Antigone: Girl vs Tyrant

Summary

Instant Classics – "Antigone: Girl vs Tyrant"

Host: Vespucci
Guests: Mary Beard (classicist), Charlotte Higgins (culture writer)
Date: April 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Instant Classics centers on Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, exploring its foundational story, its enduring political and feminist significance, and why it remains such a resonant, interpretable classic. Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins analyze not only the plot and characters but also the play’s transformations through history and modern literature, continually returning to the question: is Antigone simply a heroine, or something even more complex?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Antigone’s Story: Background & Family Rivalry

• Antigone's Lineage:
  • Daughter of Oedipus (who unwittingly married his own mother, Jocasta) (04:26)
  • “Antigone is actually the child of the incestuous relationship between Oedipus and his mother and wife, Jocasta.” – Mary Beard [04:26]
• Civil War & Catastrophe in Thebes:
  • Antigone’s brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, kill each other in a civil war over the throne.
  • Creon, their uncle, seizes power, refusing burial to Polynices as punishment for his aggression, leading to Antigone’s defiance.
  • “If you refuse people proper burial, you don’t let them make the transition to the underworld. You kind of capture them in a disastrous limbo.” – Mary Beard [07:07]
• Thebes as Literary “Other”:
  • Thebes, in Athenian drama, is a setting for society's darkest, most complex stories and moral debates (12:25).

Plot Breakdown – Sophocles’ Antigone

• Opening Conflict:
  • Antigone wants to bury her brother Polynices against Creon’s orders; her sister Ismene hesitates. (08:07)
  • “Like, you know, if drama is based on people wanting different things, it starts immediately with this sort of sense of conflict.” – Charlotte Higgins [14:27]
• Dramatic Developments:
  • Antigone is caught in the act of re-burying Polynices (15:29)
  • Creon’s son Haemon, Antigone’s fiancé, pleads in vain for mercy.
  • Tiresias, the prophet, warns Creon the gods’ laws outweigh his own. Creon relents—too late.
• Cascade of Tragedy:
  • Antigone hangs herself in her tomb; Haemon and then Creon's wife, Eurydice, also die by suicide.
  • “So Creon is left with, you know, nobody.” – Charlotte Higgins [19:23]
• Chorus’s Role:
  • The Chorus of Theban elders offers poetic and philosophical commentary, including the famous “Ode to Man.”
  • “They have some of the most extraordinary, memorable and beautiful kind of commentary on this plot.” – Mary Beard [20:29]

Antigone: Icon, Martyr, Symbol—or Something More?

• Modern Reception:
  • Antigone has become a symbol of feminist and civil rights resistance, inspiring productions from Nazi-occupied Paris to Mandela’s prison on Robben Island (21:21, 27:35).
  • “She’s a role for a woman who stood up for herself, who wasn’t going to be battered by the unjust rule of an unjust tyrant...” – Mary Beard [25:23]
  • “It stands as a monument to the idea of the individual defying tyranny, the individual standing up against authoritarianism.” – Charlotte Higgins [26:46]
• Complex Heroism:
  • The hosts challenge the view of Antigone as just a straightforward heroine.
  • Creon speaks the most lines; he may be the tragic hero by classical standards.
  • German philosopher Hegel saw the play as a “conflict between right and right, not between right and wrong” (29:06).
  • “Antigone is inflexible. She’s egomaniacal.” – Mary Beard [32:39]
• Limits of Individualism:
  • Antigone’s relentless “I, me, mine” stance is scrutinized.
  • Ismene symbolizes community or compromise, and Antigone’s refusal to accept her support is discussed (35:04).

Creon: Villain or Tragic Victim?

• Nuanced Villainy:
  • Creon's motivations, initially rooted in restoring social order, become tyrannical by his inflexibility.
  • Citing Mandela’s portrayal of Creon, Mary Beard notes, “He doesn’t start out bad, he becomes the rigid tyrant.” [36:48]
  • Creon’s ultimate ruin is positioned as the play’s final tragedy.

The Play’s Enduring Ambiguity & Political Power

• Continually Relevant:
  • Antigone’s paradigmatic status as a resister is echoed in global history, inspiring both art and political action.
  • “She is right. Do you know what I mean? I mean, the play justifies her position.” – Charlotte Higgins [40:53]
• Ambivalent Reading:
  • The play “pushes the spotlight back onto the audience... it’s raising a question, that look, we have to face now, which is what we’ve got on stage... the clash of extremisms.” – Mary Beard [43:19]
  • “There can be no more modern play than Antigone. As we look at a world in which we see these kind of clashes...” – Mary Beard [43:19]
• Reflections on Reception:
  • Discussing audience responses in ancient Athens versus today:
    • Fifth-century Athenian men might have found Antigone “monstrous” for her assertiveness.
    • Modern audiences often celebrate her as a feminist icon.
• Multiplicity of Meaning:
  • Higgins: “You shift it ever so slightly and everything looks different. That’s one of the virtues of the play.” [35:06]
  • Modern adaptations (Berlin, Mandela, Heaney, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire) translate Antigone’s myth to new times, topics, and cultures (44:47, 48:06).

