In Our Time - Antigone

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

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.WithEdith Hall Professor of Classics at Durham UniversityOliver Taplin Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of OxfordAndLyndsay Coo Senior Lecturer in Ancient Greek Language and Literature at the University of BristolProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Antigone by Sophocles, 496 to 406 BC, is reputedly the most performed of all Greek tragedies today, and perhaps the most powerfully ambiguous.

Her uncle, Crian, King of Thieves, decrees that nobody should bury Antigone's brother a traitor on pain of death. She defies him. And this conflict between generations between the state and the individual, uncle and niece, autocracy and openness, releases an enormous tragic energy that brings sudden death and, for Crian, a living death of grief. With me to discuss Antigone are Lindsay Coo,

senior lecturer in ancient Greek language and literature at the University of Bristol, Oliver Taplin, Emeritus Professor of Classics, University of Oxford, and Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at Durham University. Edith Hall, what should we know about Sophocles at the time when he wrote this play? Sophocles is a well-born Athenian. We don't know exactly when he wrote it, but his life was pretty much from the Persian Wars in around 4-8-5

until his death just before the turn of the century. He probably wrote it in his prime in middle age. He was the son of a wealthy and their aristocratic family. They were urban. They lived just outside the city walls to a place called Colonas. And they also had substantial wealth from an arms factory. But the most important thing about Sophocles is that he's an Athenian citizen who served in public office at least four times.

Alone amongst the three great tragedians, he had direct experience of the political life, of leadership, of decision-making at the highest level. And for that reason, his plays explore leadership in very great detail. He wrote, you've estimated, about 120 plays, which is extraordinary. He died at the age of 90s, still writing. We have seven remaining. What happened to the others?

The fate of all of ancient Greek literature that we haven't got was that at some point not enough people copied it out. So quite early on in antiquity, seven of Sophocles' plays got picked out as the ones with the standard curriculum, like, you know, text for GCSE and that an awful lot of the other stopped being copied out already in classical antiquity. But there was further damage in the thousand years

where we're talking about Byzantine monks copying them out and keeping them alive. By the time the manuscripts managed to be brought out of Constantinople before the Turkish assault, it appears that only seven made it across to Italy interprint. The setting is in the city of Thebes. What did that mean to the Athenians? So we're, yes, sitting on the southwest side of the Athenian necropolis in broad daylight. But the scene that we're looking at is early dawn in Thebes, which is a city about 18 miles walk

to the north of Athens over the Catharon Mountains. It's a deadly historic enemy of Athens. in some ways the worst historic enemy of Athens. Firstly, it always had an oligarchy. It didn't like democracy. Secondly, it had sided with the Persians during the Persian wars and the other Greeks never forgave them. So the tragedians tended to set in Thebes stories where you'd got a very embattled ruling class

because they wanted to make a sort of democratic point that we're not like that. It was a good place to set dark emotions, dark politics and incestuous. relationships both metaphorically and literally. So the story, the backstory would be known to most of the audience? The backstory certainly was there had been, we haven't got them sadly, because of the loss of great literature,

there had been an epic poem on the whole Theban war story. There'd also been some famous plays by Sophocles' predecessor, Eeschylus, on the theme. So they were coming into it with a great deal more knowledge and a modern audience is when they arrive at the theatre to watch it. Yes. Thank you. Oliver Taplin, you've translated the play recently, which I've read the translation, thank you very much.

How can you summarise the plot? As Edith says, the backstory would be well known, and that is that Oedipus and his mother, Jakasta, from their incestuous marriage, had two sons who quarrelled over the throne of Thebes. And one of them, Polynices, went into exile, gathered a great army to come and attack Thebes. Thebans are victorious.

Crayon takes over the power. and decrees that the body of Polynices, the son who came from abroad, should not be buried. Crayon is part of the central Edibus-Chicastro family. Crone is the maternal uncle. He's the brother of Chichasta. Of these two men, both of whom died in battle at each other's hands. And then it's not the story that everybody knows already, because Sophocles makes the most extraordinary innovation.

He invents a sister, Antigone. Antigone who insists on burying her brother at all costs and that's how the play begins. We meet her in the first scene. The one who is on the side of Thebes gets an honourable burial but the other who attacked Thebes is to be left unburied, unhonoured

afraid of carrying them. Not to be buried on pain of death. Yes. And you meet Antigone right at the beginning and she is determined to do it and she does indeed go out and twice in fact she covers his body with soil. and she's arrested

and there is a great confrontation with Creon in which she maintains that he does not have the right to stop her from burying her brother and he condemns her to death he condemns her to be buried alive in an underground chamber at this point in the play Hyman who is Creon's son and is betrothed to be married to Antigone arrives and tries to persuade his father that he's doing the wrong thing

and that although he believes he's speaking for the whole city, he's not. Creon is furious, Heimann goes off in a fury with him. Next, the old blind prophet, the celebrated prophet of Thebes, Tyresias arrives and tells Creon that he's polluting the city. Crayon is then furious with him as well, and Tyresias is goaded into telling him that he will be punished for what he's done. for polluting the city.

