of spectators in classical theater, see Sara Monoson, Plato's Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Charles Segal, in his elegant chap. 5, comes close to the reading I offer here. Charles Segal, Sophocles' Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). He too sees Creon as representing a broader Athenian effort to contain certain forms of mourning. We differ both on details I specify below and also, more importantly, on the larger issue of what is at stake in the containment effort. For Segal the threat to polis order has not to do with a Homeric table of values but, more narrowly, with women's mourning and loud grief that threaten the polis. Though he mentions vengeance in passing, I do not think he thinks that the stakes are between two kinds of justice; his structuralism points him rather to a culture-nature divide. Therefore, he reads the mourning scenes of Creon and Eurydice quite differently from me, while also missing other elements of the play beyond the laments, which support my claim that classical law and democracy more generally are at issue here, not just the prohibition on mourning. Moreover, because Segal identifies Antigone with lamentation and nature (not a rival social order), and Creon with civilization, as such, Segal misses the significance of Creon's grief, which I discuss below. Segal, Sophocles' Tragic World, 119-23; 135-36. Others who identify Antigone with elements of what I am calling a Homeric episteme include Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Theodore Zielkowski, The Mirror of Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Neither offers a sustained reading of the play. Moreover, for Goldhill, Antigone's Homeric identity is represented by her individuality (a rather formal trait, as opposed to the more substantive markers identified here), and for Zielkowski, as for Hegel, Antigone represents the chthonic, effeminate accorded more respect in Homer than in democratic Athens. Neither reads Antigone as representing a rival politics or form of life.
34.
"The fifth century performance of Antigone could have raised important questions about the valuation of the individual as opposed to that of the collective citizen body, the legitimacy of the imposition (by nomos or otherwise) of democratic uniformity on individual tomb markers, and the right of the polis to bury-and to memorialize-its own fallen warriors outside of or above the claims of their families," says Sarah Brown-Ferrario in an article that provides archaeological evidence for this claim and supports my reading of the play. Sarah Brown-Ferrario , "Replaying Antigone: Changing Patterns of Public and Private Commemoration at Athens c. 440-350," Helios33s (2006): 104. Brown-Ferrario offers no reading of the play but, in passing references to it, she assumes Creon is a tyrant. For her, then, the citation of Creon's Periclean speech by Demosthenes in the fourth century needs explanation. Ibid., 80. Brown-Ferrario suggests that by the fourth century Creon has been rehabilitated. On my reading, no such explanation is needed since Creon was in both centuries marked as democratic, even if hyperbolically so. Sourvinou-Inwood's "Assumptions and the Creation of Meaning" also cites Demosthenes's use of Creon's speech as evidence in favor of her view that Creon is democratic. Her reading rests on different details than mine, centrally on the issue of treason and burial, and positions a democratic Creon against Antigone's "bad girl" dissidence with no alertness to complexities of lamentation.
35.
If Antigone buries Polynices twice, she mirrors Creon who upon hearing of Eurydice's death wails, "I died once, you kill me again and again!" (1288 [1416]) or, as in Gibbons and Segal's translation, "Aiee! You have killed a destroyed man twice over!" Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 122. This may repay Creon for trying to kill Polynices twice. For the view that Creon's refusal to bury Polynices evidences rage and the desire to kill him again, see George Steiner on Goethe. George Steiner, Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 50-51. 36. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 22.386. Achilles says, "There is a dead man who lies by the ships, unwept, unburied: Patroklos: and I will not forget him."
36.
Her first mourning, unrecorded, is unwitnessed but is performed out in the open, at night. This may be a way to suggest that under the ban on lamentation, mourning occurs in secret, but out in the open, as an open secret. Or, Charles Segal may be right when he suggests brilliantly that if the first burial speech is unrecorded, unwitnessed, that may be because it is actually not performed by Antigone but rather, as the elders worriedly suggest, by the gods. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles ( Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 160. This possibility opens the play up, as I argue elsewhere, and explains why Antigone will not disavow the deed nor own up to it, a point made much of by Butler. This may seem to argue against my point that Antigone in burying Polynices twice buries to excess, but it is surely excessive to rebury a second time, regardless of whose agency is responsible for the first burial. For Creon, in any case, the second burial is "excessive" since it indulges in the forbidden laments. For a different reading of the first burial, see my Antigone, Interrupted, chap. 4.
