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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend the Great Books Podcast, we're discussing what is arguably one of the best Greek tragedies ever written, Antigone by Sophocles. Set in the aftermath of a brutal civil war in Thebes, where Antigone's brothers have slain each other, vying for the throne. The play opens with their Uncle Creon decreeing to honor one brother with an honorable burial while condemning the other as a traitor, his body left to rot on the battlefield. We are joined today by two friends of the podcast to help guide us through the moral conflict that erupts when Antigone defies King Creon and buries her brother, a simple act that leads into a complex discussion on familial piety, divine law, and the Order of the Cosmos. Most of all, however, we'll look at the great female protagonist, Antigone herself, and examine her role as the dark sign of the gods alongside the threefold hierarchy of piety and a nascent concept of natural law. And we'll talk about what Sophocles the teacher wants to tell us about justice in the Order of the Cosmos. So join us today for an excellent conversation on the first half of Sophocles, Antigone. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. I'm a husband, father, and chancellor and general counsel for the Diocese of Tulsa. I'm recording here in rural Oklahoma. You can check us out@thegreatbookspodcast.com where we have several articles and guides and all kind of resources to help you understand the great Books. And you can follow us on X, formerly known as Twitter, YouTube, and support us at Patreon. Today we have several guests returning. A great friend of the podcast, we have Dr. Frank Hrabowski, who's serves as a professor of philosophy at Roger State University and also is a diaconate candidate. Dr. Grabowski, how are you doing?
- [02:06]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
I'm doing very well. Also, I am renewing my teaching association with the Classical School at the Cathedral.
- [02:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So I'm very happy about you thinking about it. Yeah, we are very happy to have you there. You are a. My jargon might be off. You're a third Order Franciscan.
- [02:22]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Third Order Franciscan, yes.
- [02:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The secular, yeah, yeah. No, Wonderful.
- [02:27]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Yeah. I made my profession earlier this year, so I was really excited about that.
- [02:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, congratulations. And also returning to the podcast, we have Mr. David Niles, a co host with Adam Minahan on the Catholic man show and also a member of our Sunday Great Books reading group. David, how you doing?
- [02:47]
David Niles
I'm doing great. Happy to be here.
- [02:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Have you been with us since we finished the Odyssey? Was that the last time you came on?
- [02:54]
David Niles
Yes, that was my last. That was my last time.
- [02:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You just gave us so much wisdom on the episode. We had to bask in it for a while before you came back.
- [03:01]
David Niles
You know, didn't want to do too much.
- [03:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. No, we're happy to have you back. How's the farm doing?
- [03:07]
David Niles
The farm is going really well. So for people who don't know, I am a. My day job, I'm a financial advisor, but I have a hobby farm, homestead. Sort of like you, Deacon. I've got pigs, cows, chickens, plants. Pigs are new this year, so that's been a big learning experience I've made. I've definitely made a good handful of mistakes when it comes to the pigs, but, you know, that's part of the. Just telling my dad the other day, like, everything I do here, I'm doing for the first time. I just have, like, no idea what to expect, how it should be going, you know, but the everything's. I feel like things are really on the upswing right now.
- [03:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's good. Yeah, Things around here, we're moving along. We've got 25, 28 birds outside in a mobile coupe. Most of them meet birds and so American breasts, if I remember correctly. So we're gonna. You're not.
- [04:07]
David Niles
You're not doing the Cornish cross?
- [04:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
We're not doing Cornish cross, no. Amy found. My wife. She found some other meat bird breed. It's actually. It's actually the French breasts, but they call American breasts, so they don't have to do all the regulations. So it's actually a dual purpose. It's a. It's a meat bird and an egg later, but she wants to try it out. So this is our first foray, talking about think doing things for the first time. This is our first foray into meat chickens. So I've got. Actually our whole farm went broody. And so my wife and I had this argument that she's only allowed to add one thing to the farm per year just because, like, you know, I have a job and I do other things. And inevitably she finds something that's cute and she wants it and it requires me to build a lot of infrastructure. And so we had this, like, then we had a debate because she's pregnant and we're about to have our fifth kid. And I was like, well, that's the one thing on the farm. Like, you can't add anything else here because it's a baby. Like the one we already have. The one thing.
- [04:59]
David Niles
We're adding a human this year, right?
- [05:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And I. I lost this terribly. And so we have, like, 50 birds, right, running around because I've got all the meat chickens. And then we have a little bantam hen that went broody, and she's raising 8 of her own chicks in an empty coop that I had. So we actually, like, sat on them, matched everything just fully natural, and now they're running around, and it's somewhat adorable to watch. Slash it is. I'm constantly worried that they're all going to die somehow, because, like, when they're inside and you take care of them, it's like, oh, they have the heat lamp and they have this and they have that. And then, like, she just, like, marches them through a puddle after they've been alive for, like, 24 hours, and somehow they don't die. I'm like, why. Why am I doing all this work? Just let nature do it.
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David Niles
Oh, it's so much better to use a broody chicken. So we have 21 chicks right now from a rooster that you gave us. Oh, yeah. Who died on Good Friday.
- [05:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. You guys ate him, right?
- [05:51]
David Niles
Actually, I killed him. But, yeah, I make the joke like, well, he forgot to spread the blood on the coop door, and so he got killed on. On Good Friday. Having a broody chicken is a huge. It's like a. It's a gift. Unless, of course, you want eggs, and then it's not.
- [06:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. It's a gift when you have, I think, the infrastructure to handle it and separate them. But then I also have two broody pilgrim geese that are sitting. That then stole all the duck eggs because there's no gander, so their eggs aren't fertilized. So then they stole all the duck eggs that are fertilized. And we should be getting a bunch of ducklings here pretty soon. So things on the farm are moving along.
- [06:27]
David Niles
Hilarious. It's weird and hilarious.
- [06:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Frank, have you picked up any animals yet?
- [06:31]
David Niles
No.
- [06:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No.
- [06:32]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
My. My knowledge of farming, I think, begins and ends with the nursing nursery rhyme of old McDonald's. So I don't really.
- [06:41]
David Niles
Oh, Frank, you don't have to know anything to get animals. Like, they will just. If you have money, they'll just give. Give you the animals. There's no.
- [06:50]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Well, it seems, as a Franciscan, I should somehow be obligated to own at least some. I do have a cat, but it's just a pet inside. It's not an eating cat.
- [07:02]
David Niles
It doesn't lay eggs or anything.
- [07:04]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Doesn't it lay eggs? No, it just consumes.
- [07:06]
David Niles
It's not a meat cat. No, no, no.
- [07:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
We're moving on. We are moving on.
- [07:13]
David Niles
People do with rabbits. Rabbits are like super cute and, you know, people eat them.
- [07:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, my daughter wants to do some of that for 4H. We're figuring it out. So anyway, today you're going to hear a bunch of guys from rural. Ok, chickens and geese tell you about Antigone, a play by Sophocles. So just a little sketch on him. Sophocles was born outside of Athens in 496 B.C. so he is younger than Aeschylus. If you've been following us through our podcast on first the Year of Homer and then kind of working through the Greek poetics, we did Hesiod and then we did Aeschylus, and now we are onto Sophocles. He also held public offices, both civil and in the military. He was actually a general at one point, if you remember. Aeschylus also was in the military, fought in the battle of Marathon. So again in Athens. That's very common. And so he kind of spans in his life where Aeschylus was looking at an Athens that was emerging into a nascent democracy, kind of out of tyranny and into a nascent democracy. Sophocles is very much seeing the rise and fall of an Athenian empire. He's seeing kind of the ris of this great nation that really does take a lot of pride in its more newly democratic spirit. He was also friends with Herodotus. We know Herodotus, the Greek historian who's actually friends with him. Notably, in 468 BC, the young Sophocles defeated Aeschylus for the first prize in tragedies. He wrote over a hundred plays. Only seven of them actually survive, which is somewhat depressing. He died around 406 B.C. at 90 years old.
- [08:56]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Impressive.
- [08:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
One thing I really like about reading the Greeks is that they just seem to be cosmopolitan, but in the absolute best sense of that word, not like in a negative sense. They're just very. They have very broad skill sets. So it's not uncommon that these playwrights also served in the military, which makes sense, right? When you're a small city state, pretty much everyone has to serve, but they served like with distinction as opposed to. I think we tend to be myopic today and over specialize. And it's just really interesting to read these guys who, like Aeschylus, fought at Marathon or Sophocles, served as a general. I think it lends a certain character to their works. That I think is pretty alien to us today.
- [09:34]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
I think it informs their works too, intellectually informs their works. I think that as we've seen already with Aeschylus, and as we'll see too, Sophocles, I mean, they're very wise. They have a certain sort of practical wisdom when it comes to politics that maybe contemporary Galvanists don't.
- [09:51]
David Niles
Yeah, I do think that there's something like, if you have to fight for your city or you fight for your community, it does make you think about, what is it about that city? What is it about that's worth fighting for?
- [10:07]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
They go sing again.
- [10:08]
David Niles
Right, right.
- [10:09]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, I very much agree. So kind of shifting from Sophocles to Antigone. So Antigone, the play is the second oldest play that we have of Sophocles. I think Ajax probably came first or preceded it. So we're looking about 441 BC. So, one thing I do want to parse out here that throws people for a loop is Antigone is the end of the story. So Antigone is actually the end of the Oedipus cycle, however, and we're reading the Fagals, so for those on YouTube, I'll hold it up. I'm reading the Fagals edition today. Fagles puts Antigone at the beginning, and he's right to do so because somewhat akin to, say, the Chronicles of Narnia, you should read things in publication order, not necessarily the order that things happen chronologically. And so I think that's one distinction we have to make with Antigone, is that we're jumping in here at the end of the story. The reason it's like that, because one distinction I would like to parse out is that with Aeschylus, we were actually, when we read the Oresteia, we were actually reading an intentional triad. Like you were supposed to read these three plays in order. They were written in that order. And you can see Aeschylus moving his audience through the kind of maturation of his own thought. One thing to notice about the Theban plays or the Oedipus cycle, as I understand it, is that these were not written as a triad, which is why Antigone comes first. He actually wrote each one of them. So Antigone and then the two Oedipus plays over the span of his entire lifetime. And so when we track and we read them in for what I'll call the publication order, what's interesting is, is that even though they're not in chronological order, if you Read them in the way that he wrote them, you see, and we'll hopefully kind of parse this out. You see, Sophocles own kind of philosophical underpinnings, right, develop as he kind of moves through the text. And so sometimes this throws people for a loop. And I've even met, you know, people that really like Antigone and they always read it last and sometimes it confuses them because some of the ideas that are Antigone are still kind of raw and undefined, but they seem more clarified and mature in the second play. It's because actually by the second play, that was the third play. Does that make sense?
- [12:23]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Yeah, this is a very good point you bring up, Deacon. In fact, this is controversial, but something similar can be said about Plato's dialogues, right? And there's a long standing debate about which dialogues belong to Plato's early period, which belonged to his middle period, which belonged to his late period, and somewhat say. Well, you can't really tell, but I would say the traditional view is to organize Plato's dialogues in that way so as to trace his philosophical.
- [12:50]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. And I, I mean, I realize it's somewhat of a mundane example, but honestly, this is a huge debate for the Chronicles of Narnia, like for those of us who have read them or read them to our kids, like, what order do you read them in? And it's because one of the English publishers, even the edition that I bought for my eldest, it orders them in the series, like, you know, 1, 2, 3, however many are, I can't remember right now, 7, 8. It orders them according to the chronological narrative, not according to the publication narrative. And so it really throws you for a loop because Lewis's own ideas are maturing. And so if you read them in the way that he wrote them, the way he introduces Aslan is like this big reveal. And it's very beautiful. If you read them in the chronological order, Aslan gets introduced very much earlier. And it's, it's not lackluster, but in his mind you were supposed to know who he already was, but you. But you don't as a first time reader. And so you kind of end up like stumbling over it. So the same thing here with Sophocles. I think we have to read them in the order that he wrote them so we can kind of see the contours of his own thoughts throughout the three plays.
- [13:57]
David Niles
Yeah, I totally agree, especially with the Chronicles of Narnia. You have to read it in publication order. I love the Magician's Nephew. It's like, aside from obviously the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is the best one. Everybody agrees on that. I think the Magician's Nephew is like. I don't know if it's my favorite. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is also really awesome. But the creation scene in the Magician's Nephew is amazing. I love the line where Aslan says, he looks to all the animals and he says, I give you to yourselves. It's just like, man, the. There's just a lot to think about right there. But I think also when it comes to this, as a general principle, you just have to look at what is the series we're talking about. I would say definitely publication order. I wouldn't necessarily say that for something like Star wars, because I think you could just totally skip episodes one, two, and three altogether. So I guess then you do still end up in publication order. If you're only reading, you're only watching 4, 5, and 6. And then I think 7, 8, 9 are optional.