And that's what makes Crayon finally relent and decide to try and undo the things that he's done. But as a messenger tells, he's too late, he arrives at Antigone's underground chamber. She has already hung herself. Hyman is there and stabs himself in front of his father. In the final scene, Crayon comes back carrying the body of his son to find also that his wife in sorrow

and anger has killed herself. So the final scene, he's there, lamenting, admitting his mistake, devastated with a life that is worse than death, surrounded by the bodies of his family, the family that he had so underrated earlier in the play. How would it have been staged? Right, we've got a huge open airspace.

On the slope beneath the Acropolis, as he said, it's the sanctuary of Dionysus. At the bottom of it, there's a large, flat performance area. And the audience sit up the hill, 6,000, maybe even 10,000, of a huge proportion of all the citizens, which means the freeborn males of the city.

And the chorus and actors are down there in the large flat space beneath, where the chorus can sing and dance, the actors play out their parts, and the palace forms the background. So we have these individuals, about half a dozen of them, I take a nearer philence.

And now we have the core. which consists of how many people? All those individuals are actually acted by just three actors who the playwright had recruited the previous autumn. This is on a spring day. It's a huge organisation. It takes a great deal of team collaboration. They recruit the three actors who play all the roles.

They recruit the chorus, which is probably 15. They rehearse the whole way through the winter. So it's a highly rehearsed occasion. And then on one spring, day. Sophocles puts on three tragedies and a satir play. We don't know what the other two tragedies of that year were. We don't know what the satir play was. Lindsay, Lindsay, who, the play opens with Antigone and her sister, Ismene, meeting outside the palace so that they can not be overheard. Can you tell us what happens there, which actually,

in about ten lines, keys off the whole tragedy? So this opening scene, which is between two young girls, Antigone and her sister Ismini, immediately plunges us into the action because Antigone informs Ismini of this proclamation by their uncle Creon of denying burial to their brother Polonis on pain of death. And she asks her sister to help her to bury the body. Which would be massively illegal and she's, everybody's heard in the city, it's pain of death. Exactly. So it's to undertake an action on behalf of their family, but one which is absolutely fraught with danger and will almost certainly lead to their death. Ismini, who is fairly sensible in her approach to this,

points out that as women, they don't have the power to stand up to those in charge, and so she refuses to help Antigone, at which point Antigone who had opened the scene by being extremely friendly to her sister, calling on her as a sister, remembering their familial closeness, Antigone turns on her and starts to use the language of hatred towards her and says, if you don't help me, then I will hate you and our brother will hate you as well. So we get this very compressed scene which immediately introduces us to these two characters. It highlights the difference in approach that these two young girls are taking to the situation.

So Antigone is going for this transgressive extreme action. She's going to do something dangerous. She rejects the approach of her sister, which is a much more pragmatic and conventionally feminine in terms of ancient expectations around gender. a much more conventional approach because she is so determined to honour their brother by burying him. Can you tell the listeners about the age and circumstances of Antigone and her sister? Are they 16? They're from royal blood, so they've had what sort of education. Can you just fill that in a bit? So they are from the Theban royal family, so their father was Yudipers, their mother was Jakasta.

So in that sense, they are from the elite ruling family of Thebes. but in terms of status they are unmarried girls. They are clearly, they don't have husbands yet. They're meeting outside the home of their family. So in the sense that they are young girls unmarried, they are in a fairly vulnerable situation. Creon, who is their uncle, is also their legal guardian because he is the one remaining male member of their family.

And he's now ruling thieves as well. So he's the head of their family and he's the head of their city. So in both of those ways, they're in a very inferior and vulnerable position compared to him. Just to bring the listeners in again on the basic thing, she wants to bury Polynices, one of the two brothers. And he has led an army against Thieves. He has tried to conquer Thieves.

And he has been slaughtered by his brother whom he has slaughtered. Yes. So it isn't as if they're talking about an innocent man. This man is up to his armpits in blood, isn't he? Yes. And there are Antigone's approach towards her own family members is complex in that way. So even though her two brothers patently hated each other

because they killed each other, for her they are both her friends. The wedding Greek is philoi, her friends, her own ones, her family. And she sees no distinction between the two of them because they are her blood relations. So as you say, even though one of them was attacking the city was a danger to the very place

in which the sisters are living, for her that bond of blood is more important. But she doesn't actually extend that consideration to Ismini, who is also her blood relation, but whom she dismisses and rejects because she's not willing to help her. Edith Hall, what's Antigone's status there at that time? Let's say she's 16 or 17, probably a little bit younger, but that'll have to do for the moment,

unless you've got an accurate fix on it? I think she may well be younger. She's betrothed. That is the sort of thing that tended to happen the minute in Athens anyway. the minute that girls had their first periods at Menarchie, which is likely to be more like 13 or 14 than 15 or 16. What do you think a mistake was? Well, I don't think she made a mistake,

because I think the play entirely vindicates her. No, what does it say? I mean, a mistake was in the eyes of Creon, the ruler of... Because he puts forward in his first long speech, a very convincing, seems to me, argument for having a stable society run by stable, people like him who make good sound judgments like he does and so on and so forth. It seems to me that from the beginning she's attacking the society as well as him.

