1. Antigone: Greek Audience
The Greek audience would have been familiar with the story and the characters.
An understanding of Antigone’s family and her father’s fate helps to put the events of the play in context.
Sophocles would have only used three actors in the original production (a Greek drama competition regulation).

2. The Oedipus Myth
Oedipus was born of Jocasta and Laius (the rulers of Thebes), a great but star-crossed family.
Prophecy warns that the boy would grow up to murder his father and marry his mother.
See handout.

3. Antigone Summary
In the battle for the throne of Thebes, Antigone’s brothers Eteocles and Polyneices fight for and against the city.
Creon, king of Thebes, gives Eteocles a soldier’s funeral, but decrees that Polyneices’ body remain unburied.
Antigone defies the decree, without Ismene's help, and buries the body.

4. Summary continued
After a sentry rats out Antigone, Creon then condemns both Antigone and Ismene to death.
He later changes his mind about Ismene, and locks Antigone away in a stone vault.
Haemon, Creon’s son, who is in love with Antigone, pleads with his father to do the right move, but Creon ignores this plea.

5. Summary continued
The blind prophet Tiresias then proves that “the gods” are on Antigone’s side, and he warns Creon of his immoral actions.
Creon then changes his tune, but upon going to actually bury Polyneices himself, Haemon attacks him and then kills himself.
When the news of this spreads, Creon’s wife, Eurydice, kills herself, and Creon is left utterly alone at the end of the play.

6. Conflicts in Antigone Man versus Man Man versus the environment
Man versus the supernatural
Man versus himself.

7. Issues in Antigone Families torn apart by political differences,
Overall family dysfunction,
Gender bias,
The death penalty,
Suicide,
Fate.