Sophocles Antigone 442 or 438 BC Samos rebellion

Sophocles: Antigone 442 or 438 BC?

Samos rebellion, 440 -39 BC • Yet, the punishment resembles apotympanismos, crucifixion on a plank, which Athenians afflicted upon citizens guilty of henous crimes. By all appearances, Pericles treated the Samians as disloyal citizens, and, in that light, their revolt is equivalent to stasis, factional discord and citizens, and analogous to the quarrel between Oedipus’s sons, Eteocles and Polynices, both of whom claimed the kingship of Thebes for himself. • Plutarch, Life of Pericles (second-hand account from Samian historian, Duris)

Samos Vs Miletus • 441/0 Pericles leads 40 ships from Athens to intervene in the conflict • Installs democracy and a small garrison on Samos • Oligarchs taken as hostages and interned on Lemnos • Samian dissidents rescue them and mount a counter-revolution • Sparta supports Samos, while Athens supports Miletus – prelude to the Peloponesian war • 440 BC 8 months war ‘hard fought and bitter’ • Settlement: Samos lost. Democracy forcefully imposed

Samos • ‘Fury forges the long bloodchain – The slain that link the slain’ (Oresteia) • 428 and 413/2 BC escaped Samian oligarchs cause trouble for Athens • Creon: ‘Polynices, I say, is to have no burial: no man is to touch him or say the least prayer for him; he shall lie on the plain, unburried; and the birds and the scavenging dogs can do with him whatever they like. (p. 261)

Sophocles c. 496 – c. 406 BC • 497 BC Danced in celebrations following victory over Persia • Acted in his own plays as a young man • Won at least 18 City Dionysia • 443 -442 BC state treasurer (hellenotamiai) • c. 441 -438 BC general (alongside Pericles) involved with putting down the revolt on Samos • 413 BC sat on the ten-man council (the probouloi) which was convened to deal with the crisis of Athens’ failed Sicilian expedition against Syracuse.

Creon • Very very bad king? • ‘Creon is the unequivocal tyrant of the play, relentlessly narrow in views and destructive in behaviour’ (Normand Berlin, p. 299) • Anagnorisis ‘can it be true? Is my wife dead? Has death bred death? ’ • ‘I alone am guilty’ • Is Creon undermined by the structure of the play?

Is Antigone ‘an anarchist’? • Creon: ‘And the city proposes to teach me how to rule? ’ (p. 277) • Creon: ‘My voice is the one giving orders in the city’ (p. 277) • Haemon: the city is not a polis ‘if one man rules it’

Is Antigone a maverick?

G. W. F. Hegel (1770 -1831) The unwritten and infallible laws of the gods: ‘They are not of yesterday or today, but everlasting, Though where they came from, none of us can tell’ The are. If I enquire after their origin and confine them to the point whence thy arose, then I have transcended them; for now it is I who am the univsersal, and they are the conditioned and limited. If they are supposed to be validated by my insight, then I have already denied their unshakeable, intrinsic being, and regard them as something, which, for me, is perhaps true, but also is perhaps not true’ (trans. A. V. Miller, pp. 261 -2)

Hegel: The Ethical Order; Human and Divine Laws • The ethical consciousness is more complete, its guilt more excusable, if it knows beforehand the law and the power which it opposes, if it takes them to be violence and wrong, to be ethical merely by accident, and, like Antigone, knowingly commits the crime. The accomplished deed completely alters its point of view; the very performance of it declares that what is ethical must be actual; for the realization of purpose is the purpose of the action… The ethical consciousness must, on account of its actuality and on account of its deed, acknowledge its opposite as its own actuality, must acknowledge its guilt’ (trans. Miller, p. 284)

There are many images of Medea feeding a serpent, this is the serpent that guards the golden fleece that she and Jason steal before eloping together. This depicts yet again Medea’s witchlike activities.