- [15:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I'll leave the Star wars debates to my betters. I haven't ventured into those. So looking at Tigone kind of from a overarching view, just kind of as a preliminary, on its face, I think that what you were introduced to immediately is a moral dispute about burying the dead. And I think as we get into the text, I think there are a lot of issues that are deeper than that and that more at play. But I do want to mention, just kind of encapsulate here that it's a really interesting play to come back and read because I did my father's funeral this week. And so to come back and kind of see the importance of burying the dead. This is one of the things that, you know, my kids aren't that old. My oldest is 10, and the next one is 6. And so their experience of death is pretty limited. And so, I mean, this is one of the things that we. We really. That I particularly, you know, wanted it to be pedagogical for them and really, like, emphasized, like, well, yeah, I mean, grandpa has died, right? Grandpa died. But now there's like a duty incumbent upon us. Like, it's okay to cry, it's okay to be sad. But one, we have a hope in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And that was something that, you know, for the first time, I think had somewhat of a palpable reality to them that. That I can actually hope to see this person again. But two, then I think were these duties that we have to the dead, right? That there is a corporal work of mercy to bury the dead. And there's a spiritual work of mercy to pray for the dead. And what's so fascinating here, I mean, it really did seep into them. I mean, there's an image burned in my mind of my 6 year old who at the time, like, as a parent, you're trying to explain all these things and, and then I explain all these things are going on in the funeral. I mean, I did the funeral. So before, before the funeral, I was trying to explain, like, here's the. Paul, here's holy water. This is what you're going to see. You know, he just kind of looks at the casket and he's like, well, what is that? And I was like, oh, well, grandpa's in there, buddy. Like, that's, that's the casket. And we had talked about it, but like, the reality hadn't clicked. And that's when it, like he had a strong emotional reaction. That's when like the reality of it hit him. And he just like went and put his hand on the casket and I don't know how long he stood there, like, praying and thinking about, you know, his grandfather. And so, you know, you want these moments to be good for them. And I think it, you know, as a, as a parent, you're just hoping that they, they pull the right things out of it and you can, you try and do what you can. And I think it worked because, you know, at the end of the day, we came back and he told his grandma on the other side of the family. She asked him how things went. He told her it was a sad but good day. It was a sad but good day. And you know, I think here about like, the things that we've been reading and it was hard, you know, as I went back over this, you know, to kind of think of this kind of more raw experience, you know, because I was the minister at the, at the funeral, I did the homily. You know, I think there was a. I felt a duty incumbent upon me, you know, to bury my dad, to do the funeral, you know, myself. And so, which I think went well by the grace of God. But like, looking at these Greek plays, it was just, it's been just really amazing to me that, you know, when we read the Oresteia, you see such a strong tradition already for praying for the dead and that the dead can pray for you. When you remember that the children of Agamemnon are like, around the altar and asking for his intercession and making sacrifices for him, it's an incredibly Strong tradition of intercessory prayer. And then also, like in this one, we have the antecedents for the corporal work of mercy, of burying the dead. I mean, I think this book, on its face, I think one of these kind of issues. More on the veneer of the play is the moral demand to bury the dead. And it very much tracks according to Tobit. It's hard not to think of Tobit when you read this text. Right. And so it's just interesting to me that as we on the podcast, we talk a lot about that Greek reason, coupled together with Hebrew faith under Roman order, prepared the world to receive Jesus Christ. Right. It tilled the earth to be able to receive him. And it's just been interesting how strong there is of a notion in the Greek culture of our duties towards the dead, which really goes, you know, all the way back to Homer.
- [19:23]
David Niles
Yeah. There is something about death, as strange as this sounds, that is a bonding experience. I mean, if you just look at. Go back and look at stories that have been told, okay, even a Western, a guy might shoot his enemy, but still feels like he has a duty. You know, if you're out kind of, you know, outside of town, you shoot this guy that you came to do a standoff with, you still feel like you have a duty to bury him, you know, and it's, this was your enemy, you just killed this guy, yet all of a sudden, like, you feel bound to him in a way. So there's just something about it that when you're around, especially for the people who are there, when someone dies or someone or who's connected to a person who's like, there is something that goes beyond the natural world. There's no natural explanation for this thing that we all feel towards the dead, but it's just a universal part of our humanity that we know, okay, something needs to be done, you know, and different cultures have, you know, had different ways of honoring the dead or burying the dead. But it is a universal thing in every culture that when people died, they had a ceremony.
- [20:44]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think that's a good segue into Antiguany, the text itself. Right. Because that helps us kind of tee up, I think, the initial tension that we see in the text. So let's look at this. Let's actually turn to the text. As I said earlier, I am using the FAGL's edition. Is anyone using a translation different than that?
- [21:03]
David Niles
Faggles.
- [21:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
All right, very good. We're going with Faggles. I became very indebted to him during our Year of Homer. So right off the bat, one of the things that I noticed is the first line, and one of the things that we, I think, should be habituated to by now is that we need to pay attention to the opening line. We paid attention to this with Homer, right? This meant a lot when we looked at what is Homer trying to set the stage for. We saw this with the Oresteia. Every single play in the Oresteia opened up with a prayer, right? Some kind of appeal to the divine. There's like a strong contrast here because Antigone starts as follows. My own flesh and blood, dear sister Ismene. How many griefs are father Oedipus handed down? And so it starts off actually not with an invocation to the gods, but a comment about human flesh, right? About very humanity, about the family, about descendants. And all of a sudden, I think you're getting a very different tone here, that something is going to be very much rooted in our humanity is going to be explored in this play.
- [22:09]
David Niles
Yeah. To me also, what comes out to me is the ties of family, my own flesh and blood. And then here in this first line, she says, my own flesh and blood specifically invokes her sister and her father. You know, so this idea of family, the duty that we have to each other as family members, to me, that. That's a really something that jumps out at me.
- [22:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So let's look at the tension, right? So let's parse out what is the tension that we see at the beginning of the play. So in Fagals, if you look at line, what is this like 26. Antigone parses this out for us because one of the things, you know, as we kind of gone through all these Greek poetics, is that the opening of the play has to give the context, right? They're searching for, trying to give the context to the audience of what are we actually discussing. And so Antigone is going to let them know where they are in the Oedipus story, because that's probably something we should actually mention, is that Sophocles doesn't invent this tale. This is a tale that's been handed down from antiquity. Obviously, I think he has some poetic license, like Homer does or Hesiod does, but it's not a tale that he invented. His audience is going to know kind of what's happened here. And so the tension, just like as a high level, is that Antigone's two brothers, right, Oedipus is dead, their father is dead, the king of Thebes, the two brothers, then basically are in a civil war for the throne of Thebes. They kill each other on the battlefield. And this is going to go into again. This is a tragedy. This family is cursed. And so this curse just keeps multiplying. So the two brothers are dead, and their two sisters, Antigone and Ismene, right, are still living. And they're lamenting that the two brothers have died and their uncle, which is. Make sure I get this right. Uncle Creon is Jocasta, the mother's brother, who is also their grandmother. So if you don't know about the Oedipus, how this works is that Oedipus, how do we say this, accidentally married his own mother. And so the four children that we've just discussed, the two brothers and the two sisters, all come from Oedipus accidentally marrying his mother. And so the mother's brother is Creon. And so when the two brothers kill each other on the battlefield and the two sisters are lamenting, Creon, the uncle has issued a decree. And the decree is that the one that he saw as the traitor, the one that he saw as the traitor to Thebes, this is what Polynices.
- [24:44]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Yes.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
The decree is that no one can bury him, that he is to be left unburied, no rituals for him to be torn apart by the dogs, by the birds, etc. Because he is a traitor to the state. And no one can actually break this decree. No one can actually go and bury him. He must rot upon the battlefield and.
- [25:06]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Be eaten by the birds and the dogs and any other passers by, Right?
- [25:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Correct. And one thing to notice about the family history there is the depth of this line in a somewhat comical way. Antigone's talking to Ismene and saying, like, we've got to do something about this. And she says, there you have it. You soon show what you are worth your breeding, Ismene, right? Or a coward for all your royal blood. So on its face, you know, it's just talking about that you're royalty, right? You're the. You're an aristocrat. Like, we have to do what is right and just. But also when it says someone worth your breeding, remember your breeding, well, that's also part of the curse, right? Is that their father accidentally married the mother and they're part of this. They're all cursed. They're all part of this incestuous relationship, right? So setting up the narrative here, Antigone, right? She wants to bury the dead, so she wants to go bury her brother. And so one of the questions I Have here at the beginning is what is Antigone's lens at looking at this moral problem? Because Antigone is going to try and get her sister Ismene to help her, and Ismene is going to say no. And so I think one of the things that we have to parse out is what is the lens that Antigone is coming from? Right. What is she looking through to see this problem? And what is Ismini's, and what does that actually inform about the text?
- [26:27]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Well, I'll offer up just some initial thoughts. So this is why, obviously, when you develop later, I think a bit more fully, but at least from the first hundred lines or so, it seems as though Antigone is being motivated by some kind of familial piety or duty, that she's doing this for her brother. Ismene, on the other hand, as we'll see, seems to be a bit reticent. She's. She's. She has some cold feet. She's not willing to do it. If she does it, she's going to do it, probably, I guess, yeah. I'll see if you see if you guys agree. For the sake of her sister. Does that sound right?
- [27:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think so. I think it's a good. I think that's a good starting point because I think that with Antigone, we're going to see that she's appealing to something higher. Right? So look at, look at. Let's see. Let's start at line. Let's look at line like 53 or so. Antigone says, will you lift up his body with these bare hands and lower it with me? She responds, what, you'd bury him when a law forbids the city? Yes, he is my brother. And deny it as you will your brother too. No one will ever convict me for a traitor, Ismene says. So desperate and Creon has expressly. Antigone cuts her off. No, he has no right to keep me from my own. So one of the problems that I see here at the beginning of the text is that we have a grammatical problem. Because notice, like all the words she uses, right, Ismina appeals to the law. Well, the law says no. And so part of the grammatical issue here is, okay, but what is the law? And how do we know if the law is actually good to follow or just right? When we say law, what does that mean? Does there have to be some backing behind the law? Is it just the fact that the king says it's a law? Sophocles, at the beginning, I think is inviting us to start parsing out some key words of like, well, wait, what. What does that word actually mean? Because I think one of the most obvious here is Antigone, who's going to disobey the king, says that no one will ever convict her. Right. As a traitor. And so, of course, the question then is, what is it actually being betrayed? When she's saying, right, it's a question of loyalty. So she has a loyalty to her brother. Right. I think a good working understanding here at the beginning is she has that familial piety. She wants to go bury her brother. And so she seems to be saying, like, well, I won't be a traitor because I'll go bury him. So the question is, then, is the king who's issued the law a traitor to something? If Antigone is not a traitor to the polis, to the city, is the king a traitor? Well, if the king's a traitor, then by what standard do we judge? And it's the exact same question with the three grammatical things that popped in my head were law, traitor, and right. She said to the end, no one has a right to keep me from my own. Well, what is the right based in? And so right at the beginning, I think Sophocles is kind of parsing out a lot of grammatical questions, and you're going to see that, I think, in this play, when Antigone and Ismene are going back and forth, we have to understand the lens by which they're actually viewing these terms, because that's what actually is informing their grammar, what they think that word actually means.
- [29:45]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
There no interior demons. But I just. Just to sort of add to what you just said, Deacon, if. If you move up a bit earlier to line 90, or I guess that would be 91, we see already an equivocation on law. So you've mentioned the laws of the city, the civic laws, but at the end there, Antigone says, do as you like, dishonor the laws, the gods hold an honor. So there we already begin to see this introduction of. Of a kind of attention or a possible interference between the laws that are being established by the king, in this case, Creon, and then the laws that the gods hold an honor. And potentially these are maybe incompatible or they're in conflict.
- [30:34]
David Niles
Yeah. This is what. I think the real brilliance of this play is that it sets up what I would call a piety triangle. It's not a love triangle, it's a piety triangle. So you've got the three. Three things pulling Especially Antigone, but Ismene as well, who's just, at this point, not quite as willing. Okay? Piety to the gods, piety to the city, and piety to family. All three seem to be pulling in slightly their own direction. And so this addition, like I said, I think this is the brilliance of the play, Antigone, as it forces us to walk through with these characters. How do they respond? What mistakes do they make? Where. What is the highest good? What, you know, to what do we owe our allegiance before other things? Right. So I don't want to get ahead of ourselves here, but the. The tension is. Is so palpable and so obvious right here off. I mean, we're not even a hundred lines in, and things have already gotten real stiff. You know, it's. I love this play because, Deacon, I think this was the first thing that we did as a. I think this is the very first thing we read as our great Books group. And so this play has a lot of, like, nostalgia for me, just because this is what we started with. But I'll tell you what, like every. I think everybody should read this.