Modern Adaptations: Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

• Contemporary Resurgence:
  • Home Fire (2018) recasts Antigone in a British-Pakistani Muslim family, bringing ancient dilemmas into the present with remarkable prescience regarding real UK politics.
  • “She’s a British Pakistani novelist…It situates the plot of Antigone between a British Muslim family.” – Charlotte Higgins [46:50]
• The Play as a Living Text:
  • The myth is never static: "It has indelibly become something about struggles in political culture across the ages…it never stops quite saying, are you sure? Try seeing it this way." – Mary Beard [49:44]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Antigone’s Defiance:
  • “Nor did I think your decrees so formidable that you, mere mortal as you are, could override the laws of the gods. Unwritten and unshakable, they are not for now and yesterday, but live forever.” – Charlotte Higgins as Antigone [00:14]
• Chorus’s Reflection:
  • “Man is full of wonderful things. And one minute he rushes to greatness and the next to terrible acts.” – Charlotte Higgins paraphrasing the Ode to Man [24:03]
• On Feminist Iconography:
  • “I can see the proof that I was reading this as a pretty determined 17-year-old woman who saw in this play…what women could do.” – Mary Beard [25:23]
• On Intractable Conflict:
  • “How can we ever live in a world in which, you know, Antigone and Creon are at each other’s throats?” – Mary Beard [44:07]
• On Enduring Relevance:
  • “There can be no more modern play than Antigone.” – Mary Beard [43:40]
• On Adaptability:
  • “It never stops quite saying, are you sure? Try seeing it this way.” – Mary Beard [49:44]

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Important Timestamps

• 00:14: Antigone’s famous speech (read by Charlotte Higgins)
• 03:46–14:00: Family history, Thebes as setting, setup of the conflict
• 14:27: Play-by-play plot summary through tragic conclusion
• 20:29: Significance of the Chorus and the Ode to Man
• 25:23: Mary Beard’s personal connection as a student and the feminist read
• 27:35: 20th-century reworkings: Nazi occupation, Mandela, Brecht
• 29:01–31:00: Introduction of Hegel and the "right vs right" argument
• 32:39–36:00: Critique of Antigone’s inflexibility and individualism
• 36:48: Nelson Mandela as Creon; Creon’s evolution from restorer to tyrant
• 43:19–44:47: Modern political relevance, "clash of extremisms"
• 46:50–49:44: Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire as contemporary Antigone

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Conclusion & Takeaways

Antigone endures because it is not a simple story of right vs. wrong, but instead a play that unflinchingly portrays the conflict of principles, individual against state, personal versus communal, law versus conscience. Mary Beard and Charlotte Higgins illuminate its complexity, its adaptability to era after era, and its unending power to force both readers and audiences to ask themselves where they stand.

“It’s a great play. There’s no other way of looking at it.” – Charlotte Higgins [51:25]

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Questions or comments?
Contact the show: [Instant Classics Pod social media/@email].

Instant Classics proves once more: Ancient history is never truly ancient—it’s endlessly alive in the present.

Transcript

[Mary Beard]

You now answer me. Not at length, but briefly. Did you know about my proclamations?

[Charlotte Higgins]

I knew. How could I not? It was public knowledge.

[Mary Beard]

And yet you did transgress these laws.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yes, because to me, it was not Zeus at all who proclaimed them. Nor did justice, who lives with the gods below, make laws like these for men. Nor did I think your decrees so formidable that you, mere mortal as you are, could override the laws of the gods. Unwritten and unshakable, they are not for now and yesterday, but live forever.

[Mary Beard]

There you've got a snatch of the standoff between Greek heroine Antigone, standing up for what she believes to be right, and the tyrant of her city, Cream.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And if there's one character in ancient Greek myth and story who stands out as a feminist hero and as a civil rights hero, it is Antigone, the

[Mary Beard]

woman of the city of Thebes who insisted on following the demands of religion and burying her brother who had died in a bitter civil war.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And that's even though her Uncle Creon, the new ruler, had forbidden it could condemning to death by stoning anyone who tried to do it.

[Mary Beard]

In the modern world, she has become the symbol of human resistance to the oppressive power of the state, the brave, solitary young woman standing up to patriarchy and tyranny and dying for her beliefs.