Well, I don't think he does make such a good case. The parent lack of any kind of written constitution or even functioning constitution in Thebes is very strange. He invites the chorus and says, you're just old friends of the family. I can rely on you to stand by me. It's not a formal Senate. It's not a formal parliament. It's not a formal assembly. He said, I individually are making this proclamation, right, without any consultation,

without any kind of democratic input, which will absolutely have been heard very loud by Athenian ears, that nobody is going to do this bearing. He keeps talking about anarchy. Anarchy is the great enemy, he says, and he's regarding this as anarchy. Now, in fact, burying your own dead is the exact opposite of anarchy. It's obeying the most ancient, common to all the Greeks, imperatives, of piety and social order. It is exactly the opposite of anarchy.

So what's his grounds for saying that this should be done? Because he is a monomaniac. He's literally taken power that morning because until the two young men, the princes were dead. They were the heirs to the throne. He is only there. He is as the brother of the former queen

who wasn't even from a top aristocratic family. And he says, I'm the boss now and I'm going to tell it how it is. Would you agree with that, Oliver? The thing about the play, it promotes debate. I only half agree, I think, with what Edith says. I'm half agreeing, John. I'm the same half.

I think in Crayon's opening speech, I think he's much more plausible than he is allowing. But he is then exposed as being a mere autocrat as time goes on. So I think it's not black and white from the very beginning. The rights and wrongs are open. But Antigone is not opposing him really on political grounds. She's opposing him because blood, family, comes above all, and it comes above power, it becomes above authority. She has such a strong bond with the dead

and with the dead of her family, and that includes her brother, whatever he's done. She never expresses any affection for any living person. But there's also shading because crayon's case, which seems so plausible at first, crumbles as the play goes on. I think actually in that opening speech, sorry, I have disagreed here.

I think actually the principles he puts forward for getting a city which has just gone through a terrible shock back on a stable footing would have sounded in some ways fairly reasonable. But as Oliver says, as the play goes on and as characters interact with Creon and bring him to make some really quite outrageous and vile statements and threats,

we see more of his paranoia, his propensity to see enemies everywhere. As the play goes on, as it progresses. I was talking about the first big speech he made. Yeah, I think the first speech is not too bad, actually. I don't think he puts forward anything there, which would have been seen as completely outrageous. You've spoken, we all spoken well about Antigone. She is determined to bury his brother against the law of the man now ruling the land and against the sort of law that has obtained. But she sinks as a deeper, older law, which is to do with blood, family and so on. And she is going to defy it for that reason. Can you start to tell us, starting with you, Edith then going around,

how that fires the entire plot? The great debate scene between Antigone and Creon, where these particular words like law and edict, are used by both of them, is the philosophical crux of the play. She uses the word law to mean the ancient imperatives of all the Greeks, right? They were called the unwritten laws.

She says there's the unwritten laws. These were things like, to booze against incest and the imperative that you are law to your family, that you don't break oaths. These are beyond civic law, right? They're encoded in the psyche of the Greeks at the deepest level. He uses word law, meaning a temporary emergency measure that one individual, without taking any consultation,

and it's made very clear to a democratic audience that he's not taking advice, He's not asking what the chorus actually think. Because of that, we get this idea, what is a law? Is it a man-made thing that one individual can set up? The word is nomos. Or is it something that is so deeply imperative that it is an obscenity, an actual inhumane, atrocious obscenity to countermand it?

And I think I personally believe, whereas Lindsay and Oliver are going to, give Creon a bit more time before he's revealed as throwing his weight around in an undemocratic way. I don't really believe that. The trouble is, though, that it's all compounded by the generational conflict and the gender conflict. Can we judge Oliver for a moment on that one? Yes, but whether you think the Crown has some justification or not, he is a man, he's in his prime, he has authority, and set against him is a girl, young, powerless.

Crayon, it's quite important, I think, in the play that Crayon has command of the military, and there are soldiers, you know, so she's arrested by soldiers, taken to her death by soldiers. So this sets up this kind of antithesis, which I think is deeply uncomfortable for the male in their prime authoritative audience who are made to experience the other.

the young, the female, the powerless. And this is part of what the tragedy does. It's not there to reinforce their values. It's there to make them think about them, to make them feel uncomfortable about them. Lindsay, Antigone and Crean often use similar words, but with different meanings. Can you give us an example or a taste of that?

