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11. Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2019

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Extract

This song comes from Antigone's final moments on stage, ahead of being buried alive. Forcefully rejecting the chorus-leader's qualification of her attempt to compare her fate with Niobe's, she calls upon the chorus as the wealthy citizens of Thebes; ‘then, convinced that they have no word of comfort for her, she calls upon inanimate things’ – the streams and grove of the Theban landscape. The invocation of the city emphasizes her sense of rejection at its hands; her enemy is not simply Creon, but society as a whole, which has acquiesced in her punishment. Before calling on the city she appeals to her ancestral gods, which hints at a division fundamental to the play – between Antigone's birth family, for which she dies, and the city and its ordinances, which she defies.

Type
II Interpretation
Information
New Surveys in the Classics , Volume 44: Sophocles , 2014 , pp. 88 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2019 

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References

1 Burton 1980: 120.

2 For this division see Holt 1999; Liapis 2013.

3 These lines come from a passage whose authenticity has been debated since the 1820s, but there is no good reason to reject it: see Murnaghan 1986; Sourvinou-Inwood 1987–8; Neuburg 1990; Rösler 1993; Cropp 1997; Mader 2005.

4 Griffith 1999 on Ant. 907.

5 Van Erp Taalman Kip 1996: 521–4.

6 Burton 1980: 120.

7 Finglass 2005.

8 Griffin 1999a.

9 Taplin 1971: 39–40.

10 Ajax 850–1; Finglass 2017i: 307–8; p. 56 above.

11 Finglass 2007d on El. 642.

12 Oedipus at Colonus 919–23; Finglass 2012b.

13 Goldhill 1987; Winkler and Zeitlin 1990; Griffith 1995; Easterling 1997; Griffin 1998; Seaford 2000; Rhodes 2003; Carter 2011b; Osborne 2012.

14 Goldhill 2009a: 29. For the tragic audience see Roselli 2011; Finglass 2017i: 311–17.

15 See Aristophanes, Peace 962–7 with Carter 2011a: 50–1.

16 Aristophanes, Acharnians 504–7.

17 Goldhill and Hall 2009b: 19.

18 Allan and Kelly 2013.

19 Allan and Kelly 2013: 92.

20 Kelly 2015: 86.