Antigone Article 11

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Guide to Sophocles'

Antigone's Last Speech

ANTIGONE [ 891 - 9 28 ]

A Student Edition with Commentary,

INTRODUCTION

Grammatical Notes, & Vocabulary

three parts: The kommos between An. and the Cho., the impatient order from Cr. (883-90), and finally, An.'s speech (891-943) before the guards lead her away 10 her death. The Commentary and Grammatical Notes included below (891-928) are for most of the third part. A kommos is a dirge, usually sung by the surviving members of a family after the death of a loved one. I Since An. considers herself the last of the house, she sings her own lament, one of the most lyrical kommot of Greek tragedy. chanting it alternately with the unresponsive Theban elders instead of with a more supporT H E FOURTH EPISODE has

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tive chorus of her own sex. In beautiful, emotionallyrics,she laments her fate as a "rnetic,"

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a foreigner with no home (852), like the foreign settlers in Athens who had no rights of citizenship. Theword metoikos 2 poignantly expresses her realization[}ftd"l .that she.Is a. citizen of neithe~ .,. Thebes one.~. nor the nether world. fieAfja~ unwittingly become the IJpsijJolispolis figure t at t eCho. sang of in the Ode on Man, the eatriot without a citYrSh-e laments. too, her friendless state (846, 876 ff.), but mostly she expresses her obsession with one theme: her loss Qf the joys of marriage (813-76). All the suppressed desire of the young girl now bursts forth in anguished lyrics. 3 She does not 100

A ntigone 's Last Speech mention her lover by name-thus contributing to the pattern of utter isolation even in her references to marriage. . As t~e elders chastise ber the.ir Judgment madvertently evokes the audIence's admIration and pIty for An: she is aulonomos (82 I), -rrfollowing her own law," a word conveying both blame and admirallon; 4 she is presumptuous, they frigidly observe, in comparing herself to Niobe who, unlike An., was of divine parentage (834); 5 she IS pItiable In that she i~ying f~r Oedipus' sin; but, like Oedip~s:-;he has rushed tOthe, li~~853).6 TheU11~

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giv~s dramatic realization offstage to these

~~:ICS. In th: !ymhos she WIll find union ?ot o~ly as she expects

ith her family, but also beyond expectanon WIth her spouse. . In the Creon-Haemon Debate, Hae. applied An. 's word for "Isolated," aim os, to his father (739). The father, in turn, uses it ) \ of An. In 887, where he consciouslv willed her complete isolation. rl-,.,oS J Now, at 9 19, An. herself agam expresses her desolation, as she IS e. ~ ~~eft of all philo), "dear ones." and of divine assistance (9 21-26).. comphmentary remark IS theIr grudging admISSIOn that there IS Y! one whose whole stance has been based on hilla and eros, 1\5 vJ?eb a certain reverence in her reverent action (872) in burying her reo-c' an~ On assurance th~t phz/ia is true piety. such isolation is the. \(1.1\01\ brotheI,i. but they immediately retreat, blaming her self-willed 0-\ Jro uillmat~ woe 10 and IS a necessary psychological precondition fot"IS oit-ide.. 1. her SUICide 11 OS" 0 rJi, ~ ( aulognotos .. orga) Clor h er d estrucllon s!,n.c.e• .a.':!~hori !.'.r,t,ty , e.~\ . . -\" "cannot brook such disobedience" (873-75), 7 Their cold unsymo.f'/\ pathetic attitude adds to our feeling for the isolated girl. r02 o.bo vI(; Creon returns to the stage long enough to command the guards p' \ 0::' ,Lto remove entomb her, "alone,. deserted" [. p ".J ,' K n 0 x ' s exp Iana tiIon 0 f t h e passage captures t h e moo d _ _ An. immediately . and . . (mon~n eremon, 887) to live ~r die, b.ut In any case to be :"Ithout and motives of An. here: metoikia, the fights of a resident alien, The guards refrain from immediate action, however, tacitly granting An. time to give her This is the moment when in the face of death nothing matters but the last speech (891-928) after which Cr. reappears to see to the executruth. She is not trying to justify her action to others, she is trying to tion of his command. understand it herself. In the loneliness of her last moments in the sunlight, ~,,,') In such a setting, An. begins her last speech. It is an emotional all that was secondary in her motives, . , dissolves before her eyes. , .( apostrophe to her tomb-bridal chamber, and yet it is spoken in I).t-~ The gods she championed have failed her., Antigone is given no the reflective, analytic iambic meter (891 ff.) instead of the earlier r' ..\'" 'fl sign of approval., . She is reduced to purely human feelings; all that '(..."o emotional lyric of the kommos. She expresses her overwhelming is left her is the love she bears the dead of her own blood. For desire for union with her family who are all dead and for whom [Polynices] she has sacrificed her hfe as a woman-the husband and children she might have had. In the almost hysterical hyperbole of her she has sacrificed herself. But the lines contain, too, a love of life claim that she would not have run such a risk for that husband and and a desire for marriage absent from the twentieth-cen tury existhose children she will now never live to see, she is telling Pclvnicee that tential An. of Anouilh. Where the latter rejects life because it does

