Antigone

Overview

Author

Sophocles (c. 496–406/405 BC), of the deme of Colonus near Athens; of more than 120 plays seven survive complete

First performed

Probably about 442–441 BC at the City Dionysia in Athens; an ancient tradition links Sophocles' election as a general in the Samian War of 441–440 to the play's success

Genre

Tragedy in Greek verse: spoken iambic trimeters for the episodes, lyric metres for the choral odes and laments

Setting

Before the royal palace at Thebes, on the day after the Argive army of the Seven has been defeated

Structure

Prologue, parodos, five episodes alternating with five choral odes (stasima), and exodos; 1,353 lines in the standard numbering

Main characters

Antigone; her sister Ismene; Creon, king of Thebes; his son Haemon; the prophet Teiresias; Creon's wife Eurydice; a Chorus of Theban elders

The 'Theban plays'

Antigone, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus treat the same family but were written decades apart and do not form a trilogy; Antigone is the earliest

Key ideas

Burial of the dead, the unwritten laws, family against city, gender and power, stubbornness and learning too late

Quoted translation

Lewis Campbell, verse translation first published 1883, revised for the World's Classics in 1906; references use the standard Greek line numbers, so they are approximate for the English

Context

Sophocles was born around 496 BC at Colonus, just outside Athens, and died in 406 or 405 BC. He was the most successful tragedian of his century, winning first prize at the City Dionysia many times, and he also held public office: he served as one of the city's treasurers and as a general (stratēgos) with Pericles in the war against Samos of 441–440. An ancient summary of the play, attributed to the Alexandrian scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium, says that he was elected general because of the success of Antigone. The story may be invented, but it is one reason the play is usually dated to about 442 or 441 BC (Griffith 1999) (Ehrenberg 1954).

Greek tragedies were performed in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens in a competition at the god's spring festival. Each tragedian presented three tragedies and a satyr play; the cast were male citizens, wearing masks, with no more than three speaking actors, who could take several parts each, and a chorus of twelve or (as Sophocles is said to have introduced) fifteen. The play alternates spoken episodes with sung and danced choral odes, and that rhythm of action and reflection is the shape this guide follows.

The story belongs to the Theban cycle of myth. After Oedipus discovered that he had killed his father and married his mother, Jocasta, his sons Eteocles and Polyneices quarrelled over the throne. In the commonest version they agreed to rule in alternate years, but Eteocles refused to give up power; Polyneices went to Argos, married the daughter of King Adrastus and led seven champions against the seven gates of Thebes. The brothers killed each other in single combat, and the attack failed. Aeschylus had treated this war in Seven against Thebes (467 BC), whose last scene, in which Antigone resolves to bury Polyneices, is widely thought to have been added later under the influence of Sophocles' play. Antigone's defiance may well be Sophocles' own contribution to the myth; in another version, dramatised in Euripides' Suppliant Women, it is the Athenian king Theseus who forces the Thebans to bury the Argive dead (Griffith 1999) (Jebb 1888).

Burial mattered intensely to the Greeks. The dead needed at least a symbolic covering of earth and the rites of lament and libation to pass to the underworld, and to leave a body to the dogs was the ultimate outrage, as the Iliad already shows in the fate of Hector's body. Yet cities did refuse burial within their territory to traitors and temple-robbers, and Athenian law allowed such corpses to be cast out beyond the borders. Creon's decree was therefore extreme rather than unheard of, which is why the play's moral balance has been so fiercely debated (Sourvinou-Inwood 1989) (Cairns 2016).

Antigone has had an afterlife unmatched by almost any other ancient play. Hegel made it the central example of his theory of tragedy; Hölderlin translated it in 1804; Mendelssohn wrote music for a famous production at Potsdam in 1841. In the twentieth century it was rewritten by Jean Anouilh in occupied Paris and by Bertolt Brecht after the fall of Hitler, and it has been staged in South Africa, Latin America, Ireland and many other places as a play about resistance to state power. George Steiner's Antigones (1984) traces this history, and the play has become a central text of feminist, psychoanalytic and political philosophy (Steiner 1984) (Mee 2011).