I can. So this is partly going back to what Edith said about the way that they use the word for law to mean essentially different interpretations of that. We get other examples in the play, most notably in the great scene between the two of them, after Antigone has given her speech about the unwritten laws and Crayon has responded, Antigone responds again,

and then they enter a form of dialogue called Stichymetia, where they engage in line-by-line exchanges, so one character says one line, and then the next one responds immediately. And what that allows is this playing backwards and forwards of the same vocabulary, the same words, between the two characters, but with very different meanings. So when they're talking about who is a friend and who is an enemy, or who is good and who is evil, or who is worthy of piety and who is impious, they're using those same terms, but they're using them to mean two different worldviews.

So as we mentioned earlier, when Antigone talks about her brother, her Maimus, her one of the same blood, she's using that kind of phraseology to talk about similarity, to talk about this unbreakable bond of blood. she's using friend to mean the people who are related to me. And when Creon uses that same word in the next line or the line previously, he's using it to draw attention to difference. So that when he talks about friends and enemies, for him a friend is someone who supports the city and an enemy as someone who attacks it. So we can see in that exchange between the two of them

that they're using the same terms but completely different systems behind them, which mean that they don't actually communicate. They talk past each other. And also there's an element quite early on in crayons where he's not going to listen to a woman. A woman, he said this very straightforwardly, a woman will not rule, and I think he calls one of his sons a woman at a certain time

because he's taking against he, Creon. So can we discuss that for a moment? Creon's son is Hymon, which actually interestingly means blood, which draws attention both to the war and to the theme of kin. but Hymon tells him that this whole city is actually on Antigonist's side, that there are rumours running round. And Creon is incensed by this and says it seems that the man fights alongside the woman, is an ally of the woman, as if that was something shocking to be.

It's a very beautiful line. The gender issue appears to, it seems to absolutely incense Creon that any woman would try to get one over. This is his fundamental weakness, more even than the age distance. And to insult Hyman, he calls him talking like a woman. Yes, and in love with the woman. Creon clearly has a more than usual, even for an ancient Greek man, problem with women disagreeing with him.

He is quite incensed by it and says so, and he is deeply provoked by the fact that his young ward. I mean, he's her recently, he's suddenly become her guardian, that he's being shown up in public. as the legal father figure to a girl who was in public, flouting his authority. Not only that, it's in the background, but she is a child of incest. And there's a sense that she's something not quite okay about her. Really?

And you're a kind of dark, dark side to her that could be to do with inheriting her temperament from her father, which is raised once. It could be that she's born of a bad marriage. She's not quite right, and he's deeply incensed by all of this, but fails actually to get the chorus on side on that one. And that is really interesting, because it shows that there is a sort of middle ground of men who are prepared to listen to a female opinion at time. So I think that Sophocles is quite aware

that a certain category of man, especially one who wants power, is particularly concerned about being flouted by a woman, especially in public. Just to add to that, again with Creon's horror, the fact that it's a woman who has defied him, When he first learns that someone has attempted to bury the body, he says, what man is it who did this? So it simply doesn't even occur to him that it could be a woman or a girl who's carried out this act.

And then, as Edith said, he lapses then into these extremely gendered insults in the scene with Hymon. He calls him the slave of a woman, so even worse than a woman in a way. So we have very much his obsession with this difference between the two of them. So can you bring Hyman into the discussion a little bit more? We know Antigone, we know her sister, we know Creon. What about Hyman? So Hyman is the son of Creon and he is engaged to Antigone.

But interestingly, we don't learn this from Antigone herself. We learn it from Ismini in the scene between Ismini, Antigone and Creon. The sister. Ismini says, well, you can't kill Antigone because remember that your own son is engaged to her and actually they're very well matched. Antigone herself never mentions Himon by name. So she is not put off the idea of death because of any attachment to this fiancé. But Hiemann then does turn up on stage and attempts to save Antigone's life.

As we mentioned earlier, he says to his father, actually everyone in the city thinks that what she's done is honourable and deserving of a golden honour. What that scene does then is, I think, to bring out the worst in Creon. because just as he can't abide being defied by a woman, the idea that his own son, his own flesh and blood is going to stand up to him like this, is also intolerable.

So in the beginning of that scene, he says, I'm your father, you should follow me in all things, and Kriamon is initially quite respectful. But as soon as he tells his father that he should change his mind, he should be flexible, Creon absolutely flies into a rage,

insults him, and ends by even threatening to bring Antigone on stage and kill her in front of him, of Hymon, in front of her fiancé, at which point Hyman leaves and says, you're never going to see me again. So that character is used to bring out those autocratic tendencies in Creon. In that scene, he also declares that the city is his alone. I think this is when we see, as Edith mentioned, much more of that authoritarian side of Creon coming forward.

