Few things in life have the ability to teach us lessons about wisdom and our own character flaws like tragedy. It seems the human soul has a built-in mechanism to sympathize with characters who, like ourselves, are imperfect and learn lessons the hard way- through experience. Perhaps we like to see the tragic because it appeals to one of our most useful human attributes. We have the ability to not only learn from our own experiences and tragedies, but to learn from those harrowing affairs of others. Perhaps we like this ability our imagination bestows upon us. To sympathize with characters in a tragedy allows us to see the gravity of a situation and learn the lessons demonstrated within it while protecting ourselves from the consequences of the actual experience itself. In this way we have such an invaluable ability to impart wisdom to others as well as gain freely from it ourselves.
The passage selected from Sophocles' Anitgone in Fiero’s book is an excellent demonstration of this uncanny ability. Though named the play is named Antigone, and though her part in it is certainly sorrowful, the tragedy expressed in the passage belongs to her would be future father in law, Creon, the king of Thebes. It is Creon who suffers the character flaw of pride and ego to the fault of ignoring sound judgment and wise caring counsel. As a king, he decrees that between two brothers who killed each other, one shall be honored in death while the other shall not be mourned or buried, but left to be ravaged by wild animals. Creon goes as far as to make his decree punishable by death to any who transgresses it:
“Creon: . . . For Eteocles, who fell like a true soldier defending his native land, there shall be such funeral as we give the noblest dead. But as to his brother Polynices – he who came out of exile and sought to destroy with fire the city of his fathers and the shrines of his fathers’ gods – he who thirsted for the blood of his kin, and would have led into slavery all those who escaped death – as to this man, it has been proclaimed that none shall honor him, none shall lament over him, but he shall lie unburied, a corpse mangled by birds and dogs, a gruesome thing to see. Such is my way with traitors.” (Fiero 2011, p. 93)
However, both the brother honored, and the brother condemned to defilement in death, belong to the noble Antigone. She alone has the nobility and courage to honor both brothers because she loved them. Out of love, Antigone stood up for what she believed in – fully knowing the fate she would be dealt by doing so and accepting that whole-heartedly. Having been caught trying to bury her beloved brother by the guard sent to protect the deceased from any who would provide burial rites, she was swiftly brought before Creon (Fiero, 2011).
Nobly she pled her case, claiming that not even the king of Thebes had the authority to make a decree higher than the will of the Gods.
“Creon: You, then – you whose face is bent to the earth – do you confess or do you deny the deed?
Antigone: I did it; I make no denial.
Creon: . . . (To Antigone); Now tell me – not in many words, but briefly – did you know of the edict that forbade what you did?
Antigone: I knew it. How could I help knowing? – it was public.
Creon: And you had the boldness to transgress that law?
Antigone: Yes, for it was not Zeus made such a law; such is not the Justice of the gods. Nor did I think that your decrees had so much force, that a mortal could override the unwritten and unchanging statures of heaven. For their authority is not of today nor yesterday, but from all time, and no man knows when they were first put forth.
Not through dread or any human power could I answer to the gods for breaking these. That I must die I knew without your edict. But if I am to die before my time, I count that a gain; for who, living as I do in the midst of many woes, would not call death a friend?
It saddens me little, therefore, to come to my end. If I had let my mother’s son lie in death an unburied corpse, that would have saddened me, but for myself I do not grieve. And if my acts are foolish in your eyes, it may be that a foolish judge condemns my folly.” (Fiero, 2011, p. 95)
Creon must have inwardly acknowledged that she was right to do so, because he stated in his folly of pride that he would not be bested by a woman, as it would appear weak and unkingly when he said to Antigone, “Your place, then, is with the dead. If you must love, love them. While I live, no woman shall overbear me.” (Fiero, 2011, p. 95)
Even Haemon, the Creon's son and Antigone's fiance came to persuade the king to reason. Again, Creon stubbornly attributed the advice to youthful love and scorned the thought of a wise king taking advice from the youth. Haemon warned his father of the impending sorrow willful ignorance would bring when using the idea of justice to flaunt authority and power at the satisfaction of ego. Creon disregarded his son's words and remained inflexible, and whether from pride or fear of appearing weak it made no difference.
At the sight of his fiance's demise, and after striking out at his father, Haemon took his own life. Upon hearing the news, Haemon's mother swiftly confronted death herself. Then, in one rippling effect, the tragedy's moral about the deadly consequences of pride comes to fruition (Fiero, 2011).
In his poetics, Aristotle defines a tragedy as this: “We have laid it down that a tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself, as a whole of some magnitude . . . which has a beginning, middle, and end.” (Fiero, 2011, p. 99) He goes on to describe what exactly those parts are and what they mean in relation to each other.
Antigone certainly has these aspects: The beginning – where we find out the situation of Antigone’s brothers and the king’s decree, the middle – where the dramatic interchanges between the king, the guard, Antigone, and Haemon develop Creon’s character flaw, and the end – where we see the consequences reaped from the actions brought about from the middle. Aristotle argues that these elements in relation to each other are necessary for the proper development of a plot in a tragedy.
Antigone also fits another characteristic Aristotle ascribes to the tragedy, or “definite magnitude.” According to Aristotle,
“Just in the same way, then, as a beautiful whole made up of parts, or a beautiful living creature, must be of some size, but a size to be taken in by the eye, so a story or Plot must be of some length, but of a length to be taken in by the memory. . . . The truth is that, just as in other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole.” (Fiero, 2011, p. 99)
We are all in a quest for becoming an 'ideal' person. This inherent nature is what allows us to recognize nobility and folly in the actors of a play. Our imagination and thirst for experience in becoming this ‘ideal’ person is what gives substance and life to the structure described by Aristotle’s Poetics, creating beautiful tragedies such as Antigone.
References
Fiero, G. (2011). The Humanistic Tradition, Book 1: The First Civilizations ant the Classical Legacy. (6th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
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