Plot overview

On the morning after the defeat of the Argive army, Antigone tells her sister Ismene that their uncle Creon, the new king of Thebes, has forbidden the burial of their brother Polyneices, who died attacking the city, while their other brother Eteocles, its defender, is to be buried with honour. Antigone resolves to bury Polyneices despite the penalty of death; Ismene refuses to help. Creon announces his decree to the elders of the city, but a guard reports that someone has already sprinkled dust on the body.

Antigone is caught performing the rites a second time. Before Creon she defends her act by appeal to the unwritten laws of the gods, and Creon condemns her to death, together with Ismene, who now claims a share in the deed. Creon's son Haemon, engaged to Antigone, pleads with his father, reporting that the whole city pities her; the argument ends in a violent quarrel, and Haemon leaves in fury. Creon spares Ismene but decrees that Antigone will be walled up alive in a rock tomb.

Antigone, led to her death, laments that she goes to the underworld unmarried and unmourned, and argues that a brother is the one relative who can never be replaced. The blind prophet Teiresias then warns Creon that the gods are angry: the unburied body has polluted the altars. Creon accuses him of corruption, and Teiresias prophesies that he will pay with the death of his own child. Terrified, Creon gives way, buries Polyneices and goes to release Antigone.

He is too late. In the tomb Antigone has hanged herself; Haemon, embracing her body, tries to kill his father and then kills himself. When the news reaches the palace, Creon's wife Eurydice kills herself at the altar, cursing her husband. Creon is left alone, acknowledging that he is responsible for the deaths of his family, and the Chorus ends with the lesson that the proud learn wisdom only through suffering, in old age.

Part by part

Characters

House of Oedipus

Antigone

Daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, betrothed to Haemon. She buries her brother Polyneices in defiance of Creon's decree and defends her act as obedience to the unwritten laws of the gods and to her duty to her dead kin. She is fearless, proud and absolute, harsh to her sister and certain of her glory; the Chorus calls her 'raw' like her father. In her last scene, going alive to her tomb, she laments the marriage and children she will never have. Readers have made her a saint of conscience, a fanatic, an embodiment of the family against the state and a figure of radical kinship.

Ismene

Antigone's sister. In the prologue she refuses to help, arguing that women cannot fight against men and the power of the city. Later she tries to share Antigone's guilt and death and is rejected. She survives the play and disappears from it after the third episode. Some recent critics have read her not as a coward but as a different, quieter kind of resistance (Honig 2013).

Polyneices and Eteocles

The dead brothers, who never appear. Eteocles held Thebes and refused to share the throne; Polyneices led the Argive army against his own city. They killed each other at the seventh gate. Creon treats one as patriot and the other as traitor; for Antigone they are equally her brothers.

Thebes

Creon

Brother of Jocasta and uncle of Antigone, king of Thebes after the death of Oedipus' sons. He begins as a statesman with sound principles about the priority of the city, but he applies them with growing rigidity, sees conspiracy and bribery everywhere, and identifies the city with his own will. His contempt for women and for youth makes him deaf to Antigone and to Haemon. Broken by Teiresias' prophecy, he yields too late and loses his son and his wife. He speaks more lines than anyone else, and his fall occupies the end of the play.

Haemon

Son of Creon and Eurydice, engaged to Antigone. He reasons respectfully with his father, reporting the city's sympathy for Antigone and urging him to yield, and only loses his temper when Creon refuses to listen. He never speaks to Antigone on stage. He dies in her tomb by his own sword after attacking his father.

Teiresias

The blind prophet of Thebes, guided by a boy, who appears in many Theban stories (including Oedipus the King). He reads in the birds and the failed sacrifice the anger of the gods, explains Creon's offence against both the living and the dead, and, when insulted, prophesies the death of Creon's son.

Eurydice

Creon's wife. She appears only once, near the end, to hear the messenger's account of Haemon's death; she leaves in silence and kills herself at the altar, cursing Creon as the killer of her sons.

