Late Fall 2018: Fall 2018, Teacher Read:

My Seniors are doing Oedipus, and my Sophomores are doing Antigone, and it seemed fitting that I should read the whole Theban Trilogy again since my daily life is half-immersed within it currently. I, honestly, couldn't remember if I had to read this one in college or not.

I still feel about the way I did in the last review. This is where we come full circle and the whole of Oedipus' house is dead, and Creon's house as well, pretty much-leaving everyone on the stage as corpses and the tale a tragedy of woe from beginning to end, for all those touched by the scourge.

Fall 2014:

Next piece read with my class. I don't really have a vast attachment to this play the way I do to some of the other Greek pieces. I do see the point behind it, and it has been great for getting my kids to think about some broad concepts, but this one sort of sailed over my head without much coming to rest because of it. ( )

I first read Antigone when I took a course in college dedicated to the early Greek plays. I find it weathers well, but then that should be no surprise since it has already weathered more than 2000 years.

Twice I was taken by the presence of phrases we still use commonly today. Is this the possible first use of “bit the dust”?

Here, there, great Ares like a war horse wheeled;
Beneath his car down thrust
Our foemen bit the dust

And this of “stand your ground”?

Such a man would in the storm of battle stand his ground.

The story revolves around the girl Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, whose brothers have fought and slain one another in battle. The brother on the non-victorious side, Polyneices, is laid out to be eaten by dogs and scavenger birds, and Creon, the king, makes it a crime for anyone to bury him. Antigone, heeding the laws of the Gods over the rule of one man, defies the king and attempts to bury her brother.

What ensues is tragedy. Creon’s insistence that he, and he alone, rules in Thebes, costs everyone in the play dearly, including himself.

His son, Haemon, pleads with him to listen to reason and be swayed by those who see the other side of the question, but he is stubborn and closes his eyes and ears. Haemon’s words are powerful, especially now, when I find so many people have their ideas set in stone and refuse to entertain the possibility of being wrong about anything.

Haemon’s plea:
The wisest man will let himself be swayed
By others’ wisdom and relax in time.
See how the trees beside a stream in flood
Save, if they yield to force, each spray unharmed,
But by resisting perish root and branch.

Finally, there was a stanza that jumped out at me as being so true of our own time and made me stop and think that little really changes over time:

Of evils current upon earth
The worst is money. Money ‘tis that sacks
Cities, and drives men forth from hearth and home;

I was surprised how much of the mythology I have retained from my school days and my subsequent readings of Bulfinch’s and Edith Hamilton, although I will confess to being happy to have Google available for the more obscure references. I realized, after reading this, that I would really enjoy revisiting all these early plays. Perhaps the other Oedipus plays from this trilogy will make my list before the end of the year.







( )

Fiel hasta el final, Antigona protege la dignidad de su hermano en el contexto de su cultura contra un hombre sin criterio que desoye a los buenos consejos de personas que tratan de hacerlo entrar en razón ante el advenimiento de una catástrofe por sus acciones. ( )

I was going to do review of the edition containing the whole Oedipus trilogy but I'm honestly so sick of Greek theater, and I just got 2 books that I'm super excited about, so I'm not going to read any more for now. Anyway, I guess I'm missing some context from the other two but in this one not much happens and like everyone dies. It honestly seems more like a parody of tragic theater. Why were they even fighting in the first place? The one virtue of this was the characterization was very well written.

This translation was very easy to read. I didn't really read the footnotes because they were all in a section at the end, and there were no numbers in the text to refer to them, so this is maybe not a very useful edition if you're an academic, but it was fine for my purposes. ( )

Didn’t read this translation, but Antigone by Sophocles ( )