37.
Not quite all the forbidden elements of lament are in play here. Antigone does not self-lacerate. This may suggest she is less excessive than Creon (excessively) thinks. And/or it may suggest she is already domesticated by the polis' substitution of logos for embodiment. If she does not self-lacerate, does that mean her grief is somehow articulable and does not require the fleshly expression common in Homer? Notably, since the sentry describes what he heard, the report is witness testimony and therefore suspect. Sophocles could have had Antigone perform the goos on stage; she is said to have done it openly, with the sun high in the sky. Yet we do not hear her directly (might this be a way of staging the prohibitedness of the goos?) and so the question arises-what did the sentry really hear? And how might his report itself be affected by the expectations he would have had of what Antigone would do, as an elite/Homeric figure? The report is his perception of what she did and may be framed by their class relationship. We might say the same of Eurydice's laments, discussed below, which are also reported by a member of the lower orders.
38.
Rehm, Marriage to Death , 182n12.
39.
Loraux, Mothers in Mourning , 63.
40.
White cites Simone Weil, "The Iliad, or The Poem of Force," trans. Mary McCarthy, Politics 2 (November 1945): 321-31. White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 39-40.
41.
Susan Lape , "Racializing Democracy: The Politics of Sexual Reproduction in Classical Athens," Parallax9, no. 4 (2003): 52-63, 54. This point is indebted to conversation with Josh Ober.
42.
Spectators may have included Athenians and foreigners. Still, I take it to be uncontroversial that tragic and comic theater in some way engaged issues of political or cultural import to Athens. This leaves open the question of whether theater supported or subverted Athenian civic ideology or anything else. Simon Goldhill , "The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology," in Nothing to Do with Dionysus?, ed. John J. Winkler and Froma Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1990), 97-129.
43.
Steiner, Antigones, 44-51; H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (London: Methuen, 1969 ), 130.
44.
Sam Weber insightfully argues that when Antigone calculates the incalculable she does not cease to make sense but rather comes to personify the problem she represents. Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 138-40.
45.
Michelle Gellrich , Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict since Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 56-57.
46.
Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt, ed. John M. Marincola (London: Penguin, 1996); Foley, Female Acts, 168; Miriam Leonard, "Lacan, Irigaray, and Beyond: Antigones and the Politics of Psychoanalysis," in Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought, ed. Vana Zajko and Miriam Leonard (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 121-40.
47.
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.44.
48.
Loraux, Mothers in Mourning , 15-16.
49.
The more conventional view of Athens especially among political theorists emphasizes Athens's distinct respect for diversity, innovation, and individuality. This view is anchored by the common contrast between Athens and Sparta. Given Sparta's emphasis on homogeneity and collectivity, Athens is made by the comparison to look like a mecca of individuality. But the comparison with Homeric Greece highlights other aspects of Athenian democracy, in which collectivity and polis identification cast alternative affiliations (family, clan) and certain forms of individuality as threatening to the polis form. On the emphasis in fifth-century Athens on community versus Homeric individuality, see Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, chap. 6.
50.
Foley is just one of many critics to note the offensiveness of Creon's suggestion. Foley, Female Acts, 184. In their focus on its offensiveness, critics may miss its irony and referent.
51.
