The ANTIGONE[307] (Ἀντιγόνη) was produced about 441 B.C. The scene is laid before the palace at Thebes, on the morning after the repulse of the Argives who had come to restore Polynices. Creon, King of Thebes, publishes an edict that no one shall give burial to the corpse of Polynices on pain of death. Antigone, sister of the dead man, despite the advice of her sister Ismene, performs the rite and is haled before Creon. She insists that his edict cannot annul the unwritten primeval laws of Heaven. The king, disregarding the admonitions of his son Hæmon, betrothed to Antigone, sends her to the cave of death. The prophet Tiresias warns him that the gods are angered by the pollution which comes from the unburied corpse. Urged by the chorus, Creon relents, and hastens first to bury Polynices, then to release Antigone, who has, however, already hanged herself. Hæmon stabs himself by her body. On hearing of his death his mother Eurydice, wife of Creon, commits suicide. The play ends with Creon’s helpless grief. This play is perhaps the most admired of Sophocles’ works. But the admiration often rests on a misunderstanding. It is customary to regard Antigone as a noble martyr and Creon as a stupidly cruel tyrant, because of an assumption that she must be what a similar figure would be, and often has been, in a modern play. Memories of Cordelia confronting Lear, of Dorothea in _The Virgin Martyr_ of Massinger and Dekker, beguile us so that we read that character into the play. The principle upheld by Antigone, and that upheld by Creon, are _prima facie_ of equal validity. The poet may, possibly, agree with Antigone rather than with the king, but the current belief, that the princess is splendidly right and her oppressor ignobly wrong, stultifies the play; it would become not tragedy but crude melodrama. In judging Attic literature there is nothing which it is more vital to remember than the immense importance attached by Athenians to the State and its claims. We are alive to the sanctity of human life, but think far less of the sanctity of national life. An English reader, therefore, regards Creon with all the reprobation which his treatment of Antigone can possibly deserve; but whatever justification is inherent in the case he almost ignores.