Conflict Between Antigone and Creon

The play Antigone involves a conflict which develops between Antigone and Creon, the sister of one deemed a traitor and the ruler who demands loyalty. The two are stubborn, completely certain of their own righteousness and of the rightness of their position, inflexible, and ultimately, doomed to suffer because of it. Both do have strong reasons for their actions, and each can support his or her point of view by an appeal to law. Antigone, however, appeals to divine law, while Creon appeals to man-made law.

Antigone is the third play by Sophocles to address some element of the legend of Oedipus, but the three plays are not a formal trilogy as they were written at different times. The essence of the Oedipus myth revolves around personal responsibility in the Greek conception. Even though Oedipus appears to be the victim of a series of circumstances so that what happens to him should be no fault of his own, in the Greek view this is not the case. The structure of the three plays shows that Oedipus should have known even if he did not and that his stubbornness in the face of growing evidence as to his crime leads to his downfall. Greek tragedy addressed stories such as this in developing a moral analysis of the meaning of loyalty and obedience and of understanding the nature of the role of the gods in human life. One of the major lines in Greek tragedy centered on the House of Atreus, the family of the Greek hero Agamemnon who had returned from the Trojan War. A second

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nge Creon. The social value of compliance conflicts with the equal values of courage and loyalty, and Antigone is loyal to her brother but transgresses against the legal injunction of the state. Ismene, Antigone's sister, suggests that she comply with the order of Creon because that is what is expected. This conflicts with what Antigone feels the gods have ordered her to do in the name of her brother, and she is not willing to have what she knows is right swept aside by the admonition that she is only a woman. She says to her sister, Be what you want to: but that man shall I bury. For me, the doer, death is best. Friend shall I lie with him, yes friend with friend, when I have dared the crime of piety (Grene 161). Antigone follows her own conscience and is destroyed, but in doing so she affirms the value of loyalty. The problem for Antigone is that loyalty in this play is divided between loyalty to her brother and loyalty to the state, which in a larger sense sese the state against the gods. The necessity of burial has been ordained by the gods, and so Antigone is also being loyal to her religious beliefs. However, Creon insists that she adhere to his decrees as a proof of loyalty to the state, and this creates a clear con

Category: Literature - C