- [32:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think so. I like a lot what you said about the triangle of piety, if you will, or like the tensions there. Because one way I would. I would describe it is that I don't know if, like, Antigone or Ismini, right off the bat, are wrong or right. I think one of the things that I'd like to explore is are they looking at the same good, or are they looking at a hierarchy of good but emphasizing different parts of it? So as opposed to, like, one's wrong, one's right, or are they just looking at particular parts of that kind of threefold piety? So that goes back, if you remember, all the way to Homer with Hector going back to Troy. We saw this very clear example, just like you said, it's a hierarchy, Right. The triangle is a good depiction of attention, right? But they exist in hierarchy. And so you have your family, and then you have the polis, and then you have the gods. And so we have to see which one of those are they appealing to. And so to kind of throw out a thesis here and let's see if it plays out. I think Ismini, in a lot of ways, interprets things according to strength and power. She looks at herself as the subservient. Right. She's the lower, and she has to be obedient and pious towards the higher, particularly towards the polis. Right. Particularly towards Creon. And I don't. I mean, you Kind of have to think about the fact that they literally just emerged from a civil war. And so it's not. I mean, to give her somewhat of a defense here. I mean, I think she's. The idea that she doesn't want to come in and rock the boat of the polis right after they just had a civil war on this, which could reignite things, I think is understandable. So if you look at her when she gives her speech, right, this is a. I think it kicks in pretty heavily around line 70. She says things like, if we violate the laws and override the fixed decree of the throne, it's power. We must be sensible. Remember, we are women. We're not born to contend with men. Then, too, we're underlings ruled by much stronger hands. We must submit in this. And things still worse. I, for one, I beg the dead to forgive me. I'm forced. I have no choice. I must obey the ones who stand in power. So notice these things that she. They're power dynamics for her, right? She's weak, they're strong. I think another thing to think about in Antigone is just try and write down all the different relations. And I really try to do that on the different reads through. So, like out here, you know, I've written like, you have women to men, you have sister to brother, you have subject to king. They're all pulling from these different relations, and it's the lens by which they start to view these things. And Ismene, I think, as we'll see, I think she parallels Creon in a lot of ways that I think she's looking at her role in the polis. She's at the bottom of the totem pole. And her obedience to the polis does, apparently, I think, in her argument, gives a certain amount of peace. And we're not going to rock that boat. Particularly right as we emerge from, like, a civil war. And I'm kind of stretching it a bit, I think, because I don't find ismine to be terribly empathetic here. I actually think there's a lot of ismines in life. If we shift to a moral read of people who say, oh, I can't do what's right, like, I'm powerless. I don't have the strength to do that. I think it's a morally weak position, personally. But if you try and actually kind of like steel man, this a bit like, why is she coming from this? I think you just got to say, listen, they're coming out of a civil war. She doesn't want to rock the boat of the polis. And I think that's understandable.
- [35:20]
David Niles
Yeah, I think. I mean, if anybody at this point in the story is being critical to Ismene, then you just, look, look who isn't going to be her, okay? You're going to die. I mean, the penalty is death for breaking this command of the king. Clearly she's more of a pragmatist. Antigone is an idealist at this point in the story. And personally, I really, I really admire Antigone's, you know, oh, no, I will do what's right no matter what. Sure, it's going to cost me my life. You know, there's something very noble in that attitude. But for me to sit here and say, oh, I would totally be. I'd be right there with her, you know, like Creon be damned, you know, I'm going to bury my brother, you know, that's easy to say.
- [36:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
We always think that we'll be Antigone, right? That's what we always view ourselves. We always be the martyr. We'd always be the David before Goliath. But that's why I mentioned earlier is I think there's a lot more meanies in life, right?
- [36:26]
David Niles
Yeah, totally.
- [36:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Because notice the way she reads it through a power dynamic, she then reads that as she actually doesn't have a choice. It's not that she's not willing to make the decision. She says, like, I don't have a choice. And that's where I think that that does become very weak souled. Right. There's no spiritedness. So if you remember, since we're talking about hierarchies, we have our hierarchy of piety. You also have the hierarchy of the soul, which isn't as played out as it's going to be in Plato, but you still see its antecedents here. That man is a rational animal. He has his intellect. And then kind of the mid level of his psyche, of his soul is that spiritedness, right? The willingness to do the right thing, even if it's difficult. And you see Antigone pick this up and play this really well, and it's something that we need to look at. But his, mine seems to be more down on the appetitive. Right? She's soft. She's not willing to do this. And the fact that there's a power dynamic, quote unquote, robs her of her choice. And I think we can very much compare this to Antigone. So look at Antigone's answer, which I think encapsulates this. She says, you know, I'm not going to insist that you actually have to do this, that you're not going, you know, to join me. I will bury him myself. Even if I die in the act, the death will be a glory. I will lie with the one I love and loved by him. An outrage to the sacred gods. I have longer to please the dead than to please the living. Here in the kingdom down below, I lie forever. Do as you like. Dishonor the laws the gods hold in honor. So what is her? What would we encapsulate or summarize as her lens? Like, how is she viewing this as compared to its meaning?
- [38:07]
David Niles
You know, I think really, they're kind of viewing it the same way. I think they almost have the same perspective or the same opinion, but from different perspectives. Where, you know, Ismini is saying, I don't have a choice. You know, what are we going to do? We can't contend with these. And in some ways, she's kind of right, because their brother's body is under guard. You know, in some ways, Ismene is right. Like, she physically cannot go and in her. In her mind accomplish this, whereas Antigone is saying, I. I don't have a choice. I'm compelled by the law of the gods to go and do this. This is something that's required of me. I also must do it, even though it's going to cost me my life. And she says, I'm going to do it anyway. So I really think that they both. They're kind of different sides of the same coin almost.
- [39:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I like that. I like that because it tends to be what we've seen in tragedies. There's no lukewarmness, tragic plays. Right. Everyone just picks a hill and they die on it, and they die on it hard. So I like that comparison. They both see to be forced, even though one seems to be forced to a negative, the other one to a positive. Right. One to not act, one to act. Dr. Kabrowski, what do you think?
- [39:23]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Well, you know, this will probably come out more as we work our way through the play. I just have mixed feelings about Antigone, just because I'm not exactly sure what's motivating her at this point.
- [39:37]
David Niles
Me, too. I'm just trying not to let that show yet.
- [39:40]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
No, Well, I mean, I think it.
- [39:41]
David Niles
But I'm with you.
- [39:42]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
It comes out a bit in the passage that Ethan Harrison just read, because I think it's very easy to be sympathetic to Antigone and to depict her as this very principled, strong willed woman. And I don't think that that's entirely incorrect. But she'll on more than one occasion refer to the great glory that she'll earn as a result of this action. And if we move a bit further, Ismini says, you know, well, I'll help you and I'll, you know, don't tell anybody. We won't tell anybody. We'll keep it a secret. And Antigone is very resolute. She says, well, shut it from the rooftops. And so I begin to wonder, you know, is she doing this for the sake of, you know, being obedient to the local gods, or is she doing this for some other reason? And I just. I don't. And I think that's the brilliance, you know, among the other reasons we might.
- [40:40]
David Niles
Consider this play brilliant.
- [40:41]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
But Sophocles, I think, throughout the narrative maintains this sort of moral ambiguity in the character of Antigone. And I think that's great because I. I think he's made. He makes us struggle with trying to decide how to respond to Antigone favorably, unfavorably.
- [41:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So, yeah, yeah, I want to push into that a little bit. We can emphasize the negative and then I want to give the positive, but I think we should really push into it because I will say I love this play. I love this play and I mainly love it because of Antigone, the character. I mean, the first time I read this, you know, as a younger man, I mean, this was just Antigone standing up to tyranny and everything that was positive about her. And as I've read it later, and we read it in the diaconate Great books, we also read it in our Sunday great books. I do think there are questions that come up about Antigone herself and her motivation. And so I want to be sensitive to those because I think a lot of times, first time readers might have glanced over those, because I think there's a lot of reasons here to give a lot of deference to Antigone and to kind of read over those, particularly if you see her as the main protagonist, you know, kicking out against this tyranny and doing what's right. So on the negative side there, that passage, because I think it has hints and we can look at those hints. And so one of the things there. There's two things there, I think, that pop out. One is, is that Antigone seems to be incredibly deferential and pious towards her dead sibling and not towards Ismene. Right. I mean, she Pretty much as soon as this mean, he says, I don't really think this is a good idea. Antigone is just like, okay, well you go pound sand somewhere, I'm going to go bury the dead. And we'll see later that it's being like, oh no, I will help you, or I'll even help you take credit or these things. Antigone has nothing to do with her. So there's this interesting concept that I think that has to parsed out of. Why is Antigone so pious towards her dead sibling that seems to be so harsh towards the living? I think that's worth exploring. The other one is a double edged sword and it's what you mentioned, what she says. She says, even if I die in the act, that death will be a glory in. The first time I read this, I read this as a positive and I read it too as a development of something that we saw in the Iliad. So if you remember, in the Iliad we talked about these characters, these warriors, these men exclusively which were spirited and they were willing to die in battle. They were willing to face death. And this was being thumatic, the willingness to face death. And this is something that's akin to us as mortals because we die and so we can have glory in certain ways of the gods cannot, which if you remember, informs Odysseus choice to not become immortal. Right. It's something unnatural to man. So here, like in the most positive sense, it's interesting that we actually have a character that's very similar to Cassandra. In the Oresteia we have a woman who's acting very thumotic. Right. She's willing to face death. Penelope Homer even uses the word arete to describe her. She's excellent. But she doesn't necessarily show her excellence and a glory to face death. Cassandra and now Antigone do. And so I think there's a positive read here of like, look, here we see a woman being spirited, we see a woman being thumotic. Her thumas is well ordered insofar it's willing to face death for a greater good, which is burying it. Burying the dead. I think, though to your point, Dr. Grabowski is something to track is which I don't. I think it's nascent here. It develops as the text goes on. Is what is her real intent in burying her brother? And is she seeking death in a disproportionate or disordered way? So here it seems very kind of like. It is very spirited, is very virtuous. Human excellence of like I will face the tyrant even if it causes my death. But we need to see whether Antigone stays in this lane. And, you know, as we've already all kind of hinted at, there might even be a distinction between earlier Antigone and later Antigone. And that's a question, I think, for, you know, those of us who are reading it and listening for, like, maybe the first time is, does Antigone herself stay consistent throughout the play? Because I really like Antigone at the beginning. I really like her. She sold me in a lot of different ways. I think I even like, skipped a few things at the end because I just didn't. I couldn't reconcile them. So I'm just like, ah, they don't matter. Right? But we got to kind of parse into those. Right? The other thing, though, I think, like, in a very positive light that really can't be skipped over is that I think where Antigone does really well here is Antigone is setting the polis. She's setting the city and Creon's laws within the greater cosmos, right? So what is she saying? Remember earlier we worked on our grammar. Why can she talk about a traitor? Why can she talk about laws and rights when Creon says not to do this? Well, because she's setting this within the cosmos, an ordered cosmos that has the divine, the polis and then the family. And these have to be aligned. I mean, there's a lot of antecedents here to what we'll see become very explicit in Plato that your soul and the polis and the cosmos all actually align in this excellence, right? In this kind of pursuit of virtue and being well ordered and being just right. This. This virtue that helps things be proportionate and beautiful. And so Antigone here, I think, deserves merit because I think in the best read of it, she's taking this context and saying, no, we were putting Creon with. Inside this ordered whole, this cosmos. And he's wrong. And he's wrong according to the laws that even the gods hold to right. I mean, that's a heck of a line, right? Do as you like, dishonor the laws, the gods hold an honor. Notice that the laws aren't just the will of the gods, but these are laws that the gods themselves honor. There's something here that's actually just as like justice as a concept, not necessarily just like the will of Zeus, but there's something here that the gods themselves adhere to that just means to be well ordered. What does it mean to actually have this kind of beautiful existence. And I. I think, like, in the best sense of why I love her as a character, is that this is what she sees and this is what she's trying to act according to.
- [46:46]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Yeah. I would just add one. One more thing, and that is, you know, we. I don't think that we should necessarily take this. This choice that we put before, you know, before ourselves. Is antiquity doing this to honor the laws of the gods, or is she doing this for glory? I don't think those are necessarily mutually exclusive. You know, Aristotle writes about in his chapters on courage that the courageous soldier pursues a beautiful death, and that's a noble thing, that's virtuous. And so, you know, maybe what we could say about Antigone is that since she is a woman, since she is not a soldier, that this is perhaps the best way that she can suffer a noble or a beautiful death would be to violate the law of crayon and to obey the laws of the gods.
- [47:42]
David Niles
Yeah. And, you know, regardless of what her motivations might be, I think she's right. I mean, I think that she has the right answer here. That we do have our duty to the divine comes before our duty to the natural right. So if there is a law, you know, this is something we see in the Acts of the Apostles, right, after the apostles have been scourged, you know, and in fact, they tell the Sanhedrin, we, you know, we have to obey God before we obey you, you know, because that there's a hierarchy of piety, there's a hierarchy of goods, there's a hierarchy.