For Saxonhouse, Creon echoes "democracy's emphasis on interchangeability rather than particularity." Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 74 (though Euben disagrees; Euben, Corrupting the Youth, 157n51). I connect Pericles's instruction to have more children to Antigone's refusal to do so; it will not work given the (biological) irreplaceability of her brother (but maybe also of anyone). The play may alert us to a problem with democracy, as such, or specifically to this imperial democracy's perpetual hunger for more bodies and more people, as evidenced in the Funeral Oration. As Saxonhouse argues, that hunger for more bodies is not self-avowed. Instead, Pericles tries to enable its satisfaction by replacing civic affective attachment to bodies or embodiment with speech, a more reliable imaginary around which to form a polis. Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy, 62-71. This fits well with the argument developed here regarding the substitution of logos in Periclean democracy for the beauteous bodies of Homeric epic. Interestingly, the identification of the beauteous body with singularity and speech with interchangeability reverses the Arendtian assumption that as bodies we are all alike while as speakers and actors we distinguish ourselves. For more on Arendt's melding of Homeric and Periclean motifs, see Ackerman and Honig, "Agonality: Conceptions of Agonism in Arendt and Arendt Scholarship," in Hannah Arendt-Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung, ed. Herausgegeben von Wolfgang Heuer, Bernd Heiter, and Stefanie Rosenmüller (Stuttgart, Germany: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2009).
52.
The dramatic conceit is replayed through the ages in theater and film, most recently perhaps in Sophie's Choice, whose exploration of the conflict between mourning and justice I compare to Antigone in "The Other Is Dead: Mourning and Justice in Sophocles' Antigone," Triquarterly131 (Fall 2008): 89-111.
53.
Jacques Lacan , "The Essence of Tragedy: A Commentary on Sophocles' Antigone," in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1988). For a longer discussion of Antigone and Intaphrenes's wife, see my "From Lamentation to Logos: Antigone's Offensive Speech" in Antigone, Interrupted.
54.
"It is a trick and a victory of statist law and politics in liberal democracies to ascribe to individuals those significant actions that are actually (also) the products of a concerted politics. Rival sovereignties, oppositional movements, and political dissidence are thereby erased from view and we are left only with small individuals (three girls [in headscarves]) or large phantoms (Islam, radical particularism, etc.)." Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Hence the American celebration of "Rosa Parks" but not of the movement that prompted her to action. On the importance of the movement, see Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Free Press, 1984), 51-53.
55.
The wording is Saxonhouse's, citing M.I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973), 19, in Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy, 101. Saxonhouse criticizes Finley, arguing there was more to ancient democracy than that. Her difference with him replays longstanding debates within political science: Finley here defines democracy in formal institutional terms, and Saxonhouse argues for a more expansive approach attentive to political culture and practice.
56.
Later, when the sentry returns to Creon a second time, having apprehended Antigone in the act, he says, "no casting lots this time; this is my luck, my prize, no one else's" (emphasis in Fagles) (396-7 [438-9]). In so saying, he refers to a different mechanism of distribution in which a man gets what he is known to be owed-the lot fell to the sentry who earlier took the risk, now without lottery he gets the real prize. Rather than by way of randomness, the quintessentially democratic distributive principle, the sentry now gets what is coming to him. Has he shifted from a democratic political economy to an aristocratic one? Peter Euben suggests this binary is too stark since there is evidence that people felt the gods had a role in the lottery, that lot-based selections were not random. Still, this idea is not apparent when the sentry says, "no casting lots this time; this is my luck, my prize, no one else's" (emphasis in the original) (396-7[438-9]).
57.
The same evidence suggests to Roselli that Creon was a tyrant: "Creon's frequent references to `payment' and `hiring' [use] such low vocabulary [that they] may also serve to highlight Creon's vulgar character and improper (tyrannical) behavior as ruler of Thebes." Roselli, "Polyneices' Body," 166n68. Roselli cites Sophocles's Antigone, ed. and comm. Mark Griffith (Cambridge , UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 175, 302-3, 1035-39. But a low vocabulary could also show Creon is a democrat in elite perspective.
58.
