Democratic Love in Sophocles' Antigone

When evil comes on those we dearly love, never shall we betray them.

-Aeschylus, The Persians

The intensity of Antigone’s language and actions in response to her uncle’s decree concerning the body of her deceased brother, Polyneices, has left some Antigone audiences uncomfortable with the perceived closeness of their relationship, and has even been judged by a few scholars as boarding on incestual. However, when Antigone’s passion and boldness is assessed within a cultural and historical context, her behaviour becomes less unusual and merely speaks to the strong imperative of family loyalty in ancient Greece during the time that playwright, Sophocles, was contemplating these character connections. Equally relevant, are the philosophical influences that viewed the household as the basic unit of politics compared to modern philosophy that puts the individual before the family and the state. As some philosophers like Hegel have pointed out, the sister-brother relationship would have likely been one of the only democratic bonds that women from antiquity would have experienced in their lifetime which helps to explain why her character foresaw more freedom in an afterlife alongside Polyneices than in her bleak and oppressed future under autocratic rule. Hence, the brother is an irreplaceable bond for Antigone and puts the nature of their love at an immeasurable distance above her other familial ties. Tragically, king Creon is too stubborn to see how this form of love can be used as a model for the city-state and the essence of equality that is missing from the uneven, dictatorial relationship that he has with his Theban subjects.

While the play leaves many readers in awe of Antigone’s moral integrity, there are some critics who find her sentiments toward Polyneices too amorous for a sister-brother relationship, insisting that her character’s level of adoration goes beyond the bounds of acceptable familial love, extending into lewd and disturbing territory. Besides referring to her brother as her “heart” several times throughout the play, Antigone also admits that it was Polyneices’s death specifically that “snuffed out [her] life” (Sophocles 38, 871), which evokes confusing imagery of a lover’s inner light being extinguish by the death of their beloved. Furthermore, when Ismene attempts to share responsibility for her sister’s “crime”, Antigone vehemently refuses she share in her punishment, saying to her, “Be brave. You are alive. Already my soul is dead” (24, 559). This quote suggests that Antigone’s soul has already left her body “to help those who died before [her]” (24, 560), which means that to remain alive would be to merely exist. Subsequently, we can assume that her insistence on giving Polyneices a proper burial proceeds from the realization that her greatest love(s) are deceased, saying to Ismene, “I will bury him. I will have a noble death and lie with him, a dear sister with a dear brother” (4, 71-73). However, some scholars are too distracted by the tenderness of Antigone’s language in this line to acknowledge the nobility in her choice to defy authority and feel that there is a disturbing quality about her character’s desire to “lie with [her brother]”. They insist that such passionate altruism must necessarily involve a desire for a sexual union and are unable to move past this perceived eroticism. It is argued that one statement in particular reveals the main character’s “obsessive loyalty” toward her brother which occurs during Antigone’s final speech in the play, when she openly admits that under no other circumstance would she have defied state order (39, 905). This statement elevates her brother to a level that, according to Professor Torrance, leaves some critics unsure about how to reconcile the intensity of her bond with Polyneices. In her essay titled “Antigone and her Brother: What Sort of Special Relationship?”, Torrance says that the ontological theory put forth by Hegel and Lacan has improperly shifted attention away from Antigone’s “vicious rejection of other potential male kinship bonds” (241), which, in Torrance’s opinion, ought to detract from Antigone’s legacy of heroism (240). To make her case, Torrance draws on several different interpretations of this play, pointing to a variety of instances that seek to show the ways in which Antigone’s “unhealthy preference” toward Polyneices is not only obsessive but also unreciprocated. Because of Antigone’s “incestuous family background” (252) and “unnatural” favouritism toward this brother over her other deceased brother, Eteoclês, Torrance says that the character of Antigone does not deserve to be honoured in either intellectual or political terms (252).

Fig. 1. Félix Resurrección Hidalgo, Antigone, 1895.