The Guard

One of the soldiers set to watch the corpse (Campbell's 'Watchman'). His self-protective, garrulous speeches provide the play's rare comedy. He reports the first burial and later brings in Antigone, whom he caught performing the rites again.

The Chorus

Fifteen elders of Thebes, summoned by Creon as his council. They celebrate the victory, sing the great odes on man, the curse of the house, love, the mythical prisoners and Dionysus, and comment on the action. They are loyal to the king and cautious, wavering between respect for his authority and pity for Antigone, and it is their advice that finally moves Creon to act.

The Messengers

A first messenger reports the deaths in the tomb to Eurydice and the elders; a second, from the palace, reports Eurydice's suicide. Their speeches bring the offstage violence before the audience, as was customary in Greek tragedy.

Themes

Divine law and human law

The play is famous as a conflict between two kinds of law. Creon's decree is a nomos, a law of the city, proclaimed by its lawful ruler for the city's safety. Antigone appeals to the 'unwritten laws' of the gods, which require the burial of the dead and the honouring of kin, and which she claims no mortal can override (450–470). Teiresias' prophecy and the catastrophe confirm that the gods were offended by the exposure of the corpse.

But the play does not set divine against human law in a simple way. Creon too invokes Zeus and believes he is defending the gods of the city against a man who attacked their temples. The Ode on Man praises the person who honours both the laws of the land and the justice of the gods. Both principles are legitimate, and the tragedy comes from each being pursued to an extreme that destroys the other (Griffith 1999) (Cairns 2016).

Family and city

The Greek word philos means both 'friend' and 'kin', and the play is built on its two meanings. For Creon a philos is defined by loyalty to the city: an enemy of Thebes cannot be a friend, even in death. For Antigone, philia is a matter of blood, and a brother remains a brother whatever he has done. The household (oikos) and the city (polis) were the two great institutions of Greek life, and Athenian tragedy repeatedly stages the tension between them.

Creon's own fate inverts his priorities. The ruler who put the city first destroys his own household and is told by Haemon that he no longer speaks for the city at all. Hegel made this conflict between family and state the core of his famous interpretation (Hegel 1977) (Paolucci 1962).

Gender and power

Creon insists again and again that he will not be ruled or defeated by a woman, and he accuses Haemon of being a woman's slave. Ismene begins from the premise that women cannot fight men. Antigone's act, a woman's public defiance of the ruler, is a scandal in a culture where respectable women were not supposed to act or even be spoken of in public, though the care and lament of the dead was traditionally their task.

The play has therefore become a key text for thinking about women and the state. Some see Antigone as acting from within women's traditional sphere of mourning; others as crossing into men's public speech and becoming 'manly'; others, like Butler, as unsettling the very categories of kinship and gender on which the state relies (Foley 2001) (Butler 2000) (Söderbäck 2010).

The wonder and limits of humanity

The Ode on Man celebrates human mastery over nature, but the play surrounds it with signs of human limits: death, the gods, the inability to see one's own error. Creon's confidence in his own judgement and his rational case for the decree are exposed as blindness, while the blind prophet sees. Even Antigone, so sure of the gods' approval, wonders at the end which of the gods she can call on.

The word deinos, 'wonderful' and 'terrible', recurs at decisive moments: of man, of the power of fate, of the guard's fear, of Creon's dread of yielding. The play suggests that the same cleverness that builds cities can destroy them (Segal 1981) (Nussbaum 1986).

Stubbornness and learning too late

Both protagonists are inflexible. Antigone is called raw, self-willed and 'a law to herself'; Creon is told by his son and by the prophet that the man who never bends is broken. The images of steel that shatters, trees uprooted and ships capsized make the point visually. Antigone dies without retreat, and her refusal is part of her heroic stature. Creon yields, but only when it is too late to save anyone.

The last words of the Chorus connect wisdom with suffering in old age, recalling the Aeschylean idea that men learn through what they suffer. The play's bitter twist is that the lesson arrives when it can no longer be used (Knox 1964) (Winnington-Ingram 1980).