"At Athens, the emphasis is on the banning of offerings at the grave and the limitation of the right to mourn to kinswomen." Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 115.
59.
I think the details of the play when read in light of the regulation of lamentation suggest the play is a critical one, mostly because most of the humor appears on the side critical of democracy. Taxidou, however, argues for Sophocles's fundamental identification with the democracy. Underlining his friendship with Pericles, she positions Sophocles as too intimate with power and too rewarded with Athenian theater prizes to be unimplicated in the ideology of the "Greek miracle." By contrast to Sophocles, who sets up an organic relationship to the city state, Taxidou argues, Euripides "sets up a critical, combative relationship with the city state . . . quite consciously sever[ing] the supposed organic link between tragedy and the city state." Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity, and Mourning, 12. She prefers Euripides, the exile, reportedly torn to death by dogs at the order of his finally inhospitable host, Archelaos, the King of Macedon. Ibid., 12, 99.
60.
"Antigone sings for herself the very wedding hymn and funeral dirge that Kreon has denied her," says Rehm. In fact, Creon interrupts her and says to take her away. But she resumes her dirge and goes on until Creon threatens the soldiers again. Creon also denies her her rite in a different way unnoted by Rehm, not by silencing her-that Creon tries and fails the first time to do-but by mocking her as self-indulgent, Homeric. Rehm, Marriage to Death, 64. Segal says Creon is "scornful" but does not read that scorn (as conveying a classical perspective on Homeric lament). Segal, Sophocles'Tragic World, 249n22.
61.
But the city may mourn her; Haemon has told Creon they do so while Antigone is still alive (693 [766-78]). Sophocles does not show the city mourning her after her death, however. This elision of the question of whether she is mourned after death may be significant in a play that centers on the (im)permissibility of mourning as an indication of polis (dis)loyalty.
62.
On "overliving," see Emily R. Wilson, Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
63.
This highlights one side effect of discrediting this speech. If the speech is a later addition as Jebb (who called Creon's "delay" a "dramatic blemish"), Kitto, and Goethe hoped, then Creon is less impotent. Richard C. Jebb, The Antigone of Sophocles (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1891), xviii-xix. Antigone would presumably, prior to the later addition, have been interred immediately, on Creon's first, direct orders. Thus, an assumption of sovereign power's security may have subtly influenced the judgment of some incredulous readers of Antigone's dirge.
64.
Of course, Antigone's inability to return to life may be blamed as much on the prohibition of her laments as on her participation in them. I make the case for the former reading in "The Other Is Dead."
65.
Eurydice's is a modified Homeric lament. She experiences her son's death as a physical searing pain and she laments it loudly but she does so indoors, and few, other than the messenger who reports it and maybe her household servants, seem to have heard her cries, certainly not the audience. What should we make of the fact that her cries would have been unknown were it not for their transmission through the agency of the male soldier? Segal says Eurydice's mourning conforms to classical women's lamentation. He thereby generates a great reading of many of the play's details, but he misses the scene's departure from those forms. He also argues that Antigone and Eurydice are perfectly parallel in their mourning, erring, in my view, by apparently focusing on Antigone's first recorded lamentation, not her second (for herself). Her first lament for Polynices is, like Eurydice's, reported by a witness, but Antigone's second dirge, for herself, is heard directly by the audience. Both occur outside. Segal, Sophocles'Tragic World, 134-37.
66.
The etymology is noted in Matthew S. Santirocco, "Justice in Sophocles' Antigone," Philosophy and Literature4, no. 2 (1980): 15, n39.
67.