Heimon brings that out of him. He also shows up the similarities between Creon and Antigone, because when he says to his father, you should be more flexible, you should know, when to change your mind. That sounds suspiciously like what Creon has just said to Antigone. You need to know when to be less obstinate. Oliver. I mean, I think it's politically pretty shrewd that the politician who claims that he speaks for the people, claims that he is the personification of the people's will. Crayon. And as that is gradually undermined, shown to be wrong, particularly by Hyman, the autocrat

becomes more and more furious, more and more authority. He digs himself into the biggest hole in Greek tragedy against serial advice to the contrary, including gently from the chorus, strongly from Antigone and with immense rhetorical precision and clarity from Hymon who uses these beautiful similes from nature about a tree that bends with the torrent doesn't break. The ship's sail, when stretch.

Every chance he gets to actually say, well actually that's a reasonable argument. I will reconsider. You know, he gets three opportunities to do this. He doesn't. And he's absolutely determined that Antigone is going to die. And in fact, when Hyman leaves the stage, he actually says there's going to be another death today.

He doesn't say who. But he makes that threat. And you just thought most fathers, if their son said that there will be another death today, might say, well, wait a minute, why don't you sit down and we'll have a reasonable discussion? So he puts himself in the worst possible situation before Tyreseus arrives. Did you want to go in a line?

I wanted to bring in something. This is why it's such a wonderful debate play. It sets up so many issues. It's why it's the philosopher's favourite play. Something that we haven't brought in at all yet is if Creon is so wrong, if it's so clear, if it's so black and white, then what is the whole of the final scene doing there? why so much time spent on his regret, on his punishment?

If he's being utterly deservedly punished, then the audience sit there and think, well, I've got no time for this, you know, it serves him right. But that, I don't think that is the way that the final scene is played. But what he actually says over and over again is, I didn't deliberate properly and I didn't take counsel. This is the key word in the plane.

It's the word Boulogel, which is also the word for the Athenian Senate, where you deliberate together. People keep saying deliberate, take advice. He doesn't. He does say in the last scene over and over again, I didn't deliberate and I didn't take advice. And that to an Athenian audience is this loud, loud, loud, symbol. I didn't have the political constitution that meant that the danger of one man making decisions wasn't. diluted by proper consultation.

I think there is an overpowering political message to that. And that's why I believe even in his first speech where he says, I'm doing this alone, that is setting off alarm bells in a city which has a political parliament called the boule. He repeatedly fails, as Edith says, to take advice. But there is one crucial moment in the play, as it's nearing the end, where he does take advice. And that's after Tyreseus, the prophet has warned him that, before the days out, he is going to suffer a loss himself in revenge for this abomination that he's committed of committing someone who is alive to a tomb and leaving someone who is dead and buried.

And at that point, Creon does turn to the chorus and says, what shall I do? And they say, you need to go and free Antigone and you need to go and bury the body of polynices. I think it's the first time the chorus makes a dramatic contribution, is that right? It's most unusual for a chorus in any Greek tragedy to be the ones who turn the plot round. That's the extraordinary thing, that it's not actually Tyresias. He could have made him accede to Tyresias. He doesn't. He does finally listen to the collective of elders. Tyresius has mentioned too often to be neglected for any longer. But can you tell the listeners who Tyrese is, why is important and what effect he has? Well, you can share it between you if you want.

Start a for ten. He's a great figure of Theban myth. And there are a lot of stories around him. He's blind. But he wasn't always blind, but he's made blind. He's made blind. And it's the same in the Oedipus, in Oedipus the King. His blindness gives him some kind of insight. But here he above all takes the omens, and the omens tell him that Thebes is being polluted.

And it is, as Lindsay just said, I think the key... What are the omens? I know what they are, but what sort of omen? He has birds, and these birds are making horrible cries, instead of singing nicely. They're tearing each other apart. He tries a sacrifice and it all goes wrong, that all the omens are wrong. And I think the key thing that he isolates as epitomizing the whole wrong

is what Lindsay just pointed out, that he's put the living beneath the earth, where the dead should be, he's kept the dead above the earth where the living should be. It's almost a cosmic error. Meanwhile, while, Marnet is happening, Antigone, is being taken to her tomb, A stone tomb She's put inside and bound The crucial point In the play I think in terms of

You know reversal Is that An extraordinary thing happens That a messenger Arrives Crian has gone off We know that things are going on At Polynices

Now grave At the cave We don't know in what order We do not know what's going on And the queen appears right, eurydice. We never even heard that Creon had a wife. Nobody's mentioned that he had a wife

because he's not the sort of person who goes around talking about having a wife. And she appears and hears from the messenger what has gone on. So Sophocles was very famous for being able to use actors to listen. So we're watching her as she listens to the messenger speech.