- [48:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right?
- [48:27]
David Niles
And so we need to make sure we're living in accord with that hierarchy, that we have order in our lives. So regardless of what her motivation is, I think she's right. One thing I would like to explore, if we have time, maybe, say, maybe we can save it for the end, is hypothetically, what if this was not a divine command to bury the dead?
- [48:49]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Exactly.
- [48:50]
David Niles
Who would she still be? Right. Does the duty to family or duty to the polis. That's something I'd like to talk about.
- [48:59]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
I think that's a great question, David, and that's something that I've long wondered is on where does she get her authority from? Right. In other words, she claims to have this privileged access. She just kind of drops. Well, this is what the gods command. Well, she's just a little girl, no offense. So she doesn't really provide any evidence that this is in fact the divine creating. And I agree with you, David, it may in fact be the Law of the Gods. But how is she able to access it? Typically, we don't think of teenage girls as, you know, it's. Usually it's some sort of priest or, you know, somebody who. Who is in a position of religious authority.
- [49:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, she's not a. She doesn't seem to be a Cassandra figure, right? So Cassandra comes in as a seer, right? She's a prophetess. And. And so we don't see Antigone playing that. I. I think that you could reverse that. And we'll get into this a little bit, which is you can give a defense of Creon, because I don't think Creon. Right. We'll have to see what is his lens, and can we give it a fence of why he's coming at it from this way? And when you look at him and Antigone butting heads, what standard are we actually using? I know what we believe today, right? But we have the corporal work of mercy. You know, we have a spiritual work of mercy, but how do we adjudicate in Sophocles? How. Who knows what's actually correct? There's a few things I want to point out here, too. In that same passage, you know, it's funny that Antigone gives this wonderful, I think a wonderful talk on that we have to honor the laws that even the gods honor. And Ismene just plays her role perfectly, right? She's like, I don't have strength for that. Right. She moves it back to that power dynamic concept, right? She listens to all this, but she still responds back from her lens, like, this is the role that she's very much going to play. And I really liked down at the bottom of line 97 or so take Me says, don't fear for me. Set your life in order. And I feel like there's lots of lines, maybe half a dozen lines in here that I think are very. They're basically a thesis of what's going on in this play. And I think this is one of them where. What is the order that we look at these things, right? We've talked about piety, we've talked about hierarchy of the soul, we've talked about this cosmic hierarchy, right? These are all questions of order, which in reality are. Again, once again, in a Greek play, we're pursuing justice because this is what the virtue is, right? Justice is the virtue that makes things well ordered. And so there should be a beauty, there should be a proportionality that cascades through the cosmos. And so each character is going to look at this from a Different perspective. And then each character is going to try and set their life in order according to their particular perspective. And we have to say, earlier, David used the term common good, which I think is an excellent term here. But each layer of the hierarchy has its own common good. Right. The common good of the family, the common good of the polis, and the common good of the gods. And the higher should always perfect and controlled lower. And so, you know, is Antigone just, like, absolutely correct here because she appeals to the gods, therefore she's absolutely correct over Creon. That's a question, Right, that we have to play out. Because I think that one preliminary question, maybe another way to phrase it, is this. What is Sophocles trying to teach us in this play? And is that distinct from what Antigone embodies? Or another way to say it is, who is the actual protagonist of this play? Right. That's another way to start ferreting this out. And we don't have enough evidence yet, I think, to answer that question. But I think, as a preliminary, those are some questions that should be in the back of our head.
- [52:32]
David Niles
Yeah, I think that's a really tough question to answer honestly.
- [52:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Another one of those statements that I think just kind of really encapsulates the play is at, like, I don't know, 103 or so. She says, I know I please where I must please the most. Again. Right. It's a hierarchy concept. It's I know how things are supposed to be ordered. I know that if the king is disordered, the polis is disordered, and it's not aligned with the family in the cosmos. Right. The gods, then I know where I actually need to do things. It's a wonderful, beautiful line.
- [53:03]
David Niles
Yeah. And I like Ismeni's response just once again. So on Brand, when Antigone says, I know I must please where I please them, where I must please the most. Ismeni says, yes, if you can. But you're in love with impossibility. You know, like what you're saying can't be done. We're not powerful enough to do it. You know, it's just.
- [53:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, she stays with the theme, the character.
- [53:25]
David Niles
The character development is just really great.
- [53:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Here it is. Let's look at the chorus. So one of the things about Sophocles, he does a few things that I really enjoy. One is that I think each chorus has a particular theme, and it's something that we can explore. I think each one has a pretty strong termative theme because I find that Sophocles choruses are very pedagogical. And that's where Sophocles, I think, is actually Sophocles the teacher, if you want to call him that, sometimes almost speaks directly. So once again, we have a chorus. Who's the chorus? They're the old citizens. So we're back to this trope, right? These are the elders of the city, if you remember, like in the Odyssey and also in the Oresteia in certain sections, right. The chorus is the elders of the Polis. The thing that I would point out here is around 140. It's a small point, but it's actually something that's interesting just for the Western tradition overall, is it says, Zeus hates with a vengeance all bravado, the mighty boasts of men. He watched them coming on in a rising flood, the pride of their golden armor ringing shrill and brandishing his lightning, blasting or blasted the fighter just at the goal, rushing to shout his triumph from our walls. So one of the stories here in very form, is that when thieves is being attacked, one of the kings that starts to actually make it over the wall basically makes this comment that he can do this and he doesn't need Zeus, right? Zeus be damned. Look at me in my glory. I've conquered the wall. And in somewhat comical fashion, Zeus just strikes him dead with a lightning bolt. The reason I want to point this out is that, you know, skip a couple thousand years when Dante the pilgrim and Virgil are traveling through hell and they get to the ring that punishes blasphemy. Of all the things in Christendom that you could choose to display blasphemy. It's actually this narrative that Dante the poet picks. And what's so fascinating about that is he puts blasphemy in the mouth of a pagan, right? He gives an example of a pagan being blasphemous against Zeus as the example of blasphemy in Dante's Inferno. And I think that, you know, that throws a lot of people for a loop because he very easily could have picked a Christian tradition. And is it actually blasphemy when you talk bad about Zeus? So there's two things that are, I think, at play. One is that by the time you get to, you know, the 1200s, paganism is dead. And so paganism basically gets reinterpreted as a collection of symbols to teach vice and virtue, right? There's no danger in actual Zeus worship. So Zeus then starts to become a symbol, if you will, of natural theology, of man's ability to know God without Revelation. And so it's really interesting that Dante the poet then uses an example of blasphemy in a natural religion in man actually knowing these things. If you remember, according to Aquinas, religion is a natural virtue. Man naturally wants to give God his due. He naturally thinks that there's a divine above him, that he has to actually, you know, sacrifice to. And that takes various forms in different cultures. But I'm just flagging the story, almost.
- [56:38]
David Niles
Like it's written on our hearts or something.
- [56:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's almost like there's a natural law, just almost like that. Almost like burying the dead. Right. There's something that we know that we. We need to do. So anyway, I just flagged this because this is a narrative that's actually going to pop back up in the Western tradition, but pop back up in a really fascinating way that there's a blasphemy, even according to natural religion, that is condemnable.
- [56:58]
David Niles
Yeah. You know what?
- [56:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Just.
- [57:00]
David Niles
I just love that Dante did that because I think that there could be a tendency to just write off the Greeks. Oh, they're just, you know, they're wrong about God. If they're wrong about that, they're probably wrong about it. You know, but really there's, you know, obviously, as we continue to expand on this text, obviously, because this is about the divine. This is a play about the relationship between man and the divine. And so we have so much to learn from them. And just, this is part of our past. Right. This is part of who we are, where we come from. So I really appreciate that Dante didn't just dismiss the Greeks because in some ways he brings in validity to their own perception of the divine by. Especially there, where he puts them as blasphemers. Blasphemers.
- [57:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [57:58]
David Niles
So I just, I've always appreciated that because personally, I. I think we have a lot to learn from their perspective of the divine. Even though it was deeply flawed. Deeply.
- [58:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. No, I think this is what St. Paul talks about too, sometimes. Right. That, that nature. Nature speaks in broad moral principles. It doesn't talk about in particulars, and it can get muddled sometimes. But as we read the Greeks, sometimes back through the lens of Jesus Christ, there's generally two reactions. One is to toss them out and say, this is bad. This is not good. This isn't what the Bible says. The other one to do, which I think we do, is that, no, you take a comparative look and say, well, look how much they were able to discover. That's what I was mentioning earlier, like the fact that they have this strong moral precept to bury the dead. The fact they have a strong moral precept to even pray for the dead. I mean, these are things that I don't think could be discarded. Light.
- [58:46]
David Niles
Yeah.
- [58:47]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I mean, there were Greeks hundreds of.
- [58:48]
David Niles
Years before there were Greeks who didn't know anything about Judaism hundreds and hundreds of years before Christ, who came to their own conclusion that there was only one God. Right? I mean, like, that's amazing. Like, I don't. I'm just not smart enough for that. I was growing up in Greece, and she's like, I don't know what they say. I mean, see the statues? I don't.
- [59:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I am going to mention, just because I know someone's going to comment on the YouTube video if I don't mention this, that there is an entire theory that when Plato. Because Plato talks about how much they pulled from the Egyptians. There is a theory that when Plato pulled from the Egyptians, he was exposed to Judaism, he was exposed to Hebrew thought in the. I am. And that actually Judaism has an impact. The Old Testament, I should say, has an impact on Plato's thinking that he actually received up through the Greeks, or, excuse me, up through the Egyptians. But that is. There's a lot of theories there. But if I don't mention that, then I'm going to get a bunch of emails, so I'm going to just throw that out so those listeners are now happy so we can move on. Okay. I said that there were two things in the chorus. One is the blaspheme. The other thing that Sophocles does that I think is really interesting is he. He almost always introduces a character before the chorus is done. And so before the chorus is done, someone comes on stage. And it's really hard for me not to believe that this is intentional. So notice we have a chorus about blasphemy, about the honor of the gods and what you're supposed to do. And Sophocles introduces Creon before that chorus is over, right? So here's this pedagogical movement, and then it's like, oh, by the way, here is Creon, right? And I think that should give us a little bit of an insight into where Sophocles is going to take the character of Creon.
- [60:28]
David Niles
That is pretty great, isn't it?
- [60:29]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It is. It's good. I enjoy Sophocles. So Sophocles, like Homer, right, is a teacher, and I think that Sophocles flows really well at times. So let's look at the opening of Creon. Again. So we kind of. We packed out Ismene. We packed out or unpacked, I should say Antigone. Like, what is her perspective? So let's look at Creon. Can we figure out where is he coming from? Because I don't want to just demonize him right off the bat, right? What is the particular. Because there's a particular good. What is the particular good that he's seeking? It might be disordered in the whole. But what is it that he's actually trying to do? So he says, my countrymen, the ship of state is safe. The gods who rocked her after a long, merciless pounding in the storm have righted her once more. And I really think, here's my thesis. This opening line encapsulates Creon. His lens is the polis. His lens, the standard by which he judges everything is the common good of the polis. And I don't think he disregards the gods. Actually, he mentions the gods multiple times. What I think is, is that he tends to interpret the gods through the polis. And what I mean by that is that why does he have this decree, right? Why actually lets this guy rot out in the field, this traitor? He doesn't see that as betraying the gods. Antigone's like, oh, you're going to disobey the laws that the gods hold sacred? Creon's not saying gods be damned, right? At least not in this moment. What does he say? Well, no. What would the gods want with a traitor? The gods don't bury traitors. And so he sees the polis, right? Was this person actually an adherence to the common good of the polis as the standard by which even the divine judges things. Because I don't think he. He does not see himself, at least at this moment. He also might have somewhat of a. Of an early and later arc in his character, but at least right now, right, he seems to think that his decision is aligned with what the gods would believe.
- [62:28]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
But isn't that what we would expect from a good king, that the king would govern on behalf of the state?
- [62:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [62:37]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
I mean, I. At least that's the way I see it. I don't. At least from this, from. From the way that Sophocles introduces Creon, in fact, near the end, he says, you know, whoever pleases a friend above the good of his own country, he is nothing. I mean, I think there's something admirable to that.