Women in tragedy die by noose and men by dagger, argues Loraux in Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Segal reads Eurydice's death by dagger as a sign that she takes female self-lacerative mourning to an extreme. He thus recuperates Eurydice for femininity and does not allow her to die like a man. Rather than stand somewhere between the Homeric and democratic orders, Segal's Eurydice represents the extremity of female mourning. And Antigone is her double. When Haemon's blood spurts onto her, she looks like she self-lacerated, Segal suggests. Segal, Sophocles'Tragic World, 125-29, 134-37. This is a very interesting take, but it recuperates for a binary framework what I see as an illustration of a plural spectrum of possibilities in lament (Segal puts Antigone and Eurydice together, though Antigone does not "self-harm" in lament) and it goes against Loraux's mapping of the gendered pattern of suicide. Ibid., 135. Something Segal does not attend to: in the Homeric paradigm, women and men mourn similarly. But Segal refers repeatedly, as do most commentators in the past 15 or more years, to "women's lamentation."
68.
Taxidou, Modernity and Mourning, 178.
69.
Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory , 72.
70.
Foley criticizes "unilateral and anti-dialogic" readings and calls for approaches that attend to plural voices in drama rather than "privilege one voice over another" as the carrier of a play's meaning. Ancient Greek tragedy confronts us "not only with a cultural system that prides itself on being open to public exchanges of ideas and differences of opinion but also with a literary form such as drama, which unfolds as a complex dialogue that refuses to be bound in any direct fashion by the discourses of the agora." Foley, "Tragedy and Democratic Ideology," 143, 132.
71.
Richard Seaford, "Historicizing Tragic Ambivalence: The Vote of Athens," in History, Tragedy, Theory: Dialogues on Athenian Drama, ed. Barbara Goff (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 203. Against the claim that the play suggests the "city can only continue its existence by sacrificing those who are its most respected representatives, and there is no end to this persistent self-sacrifice," quoting T. C. Wouter Oudemans and André P. M. H. Lardinois, Tragic Ambiguity (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1987), 159, Seaford insists the play offers a clear message: "What is enacted is precisely an end [as opposed to a never-ending], from which the democratic polis may persistently benefit." The political undesirability of a powerful family's "introverted autonomy" is enacted, and the play also interpellates the audience into an "emotional cohesion of collective pity for those destroyed." Seaford, "Historicizing Tragic Ambivalence," 207. Thus, polis unity is twice achieved: powerful threats are eliminated and shared pity for them elicited.
72.
Ibid., 207.
73.
Foley, "Tragedy and Democratic Ideology," 144.
74.
Thus, I differ from Roselli's conclusion that "Antigone may question some of the fault lines of Athenian society, but it also affirms an archaic and elitist practice of celebrating the elite citizen male, as archaic elites had done and as a few Athenian families continued to do." Roselli, "Polyneices' Body," 158. The practice is referenced in the play but is also presented in politicizing and parodic terms.
75.
Elsewhere, I argue, however, that she is motivated throughout by consideration for Ismene (see chap. 4, Antigone, Interrupted).
76.
Another example of hyperbole in the play is given but not recognized in those terms by Foley, who treats it instead as evidence that Creon does not represent democracy: "Despite democratic ideology that privileges the interests of the state, Creon's blanket denial of the importance of kin ties may well have signaled an inadequacy in his attitude to leadership from the first speech on." Foley, " Tragedy and Democratic Ideology," 139.
77.
For Roselli, "Creon's decision to construct a tomb first (and to release Antigone second) underscores the importance of the [Homeric burial] monument and its significance to the audience." Roselli, "Polyneices' Body," 152. This reading of Creon's (in)action shows the limits of Roselli's otherwise valuable burial-focused interpretation of the play. His insistence that the play is about burial as a marker of status makes him miss other important elements of the play and leaves him vulnerable to Foley's criticism of narrowly historicist, referential readings. Patchen Markell imaginatively describes the events: Creon's deed, he says, outraces Creon's efforts to undo or control it, thus illustrating the contingency and finitude of the human world, in which our actions exceed our ability to contain or control them. Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 3. But the text suggests another reading as well: As I suggest above, it is also true that Creon's failure to undo his deeds is partly due to his failure to listen to the Chorus' leader. Going to Polynices first and to Antigone only second, Creon chooses not only to try (and fail) to undo his deed, as Markell suggests, but also or instead to permit the deed to continue to outrace his efforts to undo it-Antigone dies in the time it takes Creon to get there, having stopped first to bury Polynices. There may be more agency here and more power than Markell notes, both in Creon's choices and in Antigone's. Indeed, that is what tragedy may be said to require, a sense that until the last possible moment it could have been otherwise, and even then. . . . Moreover, there is agency here beyond that of the primary players. The messengers, sentry, soldiers animate the action by reporting the goings-on to the various players, even though the reactions to what is heard are predictably tragic (lament, suicide). There is something of an Upstairs-Downstairs class politics at work here.