This argument, I find both unconvincing and potentially harmful for the following reasons: Not only does it use private family history to undermine the love between a sister and brother at a foundational level, but it also implies that we should think less of Antigone’s heroism simply because of who she loves. By labelling Antigone’s level of devotion to her brother as an “unattractive” characteristic, Torrance somehow manages to rob Antigone’s character of any remaining dignity while simultaneously reinforcing the harmful link between love and shame. Evidently, for Torrance, love is only acceptable under conventional conditions, which not only puts boundaries on how we, as readers, may interpret Antigone, but also what we, as a political body, may learn from it as well.

Luckily, there are many other readers who have taken a more compassionate position, considering the layers of trauma that likely live within Antigone’s mind, body, and soul as well as the cultural and historical factors directing her passionate language and actions. Indeed, many scholars agree that the oikos* was the cornerstone of ancient Greek values, in part, because it established one’s identity, status, and survival. And although most citizens in the 1st millennium BC would have acknowledged the responsibility of civic duty, most Greeks associated helping behaviour with family and friends specifically (Christ 258). In his essay on “Helping Behaviour in Classical Athens”, author, Matthew Christ reflects on this devotion to the family, which he says, was habitual in both daily life and times of distress (258). He notes that “a guiding principle of behaviour for Athenians and other Greeks was, ‘Help Friends, Hurt Enemies’” and that the former was regarded even higher than the latter, and thus, more likely to attract social disapproval when there was a failure to help such relations (258). Another scholar observes that the Greek term philia (friendship) can be considered equivalent to our notion of the word “loyalty” and that “family” and “friends” were overlapping terms insofar as "two family members are together in a relation of philia" (Woodruff 44). This etymology is particularly helpful when trying to make sense of Antigone’s first line in which she relays the urgent news to her sister, Ismene, saying, “Our enemies are on the march to hurt our friends” (Sophocles 1, 10). Here, the term “friends” is referring specifically to their brother, Polyneices, who is being denied proper burial rights by the new king of Thebes, or rather, the “enemy” in Antigone’s eyes. As the play progresses, we see several instances in which this principle (‘help friends, hurt enemies’) is misconstrued by both main characters — the extent to which Antigone is committed to helping her “friends” (Polyneices), and the degree to which Creon is intent on hurting his “enemies”. Christ adds that this strong loyalty to family needs was not only expected, but it was expected to be adhered to in such a way that one did not even consider the consequences of this devotion (Christ 258). Wherefore, unconditional loyalty to the kinship network was deeply embedded into the Greek psyche, and inevitably, the driving force in directing the moral consciences of those who held deep familial ties. In this light, we may observe Antigone’s passion toward her brother as more culturally appropriate than disturbing and even find space for a certain amount of natural affection between siblings.

One unit that is often overlooked and, consequently, underestimated is that which rests, in Greek terms, somewhere in-between the atomo* and the oikos, largely because there is no word in the Greek language that symbolizes the brother-sister relationship or the love that is shared in this specific sibling dynamic. Yet Antigone’s line of reasoning for making Polyneices “first in honour” (Sophocles 39, 913) suggests that there is an irreplaceable quality about this relationship that she cannot find elsewhere in her life, and for that reason, may well be worth defining. Antigone believes this bond becomes especially precious when a mother and father cannot simply “grow” a new brother (39, 912). And since both her parents are also deceased, she can never replace hers with a new one. Alas, the character of Antigone has found herself in irreversible circumstances. The most tragic and the most enduring from a familial perspective and even more complicated from a mythological perspective, being the daughter of Oedipus.

According to Dr. Victoria Burke, some scholars, like Hegel, “took seriously Antigone’s claims about the irreplaceability of the brother and interpreted them in terms of the desire for mutual recognition” (2). She argues that Antigone’s burial ritual symbolizes “the ethical equality in the brother-sister relation” (2) and that this source of ethical recognition is not found in either legal bonds like marriage or in the institution of civil society (2). However, not all brother-sister relationships would fall into this category and can only reach this “ethical dimension” when it has risen to a spiritual level that can honour both divine and positive law harmoniously in the burial ritual (Burke 10). What I find most compelling about the Hegelian position is that it reconciles the sister-brother bond in such a way that its irreplaceable nature is found through the absence of sexual desire and desire for dominance (that is found in marriage bond and other areas of society). From this point of view, Antigone’s passion, and devotion towards Polyneices is substantiated by democratic love which takes place between equals who “do not get confirmation of their identities from each other, as one would in relation to a spouse or another agent in the public sphere of mutual recognition” (10) according to Burke. In the case of two people who independently divide the responsibilities between themselves, each person’s value is not derived from recognition of each other, but rather, from the bond of intimacy that is shared simply through the familial link alone.