It's one of the most beautiful messenger speeches in all of the Greek tragedies, though it's very horrific. We hear that the messenger had got there. Hymon finds that Antigone has already hanged herself rather than die of starvation. Hymon is there when Creon arrives, having prioritised burying the dead one

rather than letting the living one out. They have a terrible row, well, not even a row, contretel. Hymon at first is about to kill his father, but then turns the sword on himself. the messenger says this Eurydice has heard this that she's lost Hyman

and she just turns around in complete silence and goes back into the house it's a chilling piece of theatre it's incredible use of silence and this is what launches the very final turn of the screw the final turn of the screw

is the whole way that the presence of Eurydice as the mother of Hymon affects the very final turn of the screw. affects the very final episode. So we could easily have finished this tragedy with just the corpses of hymone and Antigone. Easily. Oh no.

Sophocles is going to step it up one. And when Crian arrives back with the corpse of Hymon, we don't know what he couldn't care less about Antigone in his arms, like Lear coming on with Cordelia. And then we have another messenger saying that Eurydice has stabbed herself.

So he's lost his wife, as well of his son, but she only stabbed herself after cursing him for causing the death of her other's son. We suddenly, almost at the end of the play, have to rewind everything we've seen with the knowledge that he had lost a son in the war somehow or other heroically the day before. And how is the audience to feel for Creon in that final scene? I mean, are they drawn to feel some kind of understanding, some kind of pity?

Yes, he got it wrong, but he's human, he's left with a life worse than death, or is it the politician who you always wanted to see humiliated, and there he is humiliated, trampled in the mud. And there's no mention of Antigone in that final section. The focus is all on Creon and on the loss of his family, and the fact that in prioritising the city and the concerns of the city, he's neglected his own family unit, his own household,

and he's now lost it entirely. So when did Antigone begin to attract the attention of audiences scholars and that as such a powerful, vocal, central point. Immediately. Immediately. Edithby, you may... I've written that article, yeah. It starts immediately having impact on other playwrights,

being cited in comedy, being re-performed. There's quite a lot of evidence of its re-performance. It clearly was an absolute hit, got straight onto the A-level syllabus. Why do you think it was so powerful in its attraction, and bringing the audiences in. I think it does something really remarkable. This goes back to what we said right at the start, which is it takes this myth which traditionally has been seen

through the eyes of its male characters, of Lyas, of Edipus, of his sons, of the Seven Against Thebes, of their sons in the next installment. And it completely refocuses it through the perspective of a teenage girl, which is a really striking way of thinking about this story and such a change. It introduces a character who becomes, instantly an embedded part of that myth. So I think the appeal of the characters that he's

created, that central opposition between Antigone and Creon, and the way that they're able to stand for so many oppositions, male and female, young and old, city and family, the divine laws, the human laws, that gives it an enormous, wide-ranging appeal. There's one other contrast, though, which is a consistent character against an inconsistent character, because Antigone would never change her mind. I mean, she's incredibly sad as she goes off to die. She's terribly sad about it all, but she will never change her mind.

Creon actually does, right? He does. So the bully, if they're going to get any glory at all, have got to carry on being a bully, right? They don't suddenly stop being a bully when their own interests are gone. So there's a deep... She has principles.

He doesn't. And I think that that's one of the things that everybody, comes away from the play with, even though you don't see her for the second half. But she's had the most moving scene of the play. Yeah. And we're talking 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 pull on the second speech of this chorus, whether it's almost like what a piece of work is man except written 2,000 years before Shakespeare? And can you just tell us about that and why it's so important? In between each of the scenes which promote the action, the chorus respond in a lyric meter with dance and music in a much more associative, less argumentative way, trying to make some kind of sense of what has happened. And when they learn that somebody, unknown who, has buried the body,

they have this four-stander song, which is quite wrongly, I think, called the Ode to Man, because it's an ode about the achievements of human beings of mankind. And the whole point about it is that there are three stances of the amazing achievements, technological achievements, political achievements, and then in the last stanza, but humans also have the capacity to go wrong, to do wrong, somebody's done wrong, and that's what it's all been leading up to. Ian is going to come in.

The ode is very specific that it's the man who stops playing due attention, to divine matters and the law of the gods who will fall and bring down all the great achievements of civilization with him. That, to me, is the moral of the whole play, is in the mouth of the chorus at that point. Another emphasis on the ode is that even though mankind, humankind, humankind has been able to master all of these different areas, the one thing that humans cannot master is death is Hades. So that, as the ultimate obstacle to the progress, the achievements of mankind and that is going to be demonstrated emphatically by the end of the play

when Creon is facing the death of all of these members of his family. We're coming towards the end now, can I go around the table and ask you how it has been reimagined in some ways ever since? Well, the Antigone is one of the most re-performed and re-adapted of the ancient Greek dramas and there are certainly a few particular versions that have become kind of landmark moments in that. one very famous instance would be the Antigone Antigon of Jean-enui, which is particularly well known because of the circumstances of its production.