- [62:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, I think so. Well, because the. The common good of the polis is higher than that of the family. And what do we mean by that? Because sometimes you actually have to keep certain orders in mind in a certain way. The common good of the polis, of the state, is higher than the family, because if the state falls apart, the family can't function, right? So if the common good, a societal good, collapses, then the leisure, the flourishing, et cetera, of the family falls apart as well. So in a certain way, the polis, on that hierarchy of both piety and these common goods takes precedent. The polis has to survive for the families as a collection to survive. Now, that doesn't mean this is one of the tensions. That doesn't mean that the polis obliterates the common good of the family. Right? The fam. Does the family have some type of good that the state cannot actually invade? And now we're getting into a lot of questions that Plato takes up, Aristotle takes up, Aquinas takes up. I don't think we have the grammar in Sophocles to parse out all of these relations, right? Today we talk about solidarity, we would talk about subsidiarity, we would talk about even noblesse oblige, right? We have all these terms now to start parsing out how the different strata of society are actually supposed to interact with one another. But this is still pretty nascent. And so I think that Creon, in the best sense, is that he wants to save that ship of state, right? He sees the common good, and I think he thinks the gods have rocked it, but now they've brought peace. And he's not going to allow a traitor, someone who fought against that right to be. To be honored. I mean, another way to phrase this that I would ask is for those who maybe push back against Creon here and say, no, he's doing the right thing or he's doing the wrong thing. What rights or what duties do we think the state owes a traitor?
- [64:42]
David Niles
Right? Well, the state still owes a traitor the dignity of human, like, of their human personhood. Right. You know, I think that we see a lot of Creons today. I think this, you know, Sophocles had a, you know, brilliant insight in writing the character of Creon, someone who is really interpreting the divine through his own political lens. Okay? He sees his job, he's locked in, you know, like, this is kind of a normal human thing to do. The accountant is worried about accounting. He's worried about taxes, the investment. And I'm a financial advisor, the investment guy, he's not worried about your taxes. He's worried about, like, how well your Investments are doing like you, only you look through your sphere like, this is my vocation. This is what I'm called. This is my job. This is my duty. This is what I'm doing. And so I think Creon is seeing and almost interpreting his religious duty through his lens of his duty to the polis. And we see this today. I mean, there are. There are a litany of political movements today that you could. It's. It's obvious, are still doing this, where they interpret their duty, you know, like duty to God through their political lens. First. Right. And I'm not trying to call anybody out because it happened. This is. Like I said, there's a litany of these, but where people. It's like, oh, no. It's almost like their political opinions inform their divine opinions, you know?
- [66:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You know, and so, like, the hierarchy becomes disordered. Right?
- [66:31]
David Niles
Yeah. I mean, this isn't. It's kind of funny to think, like, well, I guess it was happening back then, too, but I don't know why that should surprise. It should surprise us.
- [66:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I agree. Like I said, I think that Creon interprets things primarily through the standard of loyalty to the polis, even when he thinks he probably isn't right, even when he thinks that he's actually honoring the gods. So he said just, like, two things to point out. So down around, like, line 230, 235, he says, never at my hands will the traitor be honored above the patriot. But whoever proves his loyalty to the state, I'll prize that man in death as well as life. Yeah, it's hard here not to see. The standard here is loyalty to the state. And I think that's the lens, that's the standard that he keeps in his head. And maybe I'm justifying him too much, but this whole play, in a lot of ways, is about justice. How are things well ordered, and how do we order things? We have this different strata. We have multiple hierarchies. We have piety. We have the polis. How do we order these things, and how do they become ordered if something becomes disordered? So let's take Antigone at her best, where, let's say, Creon is wrong to do what he did. Well, then you have the lower, the family, and you have the highest, the divine aligned. But the middle, the polis, is disordered. How then does the lower correct the higher? How does that actually work? And by what right can they do that? And I think that's one of the challenging things that we see in this play, is that Sophocles is trying to explore what does that even look like for us to do that? And so these are all questions of justice. How does this actually unfurl? And so notice, though, that Creon, in my opinion, is still very much holding to a justice of you love your friends and hate your enemies. I mean, this is the justice that we saw in Aeschylus and I think still endured in Aeschylus even throughout the Oresteia. At the end, even though he made justice more procedural, at the end of the day, it was still, you know, how do you adjust person in the polis, a just citizen, you, you hate your enemies and you love your friends. And a big part of that is, are they actually participating in the common good of the polis? Because look how the leader, right, spawns the Creon. He says, if this is your pleasure, Creon, treating our city's enemy and our friend this way, it becomes more explicit at other points. But I think this friend, enemy distinction, this kind of nascent understanding of justice, is very much animating Creon. And just as a reminder, I would argue this is an actual form of justice, because if you go back to Dante, the worst sin you can do is be a betrayer, right? Those are who in the icy pit of hell are the betrayers. And if you love your friends and hate your enemies, you're not going to be disloyal, you're not going to be a betrayer. And so that's the standard of that. Justice is the polis. And then Creon says, well, then what duty do I have to the traitor? None. Let them rot.
- [69:25]
David Niles
Yeah, no, I, I'm with him. And yeah, I totally agree with you that he doesn't owe much to him, because this guy did, I mean, he did betray him. He didn't only. He didn't just portray the polis, he also portrayed the family, right? I mean, because these are his, his family members. He did. Both of these brothers certainly were in line to rule. And so.
- [69:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [69:53]
David Niles
They were. I mean, it's like it wasn't these two brothers, they weren't just fighting against, or especially I don't remember the name of the one who left and was fighting against the city. I don't remember his name. He wasn't just fighting against cities, fighting against his own family members. I mean, it's like, definitely, he's definitely a traitor.
- [70:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But yeah, no, I agree. I mean, yeah, he. Polynice is right. Yeah, he's. He's not. That's another thing, right? These are also Creon's own family members. It's not just Antigone caring for a brother. It's also Creon making this decision about his own family because again, he's using the polis as that standard in this kind of primitive understanding of justice. And I think too, the reason I kind of lean into this is because, going back to some of your comments earlier, David, I think this also sheds light then on some of Christ's teaching in the New Testament and how radical they are. Because, you know, Christ actually mentions this form of justice explicitly, saying, even the pagans love their friends and hate their enemies. So I tell you to love your enemies. And so you see that this is the next step up. And so one of the things that. Not to push back on you too much, but earlier when I said, like, what. What is the duty that the polis owes to the traitor? And you're like, oh, well, he's a person. He has dignity. You know, we still have to bury him. It's interesting to try and make that argument from a strictly natural standpoint, right? Because according to the premise, justice, I don't love. I don't love. I don't honor my traitors, right? I don't honor my enemies. And you can say it from a Christian standpoint pretty quickly, right? Well, you're also supposed to love your enemies. And so we bury the dead, just like you said that this became ubiquitous in the West. So even when you watch a Western and they have a gunfight out in the middle of nowhere, there's still a duty incumbent upon the guy who kills the other guy. Even, like honor among thieves, they still bury him for some reason, right? This is something that's been needed into the west on how we treat a human person. But here I think that Sophocles is using it in a really brilliant way to try and tease out what exactly is the order that we have to appeal to. What is the justice, if we look at the polis in the larger cosmos, to actually say everyone actually deserves this type of burial, simply being, you know, a human qua. Human. So let's look at the. Let's look at the actual burial. So we get the sentry. The sentry is actually a really funny character. If we had time to go through all his, like, dry humor, it's actually. It's funny. It's also part of Sophocles brilliance to be able to put a funny character in the middle of a tragedy, right? And so the century comes in and someone has buried the body. So there's a few things that kind of pop up about this, like, what actually constitutes a burial, right?
- [72:24]
David Niles
And so this is a little bit confusing and I could see for first time readers because it's still. I mean, the thing is, like, I don't know what Greek culture and what their ceremonies were. So, like, why don't you talk about this for a little bit?
- [72:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I think particularly because we're used to very ornate burials coming from Homer, right? So actually the only person that's like buried is Ajax because he was a suicide, right? He's actually denied the funeral pyre and being burnt. But here, you know, from what I've seen in like the commentaries that I've looked at trying to answer this question, is that the burial, which is basically just the, at least, at minimum the sprinkling of dirt and these libations that are poured out for the people and the proper prayers, like that constitutes the duty towards the dead, right? That can constitute that they've actually been properly buried. And I think this is going to come in. We need to understand this of what constitutes the burial because we have to then handle questions later on of a second burial and why that actually occurred. So here though, what we get is that the century tells him that, you know, someone's done this, right? They sprinkled the dry dust on the flesh and given him the proper rights. We're not told who, and I think that's important. We're not told who. We assume it's Antigone because of what we know from the context of the play. It's interesting though that then there is this appeal to, well, is it the gods? Because he says that, you know, someone did this to keep from getting cursed. Not a sign in sight that the dogs or wild beast had worried the body, even torn the skin. And it's hard to read that and not think about Hector. If you go think all the way back to the Iliad that the gods saw that what was happening to Hector was unjust. Achilles dragging him around and taking him back, denying his funeral and letting him rot in camp, right? The gods saw that as unjust. And so the gods, if I remember right, rubbed ambrosia on his body, right? They keep him from decaying. They keep him a certain preservation. And actually I think Thetis actually does this to Patroclus as well, keeps him from decaying while Achilles is actually out seeking revenge. Until Patroclus comes as a shade and kind of haunts Achilles. And so there's this kind of. We think it's Antigone, but then there's like, this brought this kind of, like, broad notion, like, well, it also might be the gods that have done this. And this is actually made explicit then by the leader at realm 315. Right. My king, ever since I began debating this in my mind, could this possibly be the work of the gods?
- [74:55]
David Niles
Yeah, it's super ambiguous. And, you know, here later, I don't know if we'll get to it or not. It's like, well, was it antiquity? Was it even as Meanie who did it, you know, who, like, changed her mind? We just don't know. We just don't know. And in fact, it gets even more muddled here in a little.
- [75:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I think right here it is ambiguous. But what's interesting is, is that I think Sophocles uses it to pry open further understandings of Creon's own understanding of his justice and why he's actually just. And doing it. Because look at Creon's response. He says, stop before you make me choke with anger. The gods, you, you're senile. You must be insane. You say, why it's intolerable. Say the gods could have the slightest concern for that corpse. He says, later, exactly when did you last see the gods celebrating traitors? It's inconceivable. So notice, I think what Sophocles does here is he uses this for an insight into Creon, that Creon does not see himself as opposed to the gods. He's not playing this tyrant role, at least on its face. You know the guy, remember the guy who, like, crawled over the walls of Thebes and is like, you know, zeus be damned, I'm amazing, and gets zapped. That doesn't seem to be Creon. Creon literally does not seem to have the capacity to understand that the gods would care anything for the body of a traitor. So he doesn't see himself as being contrary to the gods. So Antigone can come in and yell at him as much as she wants to. He does not see himself as acting contrary to them, at least in this moment. Right. As he kind of develops, we'll see how he responds to certain things. But right now he's. I would say he sees himself as aligned with them according to those contours. The gods don't care about traitors.
- [76:38]
David Niles
Yeah. He's also constantly worried that someone is bribing people to, like, foil his ideas, which he brings it. Which he actually says here, I'm convinced that these instigators basically saying, like, somebody's paying people money just to go break my Rules because there's people who don't like me, that I'm king. He'll bring it up again later in the play with. When one of the prophets comes in, he's just. It is certainly one of the themes with Creon that he's worried about people bribing people to break his rules.
- [77:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But I think he. One thing I would mention there is that because he can't see a higher rationale, right? So the polis is in the middle. So he can't see a higher rationale for why people would do this, right? You can't do it according to the divine. The divine wouldn't care. So it somewhat makes sense that then Creon can look lower, right? So he looks to a lower reason, an appetitive reason. Money, right? So money is one of the main motivators of the appetitive part of the soul, Right. In Plato's Republic, the strata of society that aligns with the appetitive are the merchants, right? They want money. And so it's interesting to me that Creon is somewhat blind to the hire, which I think brings in a question Dr. Grabowski asked earlier. But he's somewhat blind to the hider. And so he blames the lower. There has to be a lower reason. So money. But going back to Dr. Grabowski's point of how does Antigone justify her understanding of the gods? It's the same thing with Creon. So both of them. Because I actually think Antigone and Creon are much more similar than most people give them credit for. So both of them are making appeals to what the gods want. And I think one of the questions is, by what standard are they actually discerning the divine? How does Antigone know that the gods hold this in honor, that everyone needs a good burial? Because that does not seem to be the Greek tradition, right? So, one. I think there's historical precedent for it. If you were a traitor, you just got left to rot. And if you look at Homer, I mean, burying the dead in the Iliad is a major theme. And if you got captured by the other side, they didn't see an obligation to bury you. Actually, they mutilated you.
- [78:54]
David Niles
You.
- [78:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right? They. They'll put your head on a pike and they'll chop you up. I mean, fighting for the bodies of your friends so they don't do something that's almost spiritually cruel to you is a major theme, right? Achilles is throwing guys in the river and laughing about how they can't have rituals. So where does Antigone Pull this from. And is Creon then? So I guess the question is, then, what does Creon represent? Is he representing being blind to what everyone should know, or is Antigone bringing in something new?