Entirely oblivious to this kind of reciprocal power dynamic is the one character who, arguably, needs to understand it most of all – Creon. And although many Theban subjects cannot directly empathize with Antigone’s circumstances, they do “grieve” (or at least feel pity) for her fate according to Creon’s son, Haemon, who, unlike his father, is sometimes able to overhear what is said among the “common” city folk:

How the entire city is grieving over this girl.

No woman has ever had a fate so unfair

(They say), when what she did deserves honor and fame.

She saved her very own brother after he died,

Murderously, from being devoured by flesh-eating dogs

And pecked apart by vultures as he lay unburied.

For this, hasn’t she earned glory bright as gold?

This sort of talk moves against you, quietly, at night. (Sophocles, 30, 690a)

Regrettably however, Creon has asserted his power in such a way that Theban citizens “live in terror [of their king]” and are, therefore, only capable of standing behind Antigone in a figurative sense, leaving the protagonist alone in her fight for justice. During Antigone and Creon’s final feud, Antigone tells her uncle that the pain of death is nothing in relation to what it would be if she were to let her brother’s corpse remain unburied, stating “that would be agony” (19, 468) by comparison. This exchange shows us that Antigone does not fear death and gives much greater authority to divine law than to human-made ones. Hierarchically, for Antigone, the family comes before the state, and since divine law concerns the family, it overrides all royal decree from her perspective. Contrastingly, Creon puts the state before the family and remains steadfast in his decision to punish his niece for her transgression and insolence.

If we do not allow ourselves to be distracted by the societal taboo of incest and look instead to the distinctness of the bond that joins Antigone and Polyneices together, we can see a power relation that many state leaders would do well to consider. Tragically, Creon puts the state (city of Thebes) before the family, and therefore, cannot perceive his niece’s actions as anything other than a crime against state order. Given the circumstances, Creon also cannot detect the mutuality and reciprocity within Antigone and Polyneices’s relationship and is, therefore, unable to see the ways in which such love has the power to restore both divine and ethical order. Rather than using their democratic love bond as a model for his relationship to Theban citizens, he instead lets his pride take precedence over his better judgement while oppressing the very subjects whom he seeks to defend in the first place.

Sincerely,

Heather

*Oikos is a Greek word for “household” and “family”

*Atomo is a Greek word for “individual” or “indivisible”

Note: This post was inspired by a scholarly lecture on Sophocle's Antigone presented by Dr. Mark Blackell, some stimulating seminar discussion on this play with my LBST111 classmates, the song "Brave For You" by one of my favourite indie rock bands – The xx (their beautiful voices brought me comfort during a mentally confusing and scary time in my life), and last but not least, two of the most loyal humans I know – my brothers, Greg and Graham (my Eteoclês and Polyneices)

Works Cited

Burke, Victoria I. “The Substance of Ethical Recognition: Hegel’s Antigone and the

Irreplaceability of the Brother.” New German Critique, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1-27.

Christ, Matthew R. “Helping Behaviour in Classical Athens.” Pheonix, vol. 64, no. 3/4, 2010, pp. 254-290.

Sophocles. Antigone. Translated by Paul Woodruff. Hackett Publishing Inc., 2001.

Torrance, Isabelle. Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism. E-book. Oxford University Press, 2010, ch.14, pp. 240-253.

Woodruff, Paul. "In Place of Loyalty: Friendship and Adversary Politics in Classical Greece." Nomos, vol. 54, 2013, pp.39-51.