Abstract

This song comes from Antigone's final moments on stage, ahead of being buried alive. Forcefully rejecting the chorus-leader's qualification of her attempt to compare her fate with Niobe's, she calls upon the chorus as the wealthy citizens of Thebes; ‘then, convinced that they have no word of comfort for her, she calls upon inanimate things’ – the streams and grove of the Theban landscape. The invocation of the city emphasizes her sense of rejection at its hands; her enemy is not simply Creon, but society as a whole, which has acquiesced in her punishment. Before calling on the city she appeals to her ancestral gods, which hints at a division fundamental to the play – between Antigone's birth family, for which she dies, and the city and its ordinances, which she defies.

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