It's most unusual for a chorus in any greek tragedy to be the ones who turn the plot round. He could have made him acceded iresias, but he doesn't. The key thing that he isolates as epitomizing the whole wrong is what lindsey just pointed out,. That he's put the living beneath the earth where the dead should be. It's almost a cosmic error. Meanwhile, while love is haveny, antigone is being taken to her tomb stone, tomb i should put inside bound. And these birds are making horrible cries. Instead of singing nicely, they're tearing each other apart. When tiretius tries to sacrifice and it all
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