To Antigone, the duty to bury her brother in order to abide to the “sacred laws” is greater than her duty to the state and to obey Creon’s law. This is effectively conveyed through the extensive dialogues spoken by the sisters, which help to establish their perspectives regarding the burial of their brother Polynecius, who “must be left to lie unwept, unburied, for hungry birds of prey to sweep and feast on his poor body”. Right at the outset of the play, we not only see the relationship between the two girls, but also their conflicting trains of thought. A leading example was Protagoras, who was noted for his doctrine, “man is the measure of all things” and it is this view that is espoused by the characters in the play- namely Creon and Ismene.Īntigone’s fervent stance that the divine were stronger than mankind is mainly seen through the familial conflicts that she displays with her sister, Ismene, as well as her uncle, Creon. This want was fulfilled by the rise of the Sophists- intellectuals who aimed to spread their wisdom across. The usage of rationality to determine the nature of the universe was popularized following the Greco-Persian Wars, when individuals were more exposed to other cultures, thus desiring more knowledge regarding fields other than mathematics and literacy. Rationality, however, is the use of reason and logic in order to make certain decisions or to understand the functioning of world.

In the reading of Sophocles’ tragedy, one can see that this belief is firmly held by the titular character and protagonist Antigone, as well as her fiancé Haemon and the seer Teiresias. According to Curd, Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Xenophanes disseminated the belief that the divine controlled and organized the universe, and it pervaded with their holy thoughts. This essentially meant that religion intertwined with both the natural world and mankind- including areas such as jurisprudence and justice. In Ancient Greece, the term “fundamental belief” mainly referred to the idea held by Pre-Socratic philosophers, that “each divine figure that arises is connected with a part of the physical universe”. The essay will also go to explore Sophocles’ ultimate conclusion over which path to follow- that of reason, or that of nature and the divine. This essay will discuss how the characters in the play represented these clashing trains of thought, which essentially mirrored the philosophical beliefs that dominated the civilians of Ancient Greece in the 4 th Century BC. Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Antigone explicitly deals with the conflict of fundamental belief against rationality.

Antigone paul woodruff