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Key Passages from Antigone 1. Antigone vs Ismene Antigone: I would not urge you now; nor if you wanted to act would I be glad to have you with me. Be as you choose to be; but for myself I myself will bury him. It will be good to die, so doing. I shall lie by his side, loving hims as he loved me; I shall be a criminal—but a religious one. The time in which I must please those that are dead is longer than I must please those of this world. For there I shall lie forever. You, if you like, can cast dishonor on what the gods have honored. Ismene: I will not put dishonor on them, but to act in defiance of the citizenry, my nature does not give me means for that(ll 79-92). 2. Creon’s idea on the conflict of national interests and personal relationships Creon: and anyone thinking another man more a friend than his own country, I rate him nowhere. For my part, God is my witness, who sees all, always, I would not count any enemy of my country as a friend—because of what I know, that she it is which gives us our security. If she sails upright and we sail on her, friends will be ours for the making. In the light of rules like this, I will make her greater still(200-210). 3. Chorus’s “Ode to Man” Chorus: Many are the wonders, none is more wonderful than what is man. ...A cunning fellow is man. His contrivances make him master of beasts of the field and those that move in the mountains...He has a way against everything, and he faces nothing that is to come without contrivances. Only against death can he call on no means of escape; but escape from hopeless diseases he has found in the depths of his mind. With some sort of cunning, inventive beyond all expectation he reaches sometimes evil, and some times good...If he honors the laws of earth, and the justice of the gods he has confirmed by oath, high is his city; no city has he with whom dwells dishonor prompted by recklessness. He who is so, may he never share my hearth(368-411)! 4. Antigone’s Defiance Creon: You there, that turn your eyes upon the ground, do you confess or deny what you have done? Antigone: Yes, I confess; I will not deny my deed.
Creon:...Now, Antigone, tell me shortly and to the point, did you know the proclamation against your action? Antigone: I knew it; of course I did. For it was public.
Creon: And did you are to disobey that law? Antigone: Yes, it was not Zeus that made the proclamation; nor did Justice, which lives with those below, enact such laws as that, for mankind. I did not believe your proclamation had such power to enable one who will someday die to override God’s ordinances, unwritten and secure. They are not of today and yesterday; they live forever; none knows when first they were. These are the laws whose penalties I would not incure from the gods, through fear of any man’s temper. I know that I will die—of course I do—even if you had not doomed me by proclamation. If I shall die before my time, I count that a profit. How can such as I, that live among such troubles, not find a profit in death? So for such as me, to face such a fate as this is pain that does not count. But if I dared to leave the dead man, my mother’s son, dead and unburied, that would have been real pain. The other is not. Now, if you think me a fool to act like this, perhaps it is a fool that judges so(485-514). 5. Creon’s stubborn argument of the inevitability of his punishment and Haeman’s Defiance Creon: Do not, my son, banish your good sense through pleasure in a woman, since you know that the embrace grows cold when an evil woman shares your bed and home. What greater wound can there be than a false friend? No. Spit on her, throw her out like an enemy, this girl, to marry someone in Death’s house. I caught her openly in disobedience alone out of all this city and I shall not make myself a liar in the city’s sight. No, I will kill her. So let her cry if she will on the Zeus of kinship;...The man the city sets up in authority must be obeyed in samll things and in just but also in their opposites...There is nothing worse than disobedience to authority. It destroys cities, it demolishes homes; it breaks and outs one’s allies. Of successful lives the most of them are saved by discipline. So we must stand on the side of what is orderly; we cannot give victory to a woman. If we must accept defeat, let it be from man; we must not let people say that a woman beat us(699-731). Haemon: ...Your face is terrible to a simple citizen; it frightens him from words you dislike to hear. But what I can hear, in the dark, are things like these; the city mourns for this girl; they think she is dying most wrongly and most undeservedly of all womenkind, for the most glorious acts...Do not bear this single habit of mind, to think that what you say and nothing else is true. A man who thinks that he alone is right, or what he says, or what he is himself, unique, such men, when opened up, are seen to be quite empty. For a man, though he be wise, it is no shame to learn—learn many things, and not maintain his views too rigidly(741-64). 6. Heated Bantering between Creon and Haemon Creon: Must I rule the land by someone else’s judgement rather than my own?
Haemon: There is no city possessed by one man only. Creon: Is not the city thought to be the ruler’s? Haemon: You would be a fine dictator of a desert. Creon: It seems this boy is on the woman’s side. Haemon: If you are a woman—my care is all for you. Creon: You villain, to bandy words with your own father! Haemon: I see your acts as mistaken and unjust. Creon: Am I mistaken, reverencing my own office? Haemon: There is no reverence in trampling on God’s honor. Creon: Your nature is vile, in yielding to a woman. Haemon: You will not find me yield to what is shameful. Creon: At least, your argument is all for her. Haemon: Yes, and for you and me—and for the gods below. Creon: You will never marry her while her life lasts. Haemon: Than she mus die—and dying destroy another. Creon: Has your daring gone so far, to threaten me? Haemon: What threat is it to speak against empty judgments? Creon: Empty of sense yourself, you will regret your schooling of me in sense.
Haemon: If your were not my father, I would say you are insane. Creon: You woman’s slave, do not try to wheedle me. Haemon: You want to talk but never to hear and listen. Creon: Is that so? By the heavens above you will not—be sure of that—get off scot-free, insulting and abusing me(793-818). 7. Teiresias’s Warning Teiresias: And you must realize that you will not outlive many cycles more of this swift sun before you give in exchange one of your own loins bred, a corpse for a corpse, for you have thrust one that belongs above below the earth, and bitterly dishonored a living soul by lodging her in the grave;...These acts of yours are violence, on your part. And in requital the avenging Spirits of Death itself and the gods’ Furies shall after your dees, like in ambush for you, and in their hands you shall be taken cruelly(1122-1138). 8. Creon’s Regret Creon: The mistakes of a blinded man are themselves rigid and laden with death. You look at us the killer and the killed of the one blood. Oh, the awful blindness of those plans of mine. My sone, you were so young, so young to die. You were freed from the bonds of life through no folly of your own—only through mine. Chorus: I think you have learned justice—but too late(1329-36).
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