In the opening section to Antigone, the Prologue, the characters of Antigone and Ismene are introduced, and the clash between them is made clear. The underlying myth of Oedipus and the House of Thebes would have been well-known to Athenian audiences from whom this play was written, and Antigone makes reference at the outset to the essential fact that the ills to be presented in this play trace directly back to the sin of Oedipus in trying to outrun his fate:
Tell me this: are there any evils coming from Oedipus that Zeus does not fulfill through us--the two still living? (Wertenbaker 7).
The language in the older translation by Fitts and Fitzgerald says essentially the same thing, but the tone is different. Where the Wertenbaker version shows Antigone from the beginning as an aggressive and angry woman, the older version shows her with a greater sense of being a victim:
You would think that we had already suffered enough
That you and I have not gone through (Fitts and Fitzgerald 886).
In this opening scene, the two sisters speak about their dead brothers and about the edict that has been imposed by Creon forbidding the burial of Polyneikes. According to the legend, Polyneikes had asked his sister to give him a decent burial, and therefore she feels a particular duty to fulfill his wishes and to keep her promise to him by doing so. The discussion sets up the primary conflicts of the play, conflicts between loyalty to family and loyalty to the state, the laws of the state versus the laws of the gods, the role of the individual versus the power of the state, and even the conflict between men and women, with women expected to obey the dictates of the dominant males in society.
In presenting these issues, the language in Wertenbaker is more indicative of immediate conflict than is the language in Fitts and Fitzgerald. Antigone asks Ismene in the latter case:
Have they told you of the new decree of our King Creon...