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 line was that of the House of Thebes, centering on the crime of Oedipus and its consequences on his society. As the ruler, his every action affects his society as the gods punish not only the king but the kingdom. Antigone centers on issues of loyalty. Antigone appears with her father first in the second of these plays, Oedipus at Colonus, after her father's crime has been revealed. The key play for the character of Antigone is the third, Antigone, in which ...