Greek Theater, the Tragic Hero, and the World of Antigone

Greek tragedy was performed at a religious festival in Athens called the City Dionysia, before audiences of thousands, by no more than three actors playing every named role in rotation while a chorus of twelve to fifteen commented on the action between scenes. Masks let a small cast play many parts and let a distant audience read an exaggerated expression across an open-air theater. Centuries later, the philosopher Aristotle studied these plays and named the pattern he found in the best of them: a tragic hero is a fundamentally admirable, high-standing figure brought down not by pure accident but by a hamartia, a specific error in judgment or defining flaw, often hubris, meaning excessive pride or a refusal to accept limits. The reversal of the hero's fortune is called peripeteia; the moment the hero finally understands the truth, usually too late, is anagnorisis.

Sophocles' Antigone, written around 441 BC, is the third play chronologically in the story of the doomed house of Oedipus, though written and usually taught on its own. Oedipus, its former king, discovered that a prophecy he had spent his whole life trying to escape had come true anyway, and he left the throne in disgrace. His two sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, later killed each other fighting on opposite sides of a civil war for that same throne. As the play opens, the new king, Creon, has decreed that Eteocles will receive full honors in burial while Polyneices, condemned as a traitor, will be left exposed and unburied -- a punishment the Greeks considered a genuine crime against the dead and the gods' law, not merely an insult. Antigone, sister of both dead men, intends to bury Polyneices herself no matter the cost.