- [79:23]
David Niles
You know, that is a good question. This is one thing that I have wondered, you know, every time I've read this is, well, what was the cult of their time? You know, because for us to sit here and interpret their actions as good or bad, there is some important context that, you know, I don't. I personally, I don't have. I don't know a lot of these things about. Well, because when I read Antigone, I kind of just read her as. It's like, okay, well, this is obviously what everybody knew and what they all believed, you know, like, oh, the gods. When she talks about the laws of the gods, part of me just says, like, okay, well, I guess that's. That was their cult. And so I actually didn't ask myself, you know, where is she getting this for? You know, under what authority is she making these? I just kind of assumed, like, well, maybe this is just. But that the context that will really color who's good, you know, like, the behavior on both sides. I don't know. So if you guys have any insight into that, I would love to. Love to hear it.
- [80:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I think in a lot of ways, we have to see that, you know, their religion is not a revealed religion. Say, like, here's holy scripture, X, Y, and Z. So their mythology is constantly evolving. And, I mean, there's a lot of questions, too, even at this time period, as we definitely move into Plato, of how much the aristocracy of Athens is still actually believing in the pantheon. I mean, even Aeschylus has really flirted already, right? So even the Oresteia, he refers to Zeus as the nameless, like, this nameless deity. Right. I'll call you Zeus if that's what you want me to call. So he's already questioning whether Zeus is actually just a symbol of a larger divine behind him, you know, which is something that we simply just don't see in Hesiod and even in Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, which we discussed here on the podcast, I mean, he takes a lot of liberties to even set up Zeus as, like, a tyrant. And so, you know, because in a similar fashion with Antigone and Creon, both appealing to what the gods want, they talk about the gods like they're monolithic. Well, anyone that's read Homer knows the gods are constantly at war with one another, and they're also Capricious, they can tell you that that's what they want one day and not the next day. And so I think there is a maturation in Greek thought during this time period that starts to unify the divine insofar as, like, you know, is the divine something more monolithic? Is there really like a nameless divine, something that actually, you know, I think we can appeal to as a universal standard as opposed to, like this fractured concept, because you're going to see this by the time you get the Plato that a lot of the aristocrats have lost faith in the pantheon, right? They're looking for something beyond that. But even in Plato's time, you can't just come out and say that, right? You'll be guilty of impiety and punished by the state. So I think some of these questions to answer you, I'm not really sure if the grammar is there to parse them out completely. And what is Sophocles, you know, trying to teach his audience here? And I think the idea that teaching your audience that there are these divine laws that even the gods honor is maybe something new. I mean, there are people who read this who will say that this is the first real. Even though it's very nascent and incipient, this is the very first articulation of something that comes close to natural law, that there's actually a law that even the gods obey. I think that's pretty thick because rooting it in nature, I don't see it rooted in nature. It's rooted more in the gods than the divine than say, you know, in our human nature, even though the whole play does start off my own flesh and blood. But I do think there's something appealing here to do the Are there laws that the gods themselves have to obey? And that's something new, right? We don't really see that.
- [83:18]
David Niles
When I read that, to me, that implies, certainly there is an implication that everybody knows this, you know, that even the gods themselves obey these rules, these laws. You know, that this was somewhat of a common knowledge something because, you know, she's certainly not claiming to be a prophetess or a seer of any kind. You know, that when I read it, those are just the things that I was kind of assuming anyway.
- [83:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, yeah, I think those are.
- [83:46]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
My thought, though, David, is that if it's so obvious, why is Antigone the only one?
- [83:52]
David Niles
That's a good question, right?
- [83:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's a good question.
- [83:54]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
I mean, no one else in Thebes seems to think that this is a problem, or at the Very least, they don't. Maybe they don't have the courage to speak.
- [84:03]
David Niles
But also, she's. She's the sister. Right. So there's a familial, like relationship that, you know, that would kind of compel her to a higher degree.
- [84:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It was. My understanding historically is that this was the highest slash, most common punishment for like a traitor.
- [84:21]
David Niles
So if you would just be left. Left to the birds and dogs.
- [84:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, you'd just be left. So this. So I don't think, I mean, again, not to go outside my own ambit, but like, I think my understanding of this is that Antigone's viewpoint is somewhat radical. Okay, right. That it's. That it's not everyone, not everyone's sitting here going, antigone is the hero and we should bury all our dead. I mean, that a lot of people listening to this would be perfectly comfortable with the fact that the traitor gets left alone, that he gets torn apart. Because this is a practice within Greek society. So I think her appealing. I mean, this is where you have to look at Aeschylus, look at Sophocles as teachers, that I think they're trying to pull certain threads that already exist in the culture, but they're trying to weave them into something that they can actually teach their audiences. And here I think Sophocles is pushing, just like Aeschylus pushed the concept of justice from blood avenger to procedural. I think Sophocles is pushing his audience to understand, you know, does the order of the cosmos actually give a certain structure to our reality that binds both human and divine? Are there laws? Because that's not. That is not what we get in Homer. Zeus is not running around talking about that he has to obey certain laws. In a lot of ways, he is the law. And if you read it, if you read it strongly, there's not even a distinction between Zeus and fate. And so but here, now we get these different laws that even the gods have to obey. And I think that is something more radical that Sophocles is pushing forward to.
- [85:52]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
The car that you brought up, Aeschylus, because, you know, I was reminded of both Cassandra and Aegisthus, in killing Agamemnon, claimed to be doing the work of Zeus, that they are acting on his incense on his behalf, that this is divine retribution. So this really seems to be an ongoing philosophical or theological problem that the Greeks were wrestling with, which is to say, how, you know, is there a way of aligning oneself with this sort of divine or higher transcendent law? And what are we to make of that.
- [86:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So let's look at the. Let's look at the chorus. Let's push forward to. The chorus is a little bit before 380. So as I mentioned earlier, I think every chorus has a theme, has a certain pedagogy to it that Sophocles is trying to teach us something. And this chorus, I find to be very beautiful. So this chorus has a very famous opening. And all of us have fagals, so it says, numberless wonders, terrible wonders, walk the world, but none the match for man. So again, how did this open up? This opened up with an appeal to humanity, right? My own flesh and blood. This chorus is a praise of man's dominion over nature. And so it gives all of these examples. I'm not sure the whole thing's in a strict hierarchy, but it is moving towards a zenith and the highest dominion of man, right? His glorious achievement in nature is the polis. It's the city state that he's been able to create civilization right out of the wilds. And so you see this in the last paragraph. Man the master, ingenious past of all measure, past all dreams, skills within his grasp, he forges on now to destruction, now again to greatness. When he weaves in the laws of the land and the justice of the gods that binds his oaths together, he and his city rise high. But the city casts out the man who weds himself to inhumanity thanks to reckless daring. Never share my hearth, never think my thoughts, he who does such things. So I think there's a lot to unpack here. My thesis here would be is that what we're getting is the actual example of how the polis should function. The polis is the highest of man's dominion on earth, right? It's a civilization that he's created out of the wilds. But notice what he should do when he weaves in the laws of the land and the justice of the gods and binds his oaths together, he and his city rise high. So the soul and the polis can both ascend in excellence if it weaves in both the laws of the land and the laws of the gods. And this is what I think, at least right now, Creon is missing, right? He's missing the capacity to weave in the justice of the gods into the polis, and it's causing a certain disorder. And Sophocles, I think, here, in his own way, is giving us a good picture of what the ordered whole should actually look like, that the polis should be that intermediary between the divine and the souls and the families, right, that that actually gets all weaved together and then the soul and the polis both ascend to excellence together. I think it also shows you again, going back to the natural virtue of religion. There is no secular state here. There is no liberal neutrality. The state is a religious creature and part of its job, because it's a creature of man's nature. Man is by nature a political animal. Part of its nature is to help a man ascend to the divine. That's part of it. And so when Creon misinterprets, maybe might be a word at this point, the justice of the gods, it's going to cause disorder inside the polis.
- [89:50]
David Niles
So do you think that there is anything to the fact. You know, we mentioned before how in the. In the chorus and we were talking about blasphemy, all of a sudden Creon enters the scene here as we're talking about these things, about marrying the laws of the divine and the laws, the laws of nature together. Antigone comes in, right?
- [90:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And she comes in with a very particular opening, which I love, right? She comes in. Enter Antigone from the side, accompanied by a century. Here is a dark sign from the gods. What to make of this. I know her. How can I deny it? So I think the thesis I'd like to throw out is I'm not sure if Antigone is the hero, and we're going to get into that in the second half of like. I'm not sure that later Antigone is consistent with earlier Antigone. I'm not even sure if Antigone is actually the true protagonist of the play. But I am sure of one thing. I think she is what Sophocles calls her. I think she is the dark sign of the gods and dark here in the Greek. I'm not a Greek expert, but I did look at this because Faggles talks about it and others talk about it because what he calls her is very important, right? How does the author of the play actually describe Antigone? Dark here is not an absence of light. Dark here is. Means an ignorance. It means an intellectual Darkness Here is something that confounds you. It is actually. It's actually very similar to Christ, right? A sign of contradiction. Here's something that's going to come in and mess up your understanding of what things are. And I think that's why she's coupled that Sophocles just gave this kind of very beautiful picture of what the ordered whole should be of the Soul of the polis and the cosmos and how they should align together in ascendancy towards the divine. And then he enters Antigone, and I know, I don't know if he's really presenting her as an embodiment of that principle. That's a question I have. Does any character in the. In the play actually embody this true ideal? Or is she really this dark sign of. She kind of gets tossed in to what Creon thinks he understands, and she becomes the sign of contradiction. She becomes a sign of revealing his ignorance, even if she herself does not embody the actual principle that needs to be understood. Oh, the other interesting thing there is that the term gods there, I believe, is actually the daemons, right? Which is. Which might sound as a negative term, right, because if it's etymologically related to demons, but the daemons were like divine spirits. That's actually what Plato is. Or, excuse me, Socrates is actually going to say later on was with him, right, that he had a daemon that always spoke to him, that told him when not to speak and led him. It's. There's these accompanying spirits. In the. In the Symposium, the daemons are presented as these creatures that are between gods and men and serve as, like angels. They're actually like a Greek analog to a Hebrew understanding of the angel. They're. They're messengers. They're creatures that are between men and gods. And so here, right, she's this. This dark sign from the daemons, right? She's this sign of contradiction from these spirits that tend to serve as these intermediaries between man and the divine. Okay, so let's get into one of my favorite conversations as we kind of drift towards the end of part one, which is, what do we do with the second burial? So we don't know who buried him the first time. We didn't know. And so all of a sudden the sentry comes back in saying, look, we caught her giving rights to the dead. And it's like, what are you talking about? Well, she buried the man. And he gives the story, which is at like 4:51. And so he says, we went back to our post, those threats of yours breathing down our necks. We brushed the corpse clean of the dust that covered it, stripped it bare. It was slimy, going soft, and we took to high ground, backs to the wind, so the stink of him could not hit us. And then it talks about that there was this huge whirlwind which was probably sent, you know, by the gods, right? We took our whipping from the gods. And after the storm passed. There they see a girl, and so this. There's this divine windstorm. Antigone appears in the windstorm. And just so when she sees the corpse bare, she bursts into a long, shattering wail and calls down withering curses on her head, all who did the work. And she scoops up dry dust, handfuls, quickly lifting a fine bronze urn, lifting it high and pouring. She crowns the dead with three full libations. And then they arrest her. There's a lot going on in this narrative.
- [94:51]
David Niles
So, as you mentioned, we don't know who buried him the first time. We do know who buried him the second time. And this gets back to our conversation earlier about what are Antigone's real intentions, right? If she wanted to honor the God, like, do what the gods required of her, you know, fulfill her pious obligations to her brother, if she already buried him once, then what is she doing here again?
- [95:22]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, because that is the real question, right, at the second burial, is if she buried him the first time and it was her, then she knows that he doesn't need to be buried again. Right. His soul has received the rituals.
- [95:35]
David Niles
Yeah.
- [95:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And so then they've unburied him, I guess, if you will. But then there's a question there of like, well, does that actually really do anything right? Is that not on them? And so a lot of commentators talk about, like, the ritual's been done, Right. His soul has been satisfied in the afterlife. And so if that's true, if that's our running thesis, that she did it the first time, then she comes back to do it again, even though she knows it's already been done. And this time she's standing there and.
- [96:07]
David Niles
She decides to scream, yelling curses at the guards.
- [96:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I mean, you can start to read this insofar as what is her actual purpose, right? Is the purpose actually to bury her brother? Or is she actually decided that burying her brother is a proxy for her to have a glorious death, and for her to have a glorious death, it means that she has to get caught.
- [96:32]
David Niles
Yeah. So a couple possibilities. A, she didn't bury him the first time, Right? Which means somebody else did. So it could be either the gods, or it could have been Esmeeni or. Or somebody else. I mean, it could have been some random person from town who just was a supporter of Oedipus. I don't know. But if it was her and she's here again, then clearly her intentions are not what they seemed in the beginning.