So this is a version of the Antigone that was produced in Paris in 1944, so in Occupied France. And because the play is so clearly about resisting authority, about a figure who rebels, that production has been seen as having Antigone as a symbol of the resistance. and the crayon figure as a symbol of the Vichy government. So in that particular case, the historical resonances have given it a very, have made those themes stand out even more. Although if you actually look at the text itself, once again we get slightly more of an ambiguous drawing of both of those characters

than you might expect. In the 1960s, Nelson Mandela put on a production of this in a prison on Robin Island and himself played crayon. In the 1970s, the early 1970s, an illegal biracial group of actors, Athel Fugard, John Carney and Winston Stoner in South Africa, wrote a play, The Island, about the play being put on in Robin Island, right, as the ultimate civil rights play against apartheid. They could not do it in South Africa because it was completely illegal for them to act together.

They took it all around the world. And it was absolutely instrumental in raising awareness of the horrors of the apartheid regime. I think it was one of the few performances, productions that have actually been part of a major international world change for the better. And Sophocles would have loved that. And finally, Oliver. A production that sticks in my mind, particularly, was in the late 80s at the time of solidarity in the docks of Gerdansk. which led eventually to Poland casting off the yoke, so to speak, and Andrei Weider, who's best known for his films,

put on this wonderful production. Antigone, of course, in blue overalls, and Creon and the chorus party bureaucrats in dark suits. But it was the most terrific, him to freedom, and made a big impact in Poland and elsewhere at that time. And it will not be long before there is an Antigone set in Ukraine. Thanks, Edith Hall, Lindsay Coo and Oliver Tapplin, and to our studio engineer Donald McDonald's.

Next week, we'll be discussing Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Some would say the greatest work of art of his time or any time. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to have said that you didn't get time to say? I wanted also to take up the island.

partly because Mandela himself was in solitary confinement and didn't see the thing that sparked it all was which was a quarter of an hour performance at the annual occasion where the prisoners were allowed to put on a show in front of the guards and their fellow prisoners and they put on a quarter of an hour Antigone scene and that inspired Mandela later to put on this reading in which he took the part of Creon

as if to explore what it was have power. I know that the episode is about Softly's Antigone, but one thing I would have loved to talk about is some of the other ancient iterations of the character as well. So Euripides's Antigone, which presents a totally different version of the character. So we think of her as a tragic figure who dies and indeed her death is part of her characterisation. But in Euripides's tragedy, Antigone, she actually marries Hymon and has a son with him. So she gets a happy ending in that version of it, which I think is such a nice counterpoint to the way that we think of her purely as this tragic, doomed figure.

And I really wish we had that play. But doesn't she lose all meaning if she marries and lives happily ever after? Well, she still defies Creon. We think that it seems that in that text, Hemon joined her in burying the body of Polynices in some way. So there is still an act of defiance, but she has some help, and she has eventually a happy ending.

This is a great shame that play is that doesn't survive. That's another one. doesn't survive. Yeah, and we have the fragments of it. The fragments are not very informative, unfortunately. Edith. One of the reasons this play is so important is because of its very particular reception since antiquity, the, unlike many of the other plays, like Oedipus and Medea,

it wasn't really one that attracted any interest until the late 18th century. And it's almost exactly at the point of the French Revolution. where the issue of individual rights in a big state came to the fore and it attracted the attention of German philosophers. Crucial to the entire popularity and ubiquity of Antigone in culture and theatre subsequently are two works by Hegel.

One is the phenomenology, the other is the philosophy of right. And he was obsessed with Antigone, He used to help him formulate his whole idea of history as a conflict, a dialectical conflict of ideas, you know, state against the individual and so on. Matriarchy against patriarchy, family against government. And through poets like Heldlin, there was a huge cult, really, of Antigone, in late 18th, early 19th century, Germany.

This led to the great production of Antigone on the stages of Prussia, Paris, London and New York in the early 1840s, in modern language translations, that changed everything. Nobody had put on these Greek plays in actual translation. They'd always been adapted. So once that had happened, and in London at Covent Garden, it played for 48 nights,

which actually was an enormous record in those days in 1845. Queen Victoria demanded that the music, which was by Mendelssohn was played at Buckingham Palace. Ever since then, it's been a favourite in terms of operas, different kinds of play scripts. And the one modern version that we haven't mentioned is absolutely crucial

is the counterblast to Henry in 1948 by Bertoltzbrecht in neutral Switzerland where he absolutely no holds bar this was about Nazism. Right,

crayon for the first time was put directly into Nazi costume, as it were. And because of Brecht's version, that's the one that has really fired and lies behind most of the great subsequent, if you'd like, radical,

the name of Bertelt Brecht on it. So we should have put Brecht in the programme. Just something about translation, that this play enables so many different kinds of translation. And just within the last few years, there was the version by Seamus Heaney, the burial at Thebes, that I thought it was a very fine production of that

by the Nottingham Playhouse, and a version by Anne Carson and I'm not comparing my translation with theirs but there is room for so many different kinds of translation and the idea that there's only one good translation or only one way to translate it is just totally refuted by the richness of this play and it's very very hard to translate Sophocles

he was famous in antiquity actually for what we're called his plain words the plain words. He's quoted in quite a plain bit of the New Testament, actually the Antigone is. And it's the contrast between this very precise lapidary Greek, the spoken Greek, which is astonishingly difficult to put into sort of easy, natural idiomatic English.

