Creon and Ismene

 Σοφοκλῆς

Sophocles (c. 496 - 405 BCE)

*

But we begin with Homer:

And I saw the mother of Oedipus, fair Epikastê,
who in the ignorance of her mind did a great deed
by marrying her own son; he, after killing his own father,
married her. The gods soon made it known among men.
But though he suffered pains in much-loved Thebes
he continued to rule the Cadmeans through the god’s baleful plans.
She descended to the house of the powerful gate-fastener Hades,
lashing a noose to a steep rafter,
subdued by all her anguish. And she left her son pains,
as many as a mother’s Furies bring to fulfillment. 

(The Odyssey, 11.271-280)

Epikastê is one of the "wives and daughters of famous men" that Odysseus meets when he visits the underworld: she is of course better known to us as Jocasta. This is one of the sparse handful of Theban allusions in Homer. (*see Note 1)

That terrible image of a hanged woman becomes the catastrophic onset in two of Sophocles' Theban plays: i.e. the moment when the catastrophe has definitely arrived, though its destructive work has not ended. 

More specifically, these Sophoclean scenes portray the discovery of the hanged woman by a man who loves her. In Antigone (shortly before 441 BCE) the hanged Antigone is discovered by her fiancé Haemon, who stabs himself. In Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE) the hanged Jocasta is discovered by her husband Oedipus, who blinds himself using the pins on his wife's brooches. 

But no-one could confuse Antigone's lonely pride with Jocasta's horrified despair: they belong to different worlds, to plays whose centres of interest feel very distinct. 

And yet Sophocles' three Theban plays, each such a distinct entity, often play variations on the same motifs. Creon, like Antigone and Ismene, appears in all three. In Oedipus Rex he's wrongfully accused, in Oedipus at Colonus he's rightfully accused, and in Antigone he's an out-and-out opponent. One has the sense of dipping into a dressing-up chest. The Creon mask and robes were already in there: they begged to be used. And Euripides  was able to use them too, in the Phoenician Women, before Oedipus at Colonus got its belated airing in 401 BCE. 

The Creon character maintains a certain flavour: never quite heroic himself, glib, vulgar, self-interested but a true native Theban, a public servant, incompetently high-handed, always apt to anger the heroes (Oedipus, Antigone). 

Creon's pain somehow doesn't matter as much as other people's, he's too coarse to worry about. In the Phoenician Women, Teiresias tries to spare him, but not very hard. (Teiresias, whose reluctant prophecies are always painful, is another costume in that dressing-up box.)

*

There's some argument about Sophocles. Alistair Elliot, for instance, makes persuasive criticisms of his poetry (*Note 2). It's possible to lose sight of the obvious. Sigmund Freud asked himself why Oedipus Rex is so powerful, when we can shrug off other tragedies of fate; a question leading to a very significant outcome, in his case. Matthew Arnold seemed to deny that the situation in Antigone had any interest for a modern reader (*Note 3).

Sophocles was the greatest of the tragedians, but it's easier to be a fan of Aeschylus or Euripides; it's easier for a reader to "discover" them, to arrive with lower expectations and to be swept away by their fertile invention and their strangenesses. With Sophocles, on the other hand, we're apt to notice what creaks, what jars, what falls flat. But that's because his work still lives in a very direct way, his plays still concern us. 

Think of that opening scene with Antigone and Ismene: Antigone's egotistic, destructive, idealistic activism versus Ismene's tempered, cautious, furtive timidity. Reading Sophocles is uncomfortable. There's no hiding-place, we're all confronted by that choice.

[ANTIGONE]
But the body of Polynices . . .

He's to be left unwept, unburied, his precious body

for the circling vultures to spy and feast on. 

That's the martial law that the good Creon

imposes on you and me -- yes, even on me -- . . .

Anyone who disobeys it will die, no appeal, 

stoned to death inside the city walls!

So now you know. Now you'll show what you're made of,

Ismene: are you worthy of your birth, 

or a coward, for all your royal blood?

ISMENE:

Poor sister, if things have come to this,

what could I do to mend them, tell me,

what good can I do for you? 

ANTIGONE:

                       Decide.

Will you share the labour, share the work?

ISMENE:

What work, what's the risk? What do you mean?

ANTIGONE:

Will you lift up his body with these bare hands

and lower it with me?

ISMENE:

What? But you can't bury him, 

when a law forbids the whole city!

ANTIGONE:

                        Yes!

He's my brother and -- say what you like to deny it --

he's your brother too.

No-one will ever accuse me of betraying him. 

ISMENE:

You're so desperate, when Creon has specifically --

ANTIGONE:

                                                           No.

He's got no right to keep me from my own. 

ISMENE:

. . .

We've got to be sensible. Remember we're women,

we weren't born to contend with men. Then too

we're underlings, ruled by much stronger hands,

so we just have to put up with this -- and with even worse.

I -- I'll beg the dead to forgive me --

I'm forced, I've got no choice -- I must obey

those in power. Don't rush into extremes --

that's madness, madness.

ANTIGONE:

                                     I won't insist.

No, even should you change your mind now

I wouldn't welcome you, not with me.

Go ahead, you do what you like, do whatever suits you,

and I'll bury him myself. . .

. . .

Yes, you do what you like, dishonor the laws

that the gods themselves honor!

ISMENE:            I don't dishonor them.

But defy the city? I can't do that.

ANTIGONE:

You've found your excuses. But I'm on my way.