- [97:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's what it starts to lend itself towards. I mean, I think we need some more evidence. If you have a very pro Antigone state, I think you can still push back against this a lot, because I think those who want to give a very pro Antigone reader are going to say, well, they unburied the brother. There's a lack of dignity in that. And so she goes back to do it again, and on the second one, she loses, you know, her control. And so she screams and so she's caught, right?
- [97:26]
David Niles
Yeah, I don't know. But that just doesn't. That doesn't hold a whole lot of weight for me because it's not like she's actually burying her brother. She's ceremonially. It's like. It's just a ceremony. The dogs and birds. It's like she sprinkled some dirt on. She's not stopping the dogs and birds from coming. Right. He's not six feet in the ground. This is not a real burial. It's just a ceremony in order to, like, bestow dignity on the dead. So if that's all it is, then coming back and doing this same ceremony again is totally pointless.
- [98:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think there's another thing too, here, because I think intentionally Sophocles leave certain of these things ambiguous. I think he wants you to start having some. I mean, this is the good writing here, right? He wants you to have some of these struggles. Because we'll see this later when all these characters come in. They're never actually 100% clear. And one of the things here, I think, if you actually try and play this out in your head. So, okay, he was buried, he had stuff sprinkled on him. They decide to unbury him, which means they just shoo off this dust. They say, by the way, oh, he's starting to get slimy. He's, like, sticky. Then there is a whirlwind. There's a big dust storm, which is big enough for them not to see Antigone and her to come in. But somehow the dust storm which was sent by the gods, doesn't cover him with dust. Even though he's sticky, Even though he's sticky, even though he's a slimy mess, he's not covered in dust. And so Antigone can tell that he's been uncovered. And so it's just interesting. I think Sophocles is intentionally being vague in certain areas, because what that does is it leads you to still question what was already questioned. Is that. Is the divine at work here in some way? Is this a completely natural event? And it's really Antigone behind the scenes, or are the gods actually kind of playing some type of role here? Right. Did the gods bury him the first time? And so then basically they provide her a way to get close to him without being seen. She wails, she cries, she wants to basically be caught. She doesn't try and do this in secret. You know, this is going to be her death and glory. And she didn't even do it the first time. But it's everyone's assumption, by the way, in the text that she did do it. It's Creon's assumption, it's the century's assumption. And one thing we need to point out is Antigone never corrects that assumption. So they'll talk about two things that she's done wrong, they'll talk about her doing it twice, etc. And she basically just tells all of them, I don't fear death, send me to my glory. She never actually corrects them. The same ambiguous response is with Ismine. So she comes in and says, well, I did it. But then when she says what she did is really in spirit, but then several times there's like she makes these vague statements about what she did. And so I think Sophocles is intentionally stacking on several broad statements to keep this kind of interest piqued. But at the end of the day, someone might have a different view. At the end of the day, I think Antigone did it both times, but I think Sophocles likes playing with his audience on this issue.
- [100:31]
David Niles
Yeah, well, you know, the truth is, we don't know. And I think ambiguity is Sophocles intention here. Okay? Another thing that he does is the century who is bringing her in is portrayed as an idiot and a coward. Okay? So this guy is not even. He's not even a competent. He's the very opposite of what you would expect and want out of a soldier. He's cowardly before the king. First of all, the first time when he was with the king, he said, I'm leaving and I'm never coming back. I'm basically, I'm abandoning your service. So he himself claims that I'm going to be a traitor, I'm going to leave, which is, you know, just more of the same theme. So he's totally a cowardly, incompetent century. So he is the one bringing all of this information. So I think that ambiguity is part of everything that Sophocles is presenting to you, because without ambiguity, there's nothing to ponder. It becomes just a story. And that's just what happened. And blah. Yep, she did it again. Okay, well, she's. She's dumb for doing it twice, but. No, I think he wants you to wonder about it, to like, make you. You know, he. Without the ambiguity. I don't think you're. You just don't have to confront these things quite as. Quite as heavily.
- [101:59]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Well, it also softens the view of Antigone. Right. Because if she really wants to be caught again, is she using the burial of her brother as a proxy towards a glorious death? Because the family is cursed, her two brothers have died, her uncle's on the throne. She sees an injustice. And I mean, I guess one way to look at it is you are the child of an incestuous, cursed house, and all of a sudden, in front of you is a chance to die in glory for the right thing. And one of the questions here is, does Antigone seize that glory in a disproportionate way? That basically there's no way she's going to go do the right thing without also seeking the death of it? Does she make herself a martyr, even unnecessarily, because she needs that death and that glory to reclaim her honor or even to achieve honor? Maybe it's not even a reclaiming, maybe to achieve honor as part of the family that's in this cursed and sensuous house?
- [102:58]
David Niles
Yeah. I mean, even though I said everything I just did, I am actually in the camp that you just described. Just my opinion. Everybody can have their own opinion. Mine is that she wants to. She's really seeking honor here because she knows her family has been deprived of honor. She comes from a noble. A noble line which should have honor. And it was. It was taken from their family because of their own. The misfortunes of incest and what and everything. And so I. I personally think she is pursuing this in a way that she. That she believes will be noble.
- [103:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And one of the things, too, I think we're going to see in Sophocles throughout the Oedipus cycle is that he really is trying to parse out the role of a suffering hero, of someone who's cursing, whose curse also is their blessing. And so Antigone here actually serves as more of a raw first take of him to articulate this type of character. It'll be interesting to see how this is refined as we look at Oedipus in the first two. And so it's not uncommon, or at least it's not. Something that occurs to me is that Sophocles you know, presents antagone in this way in somewhat of a flawed form. And I think that art of the suffering hero is going to be somewhat perfected as he kind of looks at the Oedipus narrative as a whole, as he kind of matures in his own understanding and writes on this, on this theme for the rest of his life. But I do think, I mean, I love Antigone. I mean, just even the character. I mean, this, this idea that she's the dark sign of the gods that's going to be thrown into this thing and be the sign of contradiction and take what is it? What is a disordered understanding by Creon and just blow up the whole thing. I mean, I love that, but it doesn't mean that she herself even understands the principles that she is fighting for, if that makes sense or another way to phrase it is. I'm not entirely sure that Antigone is the perfect embodiment of the lesson that Sophocles has in the text. I think she has her flaws. If you think we're being too hard on her, we might be, because we're looking. To be quite frank, I'm thinking of her as a whole. I'm not thinking of her at this moment in the play. I keep thinking of the later Antigone in the back half as really informing my own understanding right here, just to be honest. Like I'm not being intellectually honest enough to just track the evidence we have thus far in the text. So there's definitely, if you've read the whole thing, the back half certainly informs any kind of reread you have when you come at it again. And I think that's. You start seeing these signs that I don't think I saw the first time I read it. So if we look at Antigone, because she actually has right now, she's faced Creon, she's in front of this and she just does not back down. And she tells him, right, that there's this justice, there are unshakable traditions, and you as king do not have the right to override these. This is a big claim. It's still a big claim in Sophocles day, right, that the king is not concomitant with the divine order, that he actually has to be obedient to it. Right? It's not just the king makes the laws and that's, you know, quote unquote, the divine. There actually is a divine order that the king himself has to align the polis to. And so I think that She, I think she does this. I think Creon statements are chock full of irony. Right. The way he critiques her and critiques those around him. Sophocles makes him a character of irony that he's almost always critiquing himself. And so Creon ends up being somewhat comically, like inadvertently a comical character because he can't see his own faults. But he does, by the way, several times talk about what she has done twice over. One of the one examples is at 540. And so this is the thing, like you can play with these ideas that Ismini did it, the gods did the first burial. But what I always go back to in the text, even though I think Sophocles likes making things ambiguous to make us parse this out and be attentive readers or listeners at the time, that Antigone never pushes back when they accuse her of doing two things wrong. She never actually comes in and clarifies.
- [107:03]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
That, you know, it was mentioned earlier, and I think it does. They're repeating that first. That opening paragraph beginning at line 499, I just find remarkable in that Antigone seems to be really advancing a highly intellectual understanding of these traditions because she's very explicit in saying that it wasn't Zeus. So typically when reading Homer's epics, there's this question about, well, what is the relationship between the will of Zeus and fate? And Zeus really seems to be the one who's calling the shots. And, and here the implication is that even Zeus is obedient to these higher laws, that there are laws that even perhaps or traditions that transcend Zeus's dominion.
- [108:03]
David Niles
And when she says that, she's talking about it wasn't Zeus who made the law against burying her brother.
- [108:08]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Right, right.
- [108:09]
David Niles
Yeah, just right, right, yes.
- [108:12]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
So again, I find that at least, you know, we could, we can treat this as this is what Antigone's saying. But Sophocles putting these words in antiquities mouth, I think really does. It provides us with this evolution, at least in, I think in Greek theological thinking about, you know.
- [108:36]
David Niles
What is the.
- [108:37]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Relationship between the gods and the moral law? And of course, this will feed right into the Euthyphro dilemma, which raises this question about, well, is the just or is the pious what the gods love? Or do the gods love pious things for their piety, or are they pious because the gods love them?
- [109:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And so.
- [109:02]
David Niles
Right.
- [109:02]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
It's, it raises this question about, well, are things so because the gods say it or do the gods say it because it ought to be so I do. I mean, I'm not saying that there's an explicit here reference to the Euthro Dilemma, but. But I think that it's. It's not a far journey from this particular passage to what will eventually become Betzala.
- [109:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I agree. You're going to see for those unfamiliar, the Euthyphro Dilemma from Plato's dialogue of the same name. Euthyphro really plays off of this. I mean, even that earlier, when Antigone is making the argument that there are laws even the gods obey, right? That's something that Plato is going to lean into of like, okay, well then where do those laws come from? If the gods are subservient to higher principles, then how are they gods? And where do those laws come from? And so I don't think right now Sophocles has the grammar to do all that, right? They're not philosopher, they're telling these, or they're showing us these truths through story. And so, you know, the fl. But you can see in a lot of ways the antecedents to the philosophers. You can see why someone like Socrates starts to pop up in a culture like this. Who's going to then offer these things? Then Plato, who was a playwright, right, and burned all of his plays when he started following Socrates. You can see that then he takes that skill set that we see amongst the Greeks to create his dialogues and tell philosophy, you know, in a poetic way. So I want to look at antigone on like 560, a little bit before that. She says, you moralizing repels me. She's speaking to Creon still. Every word you say, pray to pray God, it always will. So naturally, all I say repels you too. So think about them coming from two different perspectives, right? They're representing two different orders. Not give me glory. What greater glory could I win than to give my own brother a decent burial? These citizens here would all agree, they would praise me too, if their locks weren't. If their lips were not locked in fear. Lucky tyrants. The prerequisites of power, ruthless power to do and say whatever pleases them. So there's a few notes to parse out here. One again. This is Antigone seeking death, right? And I think in a positive way, you can just say, listen, I can't argue with you, Creon. We're coming from two different perspectives. Like, stop moralizing against me and just send me to my death, right? Give me my glory and let's be done with it. So I think you could read this in a Positive way that doesn't make her seeking death too disproportionately of just like Creon. We're not going to come to terms here. We can't harmonize these two views. So just send me to my death. You know, a negative view here is going to lean more in towards. Is this what she really wants? She needs to be sent to her death. She needs to achieve this glory. Right. What better way could I do it than giving my brother a decent burial? Right. That she can gain her honor even as a descendant of this cursed house. The other thing too, here is the chorus. They would praise me if their lips were not locked in fear. Again, it's just interesting that we have such a theme that the elders of the polis, the men are so weak. We got this in the Odyssey with Mentor. Remember, the elders, they can't control the suitors. We've got this in the Orestaya and we have it again. Right. The older men in society which should be leading are weak. And in that weakness, they allow tyrants to pop up. Now, the question is, is Creon really a tyrant? Like, is that a true critique of him? Is that a fair critique of him?
- [112:40]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Well, I would say no.
- [112:42]
David Niles
Yeah, I mean, I think this is.
- [112:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Reportedly powerful and referring to him as.
- [112:45]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
A tyrant, but I think in sort of the literal sense of the word, no, you get. I mean, he's not. He's not acting for his own say, or at least, I mean, that's not the way he's presented. I don't think he's. He's acting on behalf of the people of Paulus.
- [113:04]
David Niles
Yeah, it doesn't seem like he's seeking his own power. He's not. He's not trying to punish this son of Oedipus because this son of Oedipus was opposing him, but because he opposed the city, he opposed the polis. So I. I don't think it's a fair critique to call Creon a tyrant.
- [113:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I certainly don't think he's an intentional one. So if you take a technical definition of like a tyrant is he who doesn't rule according to the common good, but according to his own will, then Creon might accidentally be being tyrannical on certain points. Right. That he. He's not actually weaving in the justice of the gods as he should. But I certainly don't think he's intentional. I mean, at this point in the play, I think he very much sees himself as being obedient to the gods. I mean, what do the gods care about the body of a traitor. I don't think that question has been answered for him. I'm not sure. And Antigone's trying to answer it to a certain degree, right? That there's unshakable traditions, there's this justice. I don't think she ever gives any particulars. Like, she never gives the story, like, well, do you remember the story of Zeus and such and such? And that means that everyone deserves a burial. We don't get that type of particular, but we do get a lot of appeals to broad cosmic and divine structures that then Creon should run the polis according to.