78.
Shapiro, "Wrath of Creon ," 131.
79.
Regarding Shapiro's comparison of Creon and Achilles, I argue in "Sophocles Re-writes Homer" (in Antigone, Interrupted) that although Creon's treatment of Polynices may call to mind Achilles, the figure of Achilles is better represented in this play by Antigone. For Antigone/Achilles, Polynices is not Hector but rather Patroclus-also a brother (brother-like to Achilles) and an incestuous love.
80.
Sophocles, Antigone, trans. Gibbons and Segal, 1306-11 [1394-7]. Here, I use not the Fagles translation but rather that of Gibbons and Segal because it better captures the sense of Creon's grief, perhaps because it is informed by Segal's sense that Creon mourns like a woman. Segal, Sophocles'Tragic World, 127-31.
81.
Segal sees that Creon mourns like a woman but does not note the significance of Creon's departure from the form of women's lamentation when he takes the guilt on himself rather than call for revenge. Ibid., 127, 130. In a wonderful essay on Hegel's Antigone (framed by Hegel's reading of the play as a dispute between public and private but in powerful contention with that reading nonetheless), Patricia Mills focuses on this detail (without noting its character as a departure from lamentation codes) and asks if Creon's embrace of his guilt is evidence of his superiority to Antigone. "Creon's admission of guilt makes him the hero of the play [on Hegel's account] since it gives him a higher ethical consciousness." Patricia Jagentowicz Mills, Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 70. That is, Mills focuses on what the admission tells us about Creon. I focus on what the admission does: Creon's lament ends the cycle of violence. The dramatic counterpoint of Creon's lament is not just Antigone's but also Eurydice's, who called to avenge Creon's wrongs and thereby staged his assumption of guilt (though he could still have sensibly have called for revenge, blaming it all on Antigone or lashing out at Ismene, not yet sacrificed in all this). One thing is sure: at this point, the play is not about Polynices, anymore, if it ever was.
82.
The chorus shows its awareness of Creon's penchant to delegate when it says, earlier, "Do it now, go, don't leave it to others" (1107 [1231]), echoing Achilles's criticism of Agamemnon. Of course, the chorus also urges Creon in this last scene to live out his life rather than end it; that is, not to act on his own but rather to leave his fate to the gods.
83.
Bennett and Tyrrell, "Sophocles' Antigone,"443.
84.
Whether or not the "concession" anticipates Hegel's "solution" to the problem posed by this tragedy is a separate and important question.
85.
When Luce Irigaray shifts the focus of her earlier reading of Antigone as representing a blood bond that civic kinship disavows to Antigone as articulating a claim to political power (briefly, in Irigaray, Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution, trans. Karin Montin [New York : Routledge, 1994]), Irigaray moves out of the range of this critique. Irigaray, "The Eternal Irony."
86.
Seaford's suggestion points beyond his argument to another. The lure of the appetites (which are later whetted by the Feast) may in Homer and elsewhere provide a way out of otherwise infinite grief, a point I explore in "From Lamentation to Logos." Seaford, "Historicizing Tragic Ambivalence." That said, the fifth stasimon (1115-54 [1238-72]) precedes Creon's grief. Does the invitation to the feast remain, or is it overcome and defeated by Creon's later encounter with loss?