The dead and the living

The play's crisis is the confusion of two worlds. Polyneices, who belongs below the earth, is kept above it; Antigone, who belongs among the living, is buried alive. Antigone's loyalty is to the dead, 'with whom I must dwell for ever', and she speaks of herself as already dead. Creon, at the end, is called a living corpse. The rites of burial, the boundary between the upper and the lower world, and the right ordering of both are what the gods defend (Segal 1981).

Motifs

Marriage to death

Antigone, betrothed to Haemon, goes to her tomb as a bride: she will marry Acheron, the tomb is her bridal chamber, and Haemon dies embracing her, a marriage completed in the house of Hades. The motif draws on Greek songs for girls who died unmarried, and it turns the play's conflict of laws into a story of lost youth and lost children (Segal 1981).

Bending and breaking

Creon speaks of the hardest iron shattering and of the small bit that tames a horse; Haemon of trees that bend in the flood and sails that must be slackened; Teiresias of the folly of stubbornness. The question of who will yield runs through every confrontation.

The ship of state

Creon opens as the helmsman of the city brought safely through the storm, and Haemon and Teiresias use nautical images against him. The metaphor makes the ruler's judgement a matter of life and death for all aboard.

Sight and blindness

Oedipus' self-blinding stands behind the play; the sons of Phineus are blinded in the fourth stasimon; Teiresias, blind, sees the truth Creon cannot. Creon's last words ask where he can look. Seeing correctly, morally as much as physically, is what the characters fail to do.

Money and suspicion

Creon suspects bribery behind every opposition: the guards, the dissenting citizens and the prophet are all, he believes, bought. His inability to imagine motives other than profit is a mark of the tyrant in Greek thought.

Symbols

The body of Polyneices

The unburied corpse, never seen on stage, is the centre of the play. To Creon it is a public sign of the fate of traitors; to Antigone it is her brother; to Teiresias a source of pollution spreading to the city's altars. Its fate measures what a society owes to the dead, even to its enemies.

The dust

Antigone's burial is a sprinkling of dust, enough to satisfy the gods. The whirlwind of dust that hides her, and the 'bloody dust' of the gods below in the second stasimon, give the same substance a mysterious and fatal meaning.

The rock tomb

Antigone's prison is both grave and bridal chamber, a space between the living and the dead. Creon's choice of this punishment, designed to avoid pollution, becomes the visible form of his crime: a living woman placed below the earth.

Birds

The carrion birds that feed on Polyneices, Antigone crying like a mother bird over an empty nest, the screaming birds of Teiresias' augury and the 'eagles of Zeus' in Creon's blasphemy connect the natural world, the treatment of the dead and the will of the gods.

Dionysus

The god of Thebes, invoked in the first and last odes, stands for the city's joy and its hope of healing. As god of the theatre and of the boundary between life and death, he presides over the tragedy itself.

Critical debates

Hegel: the collision of two rights

The most influential interpretation of Antigone is Hegel's. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) he treats the play as the expression of a stage in the history of spirit, in which ethical life is divided between the 'divine law' of the family, represented by woman and concerned with the dead, and the 'human law' of the community, represented by man and the state. Antigone and Creon each embody one of these powers fully and therefore violate the other (Hegel 1977).

In his Lectures on Aesthetics Hegel calls Antigone one of the most perfect works of art, and uses it to define tragedy as a collision between two equally justified ethical powers, each one-sided; the tragic resolution destroys the individuals but restores the harmony of the whole. The reading has been criticised for making Creon's case stronger than the play allows and for fixing women in the family. But nearly every later philosophical reading of the play, from Kierkegaard and Lacan to Irigaray and Butler, begins as an argument with Hegel (Paolucci 1962) (Steiner 1984).

Is Creon simply wrong?

Many readers, following the play's end, treat Antigone as right and Creon as a tyrant. Bernard Knox, in an influential study, saw both as examples of the Sophoclean hero who will not yield, but found Antigone vindicated by the gods (Knox 1964).

Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood argued that a fifth-century Athenian audience would not have started from modern sympathies. Creon's opening speech expresses civic values Athenians shared, denying burial to traitors had parallels in Athenian practice, and a woman acting against the city's ruler would have seemed deeply transgressive. In her view the play gradually shifts the audience's judgement through the reactions of the Chorus, Haemon and Teiresias. Others reply that the extremity of exposing a corpse to dogs, and the play's religious language, would always have counted against Creon (Sourvinou-Inwood 1989) (Griffith 1999) (Cairns 2016).

The double burial

Why does Antigone bury Polyneices twice? The first burial leaves no trace, no footprint or wheel-mark, and the guards and the Chorus wonder whether a god did it; the second is seen and punished. Some scholars have argued that the gods performed the first burial, or that Ismene did; others that Antigone returned because the first covering had been swept away and the rites needed completing; others that the question is irrelevant to the dramatic logic, which needs Antigone to be caught.

Most editors now accept that Antigone performed both, and that the mystery of the first burial is deliberate: Sophocles lets the possibility of divine approval hover, as he does with the god-sent whirlwind, without allowing anyone in the play to know (Griffith 1999) (Jebb 1888).

The irreplaceable brother (904–920)

Antigone's claim that she would not have defied the city for a husband or children, because they could be replaced but a brother cannot, has troubled readers since Goethe, who told Eckermann in 1827 that he wished a scholar would prove the lines spurious. Jebb removed them from his text, finding the reasoning unworthy of the heroine and borrowed from Herodotus' story of the wife of Intaphernes.

Against this, Aristotle cites the passage in the Rhetoric, so it was in the text by the fourth century, and most modern editors defend it. Some find in it a sign of Antigone's isolation and her obsession with the house of her birth; others a culturally intelligible argument about kinship; for Butler it reveals that her 'law' cannot be generalised and points to the strangeness of her family (Lloyd-Jones 1990) (Griffith 1999) (Butler 2000).

Who is the tragic hero?

The play is named after Antigone, but Creon has more lines, is on stage far longer and is the figure who experiences reversal and recognition in the Aristotelian sense. Antigone disappears from the play after line 943. Critics have therefore argued that the tragedy is really Creon's, or that it is a 'diptych' in two halves, like Ajax and Women of Trachis.

Others answer that the two figures are bound together: each is destroyed by the same conflict, and Antigone's heroic constancy and Creon's belated yielding are two answers to the same demand. Winnington-Ingram's reading emphasises the passions that drive both, and their shared resemblance to the stubborn family of the Labdacids (Winnington-Ingram 1980) (Knox 1964).

The Ode on Man and the philosophers

The first stasimon has attracted philosophers as much as the play itself. Heidegger, in his lectures of 1935 published as Introduction to Metaphysics, translated deinon as 'the uncanny' (das Unheimliche) and read the ode as an account of human being as violent, homeless and at odds with the overwhelming power of Being; hupsipolis apolis became for him a statement of the human situation (Heidegger 2000).

Martha Nussbaum read the play as a study of practical reason: Creon and Antigone both simplify the world of competing values so as to avoid conflict, and the ode's praise of human resourcefulness masks the vulnerability of a life lived among many goods. Charles Segal related the ode to the play's concern with the boundaries of civilisation and the wild (Nussbaum 1986) (Segal 1981).

Antigone in feminist and political thought

Against Hegel, feminist philosophers have asked why Antigone must stand for the family and women for the private sphere. Luce Irigaray, in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), read Hegel's account as a confinement of woman to the realm of blood and death; Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis (1959–60) made Antigone the figure of a desire that does not give way, placed 'between two deaths' (Irigaray 1985) (Lacan 1992).

Judith Butler's Antigone's Claim (2000) argues that Antigone does not represent kinship at all, but its crisis: the daughter of an incestuous union, whose brother is also her father's son, she loves her brother in a way that exceeds the norms of family and state alike, and she defies the state in the state's own language of sovereign assertion. Butler links her to those whose relationships and griefs are not publicly recognised. Bonnie Honig has argued for a more political Antigone, attentive to the politics of lament and to her solidarity with Ismene; Tina Chanter has raised the question of slavery in the play and its reception (Butler 2000) (Honig 2013) (Chanter 2011) (Söderbäck 2010).

