Colonus

Despite its ancient origins, Sophocles’ play Antigone provides a case study through which to examine issues of politics, power, sovereignty, and justice. The final of Sophocles’ trilogy “Three Theban Plays,” the first record of Antigone is around 442 BCE, during the height of Athenian democracy. The play centers around Antigone’s decision to disobey her future father-in-law and king, Creon, in order to give her brother Polyneices, who is branded a traitor and is forbade a proper burial. One of…

Erving Goffman thesis on stigma was published in 1963, his work was titled, Stigma: management of a spoiled identity. The Greeks originated the term stigma to “refer to bodily signs designed to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier.” (Goffman, 1963.) The Greeks cut or burned signs into the skin of a criminal or a traitor, to create a blemished person, this individual must be avoided at all costs, especially in public. The Greeks definition resulted in the…

Creon’s belief in civic values The Burial at Thebes, by Seamus Heaney, tells the story of a defiant woman named Antigone, and a pompous king. Antigone has been sentenced to death by the king, Creon. Throughout the book Creon shows the characteristics of Hubris, by being arrogant, attempting to show authority to his family, and over exerting his power.Multiple of Creon’s family members die by exile or by suicide. This is due to the king’s Hubris and effort to prove to the people that no one is…

In the play “Antigone” by Sophocles, the author converses the thought of the tragic hero as the person who does what everyone knows is right, pays for it in the end. The character, Antigone can be classified as the tragic hero in the play because she goes against Creon’s law on burying her brother Polyneices, who died protecting their land. Paul Epstein 's, who wrote "The Recovery of a Comprehensive View Of Greek Tragedy" said, “only the hero’s experience of an opposed aspect of both human and…

Sophocles Concept of Eternal Law and Goods Shown in Antigone and Into the Wild In The Problem of Free Choice, St. Augustine describes two types of laws, temporal and eternal. Augustine believes temporal laws are made by the state and can change overtime. In contrast, eternal laws are laws that came about through reason. They can never be changed. There are also two types of goods, temporal and eternal. Temporal goods are not permanent, but eternal goods are. The concept of eternal law and…

The gods secured Oedipus’ fate. When anyone attempts to change their fate they do the exact opposite and trigger the events to occur. Oedipus caused his first ordained prophecy to come to fruition only when he attempted to stop it from happening. As the book progresses the reader reads how a man slowly comes to terms with fate and stops fighting prophecy. In Sophocles’ play The Oedipus Cycle, he creates the dynamic character Oedipus showing that no one can run from prophecy. The beginning of…

In the two plays Antigone and Trifles we see the characters in each approach laws and justice quite differently. Both plays center on a death, and in each there are two sides seeking justice after the death. I feel the plays present one group of characters who seek lawful justice and an opposing set of characters that want justice based on their opinion. In the first play, Trifles, a man has been murdered by strangulation and the primary suspect is his wife. The person who found and reported…

In sixth century B.C., a Greek Philosopher named Epimenides who is a Cretan stated, “All Cretans are liars.” This statement was the start of the liar paradox. The liar paradox is a statement in which it says that the statement itself or the subject who said the statement is lying. Other examples of this paradox are “What I am now saying is false” or “This sentence is false.” The reason statements like “This sentence is false” is a paradox, or contradictory, is because if that whole statement is…

The motif of vision, one that is effectively portrayed throughout the story, contradicts the visions of leaders and alternates the results of their impact on the society. Blindness leads to the downfall of any hero, it obstructs their judgements, which therefore, causes them to fail to see temptations and eventually fall into their nadir. However, the narrator witnesses the blindness of Barbee and Brother Jack, which he recognizes, but does not fully acknowledge it to prevent the same from…

Sir Gawain’s Shame: the Transformation of a Symbol and the Loss of an Identity In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the title character Gawain faces a personal moral dilemma with very public consequences. His moral downfall takes physical form through the symbolic transformation of the gift Gawain receives from Morgan Le Fay, a green girdle. Initially, the girdle is a symbol of protection; however, when Gawain breaks his contract with the Green Knight, it becomes a symbol of personal shame. Once…