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no other lover could surpass her love for him. The illogicality of her explanation cannot be denied. But the illogicality can be understood; for Antigone the distinction between living and dead has ceased to exist . she IS dead and about to be entombed in the land of the living, he .ia alive- in the world of the dead. IS

not live up to the absoluteness of her demands, Soph.'s heroine embraces death as the only embrace of love left to her. s In this speech. the two central images for An., those of marriage and death. that began to converge in the preceding kommos final I" ;;;;ite. D tymbos, 0 nympheton, "0 tomb. 0 bridal chamber," elo-quently expresses her realization that her love will be consummated only in death. Later, the messenger's report of the double death of the en-

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Knox perhaps overstates An.'s rejection of her husband and children. After all, she only touches upon this thought in a contrary-to-fact clause (see 905 n.). She does not have a husband or children; she has not experienced the physical or psychological fulfillment of Hae.'s love. She/must now cling to the one love she has known, especially since she lacks the knowledge that Hac. has' \ championed..hereause. ! o3

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ce the enlightened men of Pericles' Athens. she instinctively feels

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Antigone's Last Speech

the need to find a compelling rational explanation for her deed of love. And Soph. gives her this bit of contemporary sophistry,

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a crass "masculine" exercise in mental gymnastics. But An. is no

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sophist. Here she is pure woman. trying to justify herself to herself.

they cry: "God!" 20 The heroine now has recouped her androgynous strength despite-no. because of her loneliness. In the labored prose of psychiatrist Robert Weiss. loneliness is "a deficit condition. a response to the absence of specific relational provisions." An.'s anguish stems from the lack of any divine or human "relational provisions." However, the poet understands what the psychiatrist apparently does not: this "deficit condition" is not a disease to be cured but a necessary element in all heroism. indeed in all self-knowledge. Delphi would now approve: she knows herself. The Cho, was right: she is autogniitos (875).

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Because her reason is not logical but instinctive. her analysis can only produce a formal "masculine" tone and an illogical. inappro-

priate syllogism. The rhythm she employs shows she is trying to be "masculine". she has put aside the lyrical meters of the kommos

for the composed iambs of discursive analysis. The form and the matter are thus the "masculine" elernen ts in the scene. But the anguish the words convey reveals her full femininity.17 Her religious instinct. too, here proves to be "feminine." Jebb

objected to this passage because "her feet slip from the rock on which they were set; she suddenly gives up that which. throughout the drama. has been the immovable basis of her action-the universal and unqualified validity of the divine law." 18 But even in the passage in which she attested to the universal and unqualified validity of the agrapta nonuma (450-70), even there she gave every indication that she came to perceive their validity as they were fleshed out in the corpse of her brother (see 465-68 n.). She never gives the impression that she proceeds from the universal to the

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concrete, but that, in the face of the concrete needs of one she loves, she comes to understand and believe In the universal law. At this later momenL then as she stares down the paredes to her

Dealh. she does not' back down in her concern and belief in her loved ones. but she does momentarily lose sight of the connection that she earlier perceived between the concrete and the universal.

It is one thing to perceive and believe the great religious truths when there is still some distance between one and death; it is quite

another to have the strength to believe In articulo mortis. Sorh. shows ,!!ow deeply he understood human psychology in allowing his heroine this moment of doubt when the gods' laws escape her and the gods themselves seem to desert her (921 ff.). Only after this moment 01 doubting sophIstry does her vision clear again. She faces Death down, recovers her au tonamy as a truly Iiberated whole human being,IO firm in her pious belief despite the gods' silence (943). Camus's complaint against a certain school of artists is applicable here. Faced with absurdity, they will not cry: "Absurd!" 10

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