Anouilh, Brecht and the modern Antigones

Jean Anouilh's Antigone was first performed in Paris in February 1944, under German occupation. His Creon is a weary pragmatist who explains that someone has to steer the ship and says yes to life's compromises; his Antigone refuses his offer of ordinary happiness and chooses death almost without reasons. Because Creon is given strong arguments, the play passed the censors and was read by some as sympathetic to the collaborationist regime and by others as a celebration of resistance; the ambiguity is part of its fame (Steiner 1984).

Bertolt Brecht's Die Antigone des Sophokles (Chur, Switzerland, 1948), based on Hölderlin's translation, begins with a prologue set in Berlin in April 1945, where two sisters find their brother hanged as a deserter. Brecht turns Creon into the leader of a war of plunder against Argos and Antigone into the first to break ranks with a criminal regime. Later versions, such as Athol Fugard's The Island (1973), set in a South African prison, and Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes (2004), show how the play has become a common language for resistance and its costs (Steiner 1984) (Mee 2011) (Wilmer 2010).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Is Creon's decree simply tyrannical, or does it have a legitimate basis?

   Look at his first speech (162–210), the situation of a city just saved from attack, Greek practice regarding traitors, and the way the Chorus, Haemon and Teiresias respond.

2. What exactly are the 'unwritten laws' Antigone appeals to?

   Read 450–470 closely. Are they universal moral principles or specific religious duties to the dead and to kin? Who enforces them?

3. Why does the play contain two burials of Polyneices?

   Compare the guard's two reports, the Chorus's suggestion of divine action and the whirlwind. What does the ambiguity add?

4. Is Ismene a foil to Antigone, or a character in her own right?

   Consider her arguments in the prologue, her offer to share the guilt and Antigone's rejection of it. What kind of courage does she show?

5. How does the Ode on Man relate to the action around it?

   Think about the double meaning of deinos, the final stanza's 'high in the city, cityless', and whom the elders think they are describing.

6. What role does gender play in the conflict between Antigone and Creon?

   Collect Creon's remarks about women, Ismene's argument in the prologue and the Chorus's responses. Is Antigone acting as a woman or against women's roles?

7. How does Haemon try to persuade his father, and why does he fail?

   Look at the structure of his speech, his report of public opinion, the images of tree and sail, and the moment when the dialogue turns to anger.

8. How should we understand Antigone's argument about the irreplaceable brother (904–920)?

   Weigh the arguments for and against its authenticity, the parallel in Herodotus, and what it tells us about her relation to her family.

9. Who is the tragic hero of the play, Antigone or Creon?

   Count who is on stage and when; consider who undergoes a reversal and recognition; think about why the play is named after Antigone.

10. Why has Antigone been rewritten so often in modern times, and what do Anouilh and Brecht change?

    Think about occupation, dictatorship and resistance; how each version presents Creon's arguments; and what Butler or Honig suggest about why the play speaks to political crises.

Further reading

• Butler, Judith. Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
• Cairns, Douglas. Sophocles: Antigone. Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
• Chanter, Tina. Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalization of Slavery. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011.
• Ehrenberg, Victor. Sophocles and Pericles. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954.
• Foley, Helene P. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Griffith, Mark, ed. Sophocles: Antigone. Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
• Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
• Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
• Honig, Bonnie. Antigone, Interrupted. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
• Jebb, R. C., ed. Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments. Part III: The Antigone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1888.
• Knox, Bernard M. W. The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
• Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, and N. G. Wilson. Sophoclea: Studies on the Text of Sophocles. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
• Mee, Erin B., and Helene P. Foley, eds. Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
• Paolucci, Anne, and Henry Paolucci, eds. Hegel on Tragedy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962.
• Segal, Charles. Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
• Söderbäck, Fanny, ed. Feminist Readings of Antigone. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010.
• Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane. 'Assumptions and the Creation of Meaning: Reading Sophocles' Antigone.' Journal of Hellenic Studies 109 (1989): 134–48.
• Steiner, George. Antigones. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
• Wilmer, S. E., and Audronė Žukauskaitė, eds. Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Winnington-Ingram, R. P. Sophocles: An Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.