Antigone is a tragedy written by Greek playwright Sophocles in the year 442 BCE. The play carries on in a series of plays such as Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus as well as Seven Against Thebes, which tell the tale of social classes, family feuds, and civil law in ancient times. The play tells about the reversal of fortunes between people in the high social class who are forced to live very lowly lives and to suffer emotionally and physically due to the operation of the constitution. The play deals with the burial of Antigone’s brother Polynices which happened in defiance of the wishes of Thebes’s new ruler, Creon as well as the rule of the state. The play is an account of the tragedies that befall Antigone as a result of her defiance or act of civil disobedience (Gregory, 494). Antigone carries on the theme of social class as she fights the established classes that impose unjust laws that barred people from lower classes from appealing natural laws.
It is important to establish the social status of the protagonist in the play- Antigone. She was a Theban Princess, who was the daughter of the disgraced and deceased Theban Monarch Jocasta and Oedipus (Sophocles 2). The founders of Thebes, are maternally and paternally attached to her and so is Thebes's first king. She was also fiancée to her first cousin the son of Creon, who was her father's brother. As such, Antigone had a high social class which gave her plenty of courage to confront systems and people that could not be questioned by the ordinary or low-class people in Thebes.
The issues of social classes begin to haunt the leadership of Thebes from a place in history beyond the current events. Upon the death of Oedipus, his sons Eteocles and Polynices are locked in a battle for class and supremacy (Sophocles 3). They had agreed to share power equally by alternating the leadership every year. However, when Eteocles take over leadership, he decides not to share power with his brother according to their earlier agreement. This prompted Polynices to leave the kingdom and assume the commoner class where he managed to gather an army to attack his brother’s leadership (Owen, Hilary, and Cláudia 94). It is evident that failure to capture the leadership meant living lowly life and Polynices could not be comfortable living a lowly kind of life when he had all the rights to take up kinship after his father.
The theme of social classes is evident in the passionate manner in which characters fight for power and leadership which placed people in the high or upper classes. Antigone's brothers Eteocles and Polynices died while fighting to take control of the seat left vacant by their deceased father. Each of them wanted to be the next ruler so much so that their fighting led to their deaths. Antigone in the spirit of asserting that he belonged to a respectable class and that she could have her say in matters about their society, had to suffer the wrath of such portrayal of status (Gregory 495). She epitomizes the vigor with which women wanted to safeguard the high classes their families had been given by patriarchs. In the absence of her father and two brothers, she was fighting to save face for the entire family which was on the verge of being wiped out and forgotten in the hands of their cruel uncle Creon.
Creon shows the importance of social class in the manner with which he treated his deceased nephews. He called for the indecent burial of Polynices because he wanted to assert that he was in power and that his word was law because he belonged to a superior class. As a result of maintaining his social class Creon becomes the tragic hero of the play. The issuance of a decree that Polynices would not be buried but left to rot in the open shows how determined Creon was to ensure that those who committed treason were to be treated as the lowest in the land (Wilkinson 36). According to Gregory the decree that Polynices body was to rot in the streets because he has tried treason was meant to scare the people of Thebes not to challenge the power and social systems that placed each person in their class (495). It was an extreme measure that people would live to remember that a son of a former ruler had been disgraced in death because of challenging social systems that favored the rich and the powerful.
There is evidence of social classes existing between genders in the relationship between Antigone and her sister Ismene. The two show contrasting images of ancient Greek women who were regarded to be of a class lesser than men. While Ismene is portrayed as the exact image of the ancient Greek woman with submission and regard for all the rules made by men, her sister Antigone is portrayed as a rebel who questioned the social class differences between men and women. In a debate with Antigone, Ismene states that “women are not made to battle men” (Sophocles). However, Antigone challenges the social class set therein by asserting that”I will bury him and welcome death in doing it” (Sophocles). Ismene is timid, and she thinks of men as her superiors while Antigone is willing to challenge such social classes.
The relationship between Creon, his son Haemon and Antigone also show that there existed social classes between the powerful rulers and the ordinary people. Although Antigone belonged to the relatively high-class family, she was considered of the ordinary class upon her father’s death. Haemon, Creon’s son defies social classes and his father to save Antigone (Owen, Hilary, and Cláudia 94). There is a conflict between Haemon and his father as the former is also in love with Antigone. Social classes between members of the ruling class and the ordinary folks dictated that the each member from each of the classes marry among themselves. Creon makes the differences between classes clear when he discourages his son from marrying Antigone by declaring that “she will die before you marry her” (Sophocles 94). However, Haemon defies his father and retorts that if Antigone were to die she would not die alone.
The class differences between men and women are further brought out in the conflict between Antigone and Creon. The class differences were so huge that Creon could not believe that a woman had broken some laws and was openly defying men. Creon shows extreme male chauvinism by placing women lowly and refusing to listen or give thought to any of their suggestion and ideas. So huge is the social class between the two genders that Creon defies Antigone in matters about the law. Antigone tells Creon that she could only obey the laws mad by the gods and not those that Creon made. Indeed, women had been placed lowly because Esteban Trueba supports Creon in calling for the women to retain their place- looking after the house and raising children.
The deaths that occur in this tragic story are as a result of the differences in social classes. When Creon, the ruler form the highest to social classes collides with Antigone from a relatively lower class, Antigone ends up dead by hanging herself. There is plenty of intimidation between classes by those of the upper classes and which lead the lower class members to take drastic measures. Moreover, when Creon again uses his powers and class to intimidate his son not to marry Antigone and to follow her suicide, Haemon also kills himself (Wilkinson 37). Also, Haemon’s mother who observes the class wars from a distance also kills herself. It seems then that Creon. From the highest class had immense powers to influence who died and who was left.
A group of people sings in different instances of the play. They play the role of messenger, as they sing, dance and make comments throughout the play thereby acting as if they had no class and showing the joy or peace of not belonging to the high or low classes. They are on the margins of the action, and this detaches them from the action which gives them a good moral standing to not only take note of the social evils of the time but also to act as the moral compass against such social decisions and classes (Owen, Hilary, and Cláudia 94). The chorus shows the indeterminate group whose social issues can be termed as belonging to the middle class. The use of the “we” in the prologue seem to be all call for unity of all people regardless of the social classes that exist in different societies.
The downfall of the protagonist is a strategy by the author to arouse feelings of compassion and fear in the existence of power struggles and deaths as people seek legal an illegal means to acquire power all in the name of chasing social class. The emotions of these social issues have to build up, and they eventually find a release through Antigone. She is deeply hurt by the imminent demotion of class of her previously noble family through the humiliation of her brother, and this leads her to commit suicide (Gregory 495). She could not watch as her moral principles had given way to the pressure of social classes. Also, Creon also regrets his decisions, and he accepts the consequences of his errors, he is ready to discard the chase for social class, power and wealth all in the name of peace.
Works Cited
Zolper, Tom. "Teaching Sophocles' Antigone from the multiple critical perspectives." n.d. 22 April 2016 <https://www.prestwickhouse.com/samples/303283.pdf>.
Owen, Hilary, and Cláudia P. Alonso. Antigone's Daughters: Gender, Genealogy, and the Politics of Authorship in 20th-Century Portuguese Women's Writing. Lewisburg, Pa: Bucknell University Press, 2011. Print.
Gregory, Justina. A Companion to Greek Tragedy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2005. Print
Wilkinson, Marta L. Antigone's Daughters: Gender, Family, and Expression in the Modern Novel. New York: P. Lang, 2008. Print.
Sophocles. Antigone. Classical Greek tragedy. Web 22 April 2016 https://mthoyibi.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/antigone_2.pdf
