Classical Backgrounds to English Literature

Sophocles’s Antigone

Study Questions

• What kind of woman is Antigone? Name two similarities and two differences between Antigone and Medea.

• Our discussions of Medea focused on several sets of oppositions that helped us to understand Medea’s character and her situation. Which of those oppositions also operate in this play?

• Name two new sets of oppositions that you found in reading these first few pages of Antigone. How might these oppositions relate to tensions within the polis (NB: remember we said that one of the functions of tragedy was to expose and resolve such civil / moral problems).

• As your notes tell you on p. 4, Antigone’s insistence of Polyneices’s burial is an “extreme view.” Why do you think she is so adamant about giving her brother burial? What are her motivations, if not honoring the dead?

• What do you think of Ismene’s counter-argument against Antigone? Who do you think is right at this point in the play?

• What function does the chorus play in this play? How does the chorus here differ from the chorus of Euripides? Of Seneca?

• What are Creon’s motives? Does he seem like a good leader? How do his views fundamentally oppose those of Antigone?