The chorus respond in a lyric metre with dance and music, trying to make some kind of sense of what has happened. When they learn that somebody unknown, who has buried the body, they have this four stanza song which is called the ode to man. But humans also have the capacity to go wrong, to do wrong. In that that's what it's all been leading up to. Eot comein. And wen talk about the chorus earlier. The chorus is reduced to tears, let alone the audience. Can we just take a moment out of this tragedy to fellon the second speech of this chorus,. except written two thousand years before shakespeareand can you just tell
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what is reputedly the most performed of all Greek tragedies. Antigone, by Sophocles (c496-c406 BC), is powerfully ambiguous, inviting the audience to reassess its values constantly before the climax of the play resolves the plot if not the issues. Antigone is barely a teenager and is prepared to defy her uncle Creon, the new king of Thebes, who has decreed that nobody should bury the body of her brother, a traitor, on pain of death. This sets up a conflict between generations, between the state and the individual, uncle and niece, autocracy and pluralism, and it releases an enormous tragic energy that brings sudden death to Antigone, her fiance Haemon who is also Creon's son, and to Creon's wife Eurydice, while Creon himself is condemned to a living death of grief.
With
Edith Hall
Professor of Classics at Durham University
Oliver Taplin
Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Oxford
And
Lyndsay Coo
Senior Lecturer in Ancient Greek Language and Literature at the University of Bristol
Producer: Simon Tillotson