I will raise a mound for him, for my dear brother. 

ISMENE:

You're being so rash, Antigone, I'm so afraid for you.

    . . . 

ANTIGONE:

 . . .               I won't suffer

anything so bad as an inglorious death.

[Selected lines from the first scene of Antigone. Based on Robert Fagles' 1982 translation, but freely paraphrased by me. I've struggled to find an English translation of Sophocles that I consistently get along with.]

It's so easy to be uncompromising in a play, where the consequences aren't real. But still, Antigone flings down a challenge across the millennia. 

For Shelley and Brecht, Antigone was an inspiration: they adored her fire. Those of us less besotted with uncompromising principle and less blind to its path of destruction will perhaps be more inclined to consider Ismene's point of view. I really enjoyed Jennet Kirkpatrick's essay "The Prudent Dissident: Unheroic Resistance in Sophocles' Antigone" (The Review of Politics, Cambridge University Press, Vol 73 No 3 (Summer 2011), pp. 401-424), with its thoughts about how Ismene's "unheroic weakness" might operate in corners and actually lead to better outcomes; and about Antigone, whose egotistic idea of collective action is that other people should submerge their identities into her personal mission.

You can read it on JStor: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23016517 .

*

But I don't buy into the idea (considered by Kirkpatrick) that it was Ismene, not Antigone, who performed the first hasty funeral rites on Polynices' body: it's an illuminating thought-experiment, but I can't believe that any ancient drama would involve a plot-line that can only be inferred; nor can I understand Antigone's "sharp, piercing cry" at finding the body uncovered, which the sentry compares to a bird finding its chicks gone -- What else would Antigone expect to find, if this was only her first visit to where Polynices lay? --;  nor can I understand why, if Ismene had indeed carried out the first rite, she wouldn't say anything to refute Antigone's disdainful assertion (twice) that Ismene never touched the body. 

What I think you could argue is that Antigone, when she performed the first "burial", was sufficiently mindful of Ismene's prudence to make some effort at secrecy.  But when she came back and found all her work undone she lost patience with this furtive way of fulfilling an obligation. As she had already half-glimpsed during the argument with Ismene, her deed needed to be a public statement. True, Creon could still order Polynices' body to be re-exposed. But Antigone's open willingness to sacrifice her own life was an honour to Polynices that couldn't be taken away, whatever Creon did about it. 

Edipo discovers Giocasta in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Edipo Re (1967)

[Image source: http://www.actingoutpolitics.com/pier-paolo-pasolini-edipo-re-oedipus-rex/ . Giocasta was played by Silvana Mangano, Edipo by Franco Citti.  You can watch the whole movie here (with Spanish subtitles): https://archive.org/details/1967EdipoRey .]

Note 1: 

Homer's Theban references are sparse but significant. They form the subject of a fascinating recent book by Elton T. E. Barker and Joel P. Christensen, happily available online: Homer's Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts, 2019 (Hellenic Studies Series 84. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies).

I've borrowed their translation (see Chapter 3) of the passage in question. 

Note 2:

See Alistair Elliot's interesting 2011 review (in Translation and Literature) of Reginald Gibbons' Sophocles: Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments (2008):  https://euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/E0968136109000570 .

Note 3:

. . .But clearness of arrangement, rigour of development, simplicity of style – these may to a certain extent be learned: and these may, I am convinced, be learned best from the ancients, who although infinitely less suggestive than Shakspeare, are thus, to the artist, more instructive.

   What then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be our sole models? the ancients with their comparatively narrow range of experience, and their widely different circumstances? Not, certainly, that which is narrow in the ancients, nor that in which we can no longer sympathize. An action like the action of the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the heroine's duty to her brother's corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest. . . .

Matthew Arnold's comment deserves to be read in the full context of his Author's Preface to Poems, A New Edition (1853). But even when it is, it remains a bit mystifying. Arnold's ringing commendation of the ancients is founded on their sense of the necessity and centrality of a great action, one of those "which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time". See e.g. this earlier passage:

. . . their expression is so excellent because it is so admirably kept in its right degree of prominence; because it is so simple and so well subordinated; because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys. For what reason was the Greek tragic poet confined to so limited a range of subjects? Because there are so few actions which unite in themselves, in the highest degree, the conditions of excellence: and it was not thought that on any but an excellent subject could an excellent Poem be constructed. A few actions, therefore, eminently adapted for tragedy, maintained almost exclusive possession of the Greek tragic stage; their significance appeared inexhaustible; they were as permanent problems, perpetually offered to the genius of every fresh poet. 

Antigone was the most admired of Sophoclean dramas, and surely Arnold wasn't saying that in this play alone Sophocles had neglected the great, significant and fitting action that (in his own view) the ancient writers perceived as essential? 

I can only suppose his intention in this aside was to warn the modern writer against a sort of classical antiquarianism: against becoming so entranced with the atmosphere of ancientness that you don't focus on the "elementary feelings" that compose a great action but only on the external trappings, on what is culturally time-bound, e.g. specific funeral rites. 

But Arnold seems to say it in a strange way, and I can't help wondering if there's a vein of sarcasm. Even his own description of the conflict in Antigone seems bound to provoke the "deep interest" that he denies it. It's as if one were to say of Oedipus: "a story about not being able to escape committing patricide and incest, yawn yawn". 

And after all, one of Arnold's own poems was "Fragment of an Antigone", in which he meditates intently on some of the themes in Sophocles' play.