- [114:20]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Do you. Do either of you think that Antigone wants her words to be persuasive? Like, at any point does Antigone hope that she will change minds?
- [114:32]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I don't think so because of how my two points would be. One, she doesn't seem to be really interested in continuing to talk with Creon. She's not trying to reconcile the situation. Right. It's like, you're an idiot. You didn't obey these shakable traditions, send me to my death and give me glory and get me over with. And this is why I think people have that negative view that she's disproportionately seeking death. And what's the true intention behind her burying her brother? Why does she have to scream the second time and get caught? She wants the conflict. She wants. She wants the conflict with Creon. Because I think you can run that parallel with Ismene, right. Ismene starts to warm up to the idea of burying the brother and helping Antigone, at least helping her in some way. Antigone basically tells her to go pound sand. No, I don't want your help. Get away from me. And so she doesn't seem to be a figure of reconcilement, Right. She seems to be a figure of contradiction. Right.
- [115:29]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
And that's why I asked the question. Because, I mean, she's essentially insulting the people. She's insulting the chorus, she's insulting these old men. And so she's certainly not hoping to gain their sympathy. Right? If. Because if she were to gain their sympathy and they were to persuade Creon, then she would not enjoy her glorious death. And I feel that that to me just explains the exaggerate her exaggerated language.
- [116:02]
David Niles
Yeah, I agree. She. She doesn't seem at all to be trying to plead her case. She seems to be actually encouraging Creon.
- [116:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
She does about as well. Yeah, she does about as well pleading her case as. As Socrates will do in the apology she just. She just. It's just a critique of everyone around you. But similar to Socrates, what she's doing is that she's showing herself as a sign of contradiction. I do think Socrates probably actually wants the people around him like he. He wants them to learn and what's good for them. I think that Antigone really is. Again, I just go back to it. She is the dark sign of the gods.
- [116:40]
David Niles
The dark sign. That's what I keep going back to.
- [116:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, she's the dark sign. She's a sign of contradiction. She's not really showing them the way, but she is coming in and obliterating Creon's comfort in his own understanding. Right. And it's actually Creon, maybe not necessarily Antigone, who's actually then going to have to undergo some type of character development to realign himself with what is actually properly ordered. Let's look at what I think are maybe some of the most dispositive lines of the entire play. So down a little bit before 585, Antigone says, no matter, death longs for the same rights for all. And Creon responds, never the same for the patriot and the traitor. Never the same for the patriot and the traitor. This, these two little. This back and forth right here, I think really embodies the problem. So Antigone, and this is early Antigone, and this is Antigone, I think, at her best, right? No matter. Death longs for the same rights for all. It doesn't matter. It actually doesn't even matter. That's Antigone's brother. It's that everyone deserves a certain level of dignity. So I think, David, going back to your point earlier, where you, you argued that, well, what does the polis owe the traitor? Well, the traitor still has a certain human dignity, which is a very thick and. What's the word anachronistic term, right, for the Greeks, right, that they would have this kind of human dignity. This is very much an Enlightenment term. But there's something about man that merits that he deserves a burial. This is where I think he would point to it in the Greek text itself, right? Not from the Christian tradition, not from everywhere else, in Antigone's own words, that everyone deserves these types of rights. And then, look, Creon then responds again. He's on brand that it's the polis that is the determining function according to justice. And so the patriot and the traitor are not treated the same according to justice. We love our friends and hate our enemies, and one fought against the common and good. The polis and one fought for it. And we don't treat those people the same.
- [118:47]
David Niles
You know, I think it. When I. When I read these, I agree with both of these simultaneously. You know, it's like, on the one hand, yes, I do think that we have the same. All people should be treated according to their dignity. But at the same time, I'm also agreeing with Creon that the patriot and the traitor should be treated differently. So in many ways, I think they're. They're talking past each other a little bit, that they're not actually talking about the same thing. At least you could interpret them according to a Christian perspective as Antigone is right here. And then Creon can also be right.
- [119:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I think that to backstop that opinion, which I'm glad you shared, is that if they are both sharing perspectives of the whole, but with a different emphasis, then they both can be correct. The issue, though, is that they don't know how to order their opinions, right? They don't know how these things can all be true, but they're not all equal. And so the higher always orders the lower. And so you have to have a way, right? This is where justice comes in. You have to have a way to actually then structure what this is. Because, again, I think Creon's understanding of justice is a true understanding of justice. It's primitive. I don't think it's underdeveloped, but it's a true understanding. And he actually makes this explicit. So if you actually carry on in that same dialogue, Creon responds, never once an enemy, never a friend, not even after death. And so, again, that primitive justice is still very much right there. We hate our enemies. We love our friends. And the reason I emphasize that is then look at how Antigone responds. I was born to join in love, not hate. That is my nature. And that I think. I mean, I don't even know where to begin to start unpacking that, because that's that primitive justice that we see even Christ our Lord, pushing out against to say, you know, even the pagans do that. You need to love your enemies. And here we have Antigone, at least in a certain way, a preliminary way, stumbling over, well, the answer to this is love. And I was born to join in love. Love is a binding force. It's not a force that separates. And, I mean, I think in certain ways, I think Sophocles maybe wrote this answer better than he knew that the answer to this primitive justice is love, and a love that actually can be extended then to everybody. And that in that love, people merit a certain level of, Again, to use the word dignity as an example, that they all deserve to be buried, even if they're a traitor. So here we get the entrance of Ismene coming in. And this is again, I think Sophocles just really enjoys doing this, right? She just really kind of piles more ambiguity on the whole situation. Because if you remember, Creon actually just randomly blamed her too. Creon. Even before Hismena even gets here, Creon's like, oh, and your sister, she's guilty too, right? He couples them together immediately. So then this meanie comes in and basically is saying, like, I did it. Yes, if only she consents, I share the guilt and the consequences too. So she has enough of these statements to start making you wonder, like, wait, did she bury him the first time? What is she doing here? But again, Antigone critiques her for not actually doing the work. And his Mene never comes over the top of her and says, well, you know, I buried him the first time. So, again, kind of like how Creon accuses Antigone of doing it twice, and she never corrects him. Ismene never actually corrects Antigone. And so we're just kind of left with this ambiguity of what is everyone's role here. At the end of the day, I think Antigone did it both times, but Sophocles likes to come in and play with these things. But again, as we mentioned earlier, look how harsh Antigone is to her and how much she pushes her away. And again, if you have a more negative understanding of Antigone, that she's really seeking this glory, notice how much she ferociously fights against sharing that glory with anyone. Ismine cannot come in and do this, right? You did not do the work. If you did not do the work, you cannot have the glory. She does not allow her sister to have any part in this moving forward.
- [122:52]
David Niles
Yeah. You know, and I really, you know, in the beginning, when you. Ismini is not a huge character in the book. She didn't have a whole lot of lines. But. But in the beginning, you're like, okay, yeah, Ismene, you're kind of a weak character, especially when you compare it to Antigone, who's coming across very strong. But I really love Ismene here in the end, who she leaves with the feel of a very noble character to me, someone who is willing to support her sister here in the end. I mean, she's kind of doing the same thing. Antigone is doing. It's like, willing to just throw away her life.
- [123:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I think there's a rationale to that. Right. Because now Antigone has done the deed and Ismene is going to be alone.
- [123:41]
David Niles
Yeah.
- [123:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
She's going to lose everyone in the family. Everyone in the family is gone. And now Asmine would rather die with her than be alone. And so I don't know if. If, you know, Asmine couldn't be motivated by her brother's death, but she seems to now be animated by. By the potential death of Antigone and would rather die with Antigone than live without her. So in certain ways, Antigone, excuse me, Ismene starts the mirror Antigone in a certain way, but it's just a little too late. Or at least Antigone, again, is going to be very harsh towards the living while being overly deferential towards the dead. Another one of those lines I talked about that I think kind of really encapsulate, like a thesis statement is down a little bit before 6:30. Tigany says, your wisdom appealed to one world, mine to another. Right. Just these. These kind of very cosmic, you know, she's focusing on the dead. She has that wonderful line that, you know, she'll be with the dead far longer than with the living, so she knows where she has to please and please the most. Antigone says, courage, live your life. I gave myself to death long ago so I might serve the dead again. This goes back to those understanding of like, does she have a preoccupation with death? Does she see this as a gateway to her glory and in. In a certain way, a certain redemption arc for herself and maybe even for her family overall. We also just get it dropped at like 6:42 or so that Antigone is set to be married to Creon's son.
- [125:08]
David Niles
Yeah.
- [125:08]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
This hasn't been mentioned yet.
- [125:10]
David Niles
Total plot twist.
- [125:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Ismine just like, drops this out of nowhere. She's like, what, you'd kill your own son's bride? And then Creon lovingly responds, absolutely, there are other fields for him to plow. Right.
- [125:23]
David Niles
You kill your own sons, his bride. Absolutely.
- [125:27]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, absolutely. There are other fields for him to plow. So.
- [125:32]
David Niles
And his name, we all made. We all made the. The comment, like, I know that analogy was this old.
- [125:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It's apparently very old. The other thing that's really interesting is here is what that does is it enters in more relations. So when we kind of come back next time for like a part two, and Haman enters the Narrative. Now you have father and son, right? So that's not like king and subjects all these. Now you have a father and son relationship that gets thrown into all of these other relationships, but it's also a king and subject. And, like, which one is actually going to override, like, which relationship actually rules the other.
- [126:10]
David Niles
Yeah. And, you know, I think Haman is one of my favorite characters in this play. I think that, you know, and we're not. We don't have time to get into it today, but I just think that I really like the way he. He's so well disposed to piety and wisdom simultaneously, where he's just. I think in many ways he represents the ideal son.
- [126:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that he's a character to watch of. Like, does anyone actually embody the principles of Antigone, the play the most? And I think Heyman has a few lines and a few things that I think are really, really good in that last chorus there, you know, which we'll end on. You know, I don't have any deep things to mine out of it, but I do think, like the theme there is fate, Right. There's a. There's a pedagogical understanding of talking about fate. And so we're kind of getting moved along here, I think, by Sophocles on these certain things. And so next week when we come back for like a Part two, we'll. We'll pick up, I think, with the entrance of Haman, who I think really does a good job both rhetorically out of piety for his father. I think he does a really excellent job of trying to articulate this. I think, to Dr. Grabowski's point, he is seeking true harmony. He's actually seeking a metanoia, a turning of around to reconcile and to actually make a change as opposed to. I'm not entirely sure if that's Antigone's point. So as we kind of look to next week and people are kind of finishing up the play or we're coming back to discuss it again, any thoughts on what people should be looking for?
- [127:43]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
Well, I guess the big plot would be the potential moment of self doubt in Antigone.
- [127:54]
David Niles
Right.
- [127:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There's.
- [127:55]
Dr. Frank Hrabowski
There's a moment where she seems to perhaps question what she's doing. And I think that that's going to probably consume a good deal of our discussion because I know that you have different opinions about what's really going on there. But yeah, I mean, further development and taking these characters at least something to look forward to.
- [128:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I very much agree. Is earlier Antigone consistent with later Antigone? I think that'd be a big thing to keep in mind. The other thing I was asked is, who is the hero? Right? Who do we actually think the hero of this play is? And what role does Antigone actually play in, like, the back fourth of the play? Like, where does she go as a character? I think that's something that really caught my attention, is that in a lot of ways, her absence speaks a lot of volumes, in my opinion. So we'll look at, you know, these kind of things. Where's Antigone? Do we think she's consistent? Do we think she's the hero? If she's not the hero, who is the hero?
- [128:51]
David Niles
And then, of course, the greatest question is, what is Sophocles trying to teach us? Okay, so if she's. Is she the hero? Is she not? If she isn't, what does that mean? Ultimately, what is Sophocles trying to tell us by writing this play? I mean, I think that's the biggest question, which, if anybody has, like, a definitive answer for it at the end of the play, I would love to hear it.
- [129:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You have a week to prepare your answer, and we'll see what it is, because I do think Sophocles, the teacher, is really trying to communicate something within the text. The question is, does any character in the play actually embody that fully, or do we see parts of it broken out between the various characters? All right, very good, Dr. Grabowski, I appreciate you being here. David, welcome back to the podcast. We appreciated your insights and all your update about your farm. Very much appreciate it. So thank you so much. Next week, we'll be looking at the back half of antigone, right? Part two. You can check us out@thegreatbookspodcast.com you can check us out on X, formerly as Twitter and YouTube, and support us on Patreon. And I would simply end particularly for our Catholic audience, as some of the lessons we learned today that if you can pray for the repose of my father, Hal Garlic, I would appreciate it. And we'll see everyone next week.