And the beautiful lyrics of the chorus, you've just got these two registers sort of interpenetrating. And you can go either way. You can go high poetic, or you can go like Tom Paulins, the Riot Act, great Northern Irish version of it, where it's practically in Belfast Broke. You can go anywhere you like.

Well, another part of the afterlife of the play that really fascinates me is Antigone's role in the theory of politics and particularly in feminist politics where she has become an iconic figure. And there's been some really interesting work on the way in which she has been understood as a feminist icon, Also work on her sister is meanie. He tends to get slightly written out of the picture,

but it's increasingly being put back in. So with scholars looking at the way that the sisterhood between those two figures is presented in the play and what kind of models that might provide for actions of resistance. So I think that whole other strand of Antigone and her importance to the modern world is something which is really evolving and is really fascinating. And that has been fired by the other great strand in the reception,

which is psychoanalytical. And very many people encounter Antigone now through the works of Luce Irrigare and Judith Butler. So feminist psychoanalytical critics who say that she is the answer to Freud's selection of Oedipus. They said, What if Freud had selected Antigone, a strange girl born of a not heteronotive relationship

between her parents, who's never going to get married herself, You know, she's been very much identified by LGBTQ plus communities as a helpful way into psychoanalysis, particularly through the work of Judith Butler. And the reason why Erigaet took on Antigonee was because she felt that her master, Lacan, had written about Antigone in a deeply patriarchal way. Yeah, yeah. So there is a constant debate going to and fro,

and people, critics, psychologists, theatricians, all sort of bouncing off each other through it and it reflects the way that this play is so much a play of action, counteraction, argument, counter argument. It lays out the two sides with such complexity. And with such economy, and it sort of gets you by the throat from about the third line in a very short play. I never let you go. Right there at the beginning when Antigone puts the emphasis on, I'm going to do this, nobody's going to stop me. An important complication in the theology, if you like, of the play

is there are the gods above, the Olympian gods, the gods who look after the city, there are also the gods below, the gods, the phonic gods, the underworld gods, the gods of the dead. And it's those gods that Antigone feels a special loyalty to a special affinity, with. In what way does she justify that? Because her family, because most of her family are dead, and for

her what matters is that she will join them. She will be with them. She says, I'm going to bury my brother because I'm going to have to be with him for a long time and I will lie by him in death. One thing that I hope you can help him, I've read several times for this programme. It's quite short, but even though it's quite short, quite a lot of the space is taken by the chorus. If you take a lot of the chorus away, it's very short.

And how does he manage? How does Sophocles manage to put so much actions, so much arguments, so much philosophy, into such a sort space? I mean, do any of you know that? Because I thought it's almost like a miracle reading it. You think, this is happening and it seemed effortless. Another thing, another thing, another thing. Who's got the key to this?

Oliver? I don't think a key, but the amazing thing is that here are all these enormous. issues with the terrific ramification and they are somehow distilled into the particular into the particularities of these people. I think Aristotle can actually be helpful here. Aristotle wrote his poetics

about the art of tragedy the next century, 150 years probably after this play was produced. But he said that the core of an effective tragedy is plot. It's plotting. It's the organic evolution through probability,

probability of a total catastrophe, right? It's in human terms, despite the presence of the gods. And although Iskolas, who is the only predecessor of Sophocles' extant plays we've got, is a marvellous tragedian for all kinds of ways. Plotting was not his forte. I think we can actually say that the one who really contribute most to tightness, an economy of plotting was Sophocles, and it is Sophocles, Edipus and also Antigone that Aristotle talks about as the tight plotting in Greek tragedy. I've read the people who talk about him as a sort of great detective writer that you have to follow trails through to their end. And the Eurydice final turn of that screw seems to me the absolute masterstroke

that you've already been traumatised enough, but then you're going to get retramatized because you've suddenly got to flash through everything that's happened again just before it ends with a different lens. Well, thank you all very much. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Death by Conspiracy, a new podcast from BBC Radio 4. Gary Matthews was an artist and photographer, a familiar site on the streets of his hometown in Shropshire.

But in the last few years, he was drawn to conspiracies. And when the pandemic hit, Gary, who... who was suspicious of experts, ignored the rules. When he died of COVID-19, his distraught family and friends were left searching for answers. I'm Marianna Spring, the BBC's specialist disinformation reporter, and I've been investigating what happened to Gary by delving into the conspiracy underbelly of the picturesque town of Shrewsbury.

From BBC Radio 4, Death by Conspiracy. A new 10-part podcast series. Subscribe now on BBC Sounds.