[Charlotte Higgins]

She's best known from Sophocles, 5th century BCE tragedy Antigone. But versions of her story have been presented in plays with a strong political message, from Nazi occupied Paris to Nelson Mandela's prison on Robben Island.

[Mary Beard]

And she's been recrafted by a galaxy of modern writers. Seamus Heaney, Ali Smith, Kamala Shamsi.

[Charlotte Higgins]

But we want to ask today if there's something more complicated about Antigone than just the martyr to a noble cause.

[Mary Beard]

This is Instant Classics, the the podcast that uncovers the ancient stories still shaping the world today. I'm Mary Beard.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And I'm Charlotte Higgins. Each week we dive into the myths, the dramas and the characters of the classical world to discover what they still mean to us. Now, this episode, Antigone Girl vs Tyrant.

[Mary Beard]

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[Mary Beard]

Okay, Charlotte. Okay.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah.

[Mary Beard]

I think we gotta start by filling in a bit of backstory about who Antigone is, where she is, what the big issue about Antigone is. Right, Help us out.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Exactly, exactly. Well, I think know Antigone is living in Thebes and her uncle is Creon. But I think it's really important to know that she is the daughter of Oedipus. That is Oedipus, the king who married his mother and who put out his eyes and was exiled. That's the subject of another play by Sophocles called Oedipus the King.

[Mary Beard]

And Antigone is actually the child of the incestuous relationship between Oedipus and his mother and wife, Jocasta.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Exactly. So if you fast forward, you know, Antigone's a tiny child at the time of that self blinding. If you fast forward, what happens is that Antigone's brothers Polynices and Eteocles end up inheriting the throne of Thebes. They fall out over who's actually going to be king. They fight a bloody civil war. Eteokles and Polynices kill each other. At the end of this war, Polynices was kind of the aggressor. Creon, you know, it's a very incestuous situation. I mean that metaphorically as well as literally. So Creon, the uncle of Antigone, Astacastor's brother, Right, takes over the state.

[Mary Beard]

This is a very inbred family we're dealing with here.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, totally. And this is where the play kicks off, right? So Polynices and Eteocles, the brothers of Antigone, have killed each other. Polynices having kind of basically been the aggressor, and invaded Thebes. Creon is in charge. And in the sort of aftermath of this horrific civil war, Creon decides to refuse a proper burial to Polynices, the brother of Antigone. And there's another character, there's another sibling who's kind of important as well, Ismene, who is Antigone's sister. So that's where the play starts.

[Mary Beard]

And it's. It's a kind of. It's a post civil war play. You know, if you ever wonder, and we often don't explore the next episode, if you ever wonder what happens after Oedipus has realized that he has married his. His mother and has blinded himself and goes into exile, well, things don't settle down back in Thebes in a kind of calm way. Predictably, civil war breaks out between the kids. And then the uncle Creon tries to establish kind of order again. This is a sort of post civil war restoration of order. But he does that partly by kind of saying, no, we've got this Polynices the aggressor. We are not going to allow him even to be buried. That's part of the New Deal. I mean, it sounds kind of bad within modern terminology, I think, you know, I'm not going to allow this guy to have a proper burial. In Greek or particularly Athenian culture, if you refuse people proper burial, you don't let them make the transition to the underworld. You kind of capture them in a disastrous limbo. So the ruling of saying this guy is the wicked one and we're not going to bury him, that has consequences beyond what it would have for us. And Antigone, the sister, sees that which is. From there, the play, in a sense, kicks off.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, that in fact, the very, very, very beginning of the play is Antigone deciding that she absolutely must bury her brother. And talking to her sister is mainly about. It is mainly much less keen on this. So immediately you get this debate between can we go against the proclamation that's just been laid down by the ruler in order to do this thing that the gods demand, which is the burial of the dead, or should we just. Should we obey the laws of the state? So just to wind back a bit, I think it's important to say, isn't it, Mary, that the key text here is Sophocles play. She doesn't. Antigone doesn't appear in a whole host of different Greek or Roman texts like the. The main, by far the most important version is this play by Sophocles, though Euripides, another Athenian dramatist, did write a version of this story. But we don't have that text anymore. It's lost. What we do know is that it has a happy ending. And I can tell you, I Can tell you. Spoiler alert. I can tell you right now that Sophocles version, the one that we all know, as it were, or that is part of our culture, is not a happy ending.

[Mary Beard]

It's interesting because she doesn't appear much and she has some bit parts in other plays of Sophocles, particularly focusing on her dad, Oedipus. But really, this is part of. This is where we know Antigone from. So I think it's quite different from many, let's say, of the heroes of the mythical Trojan War, who recur in tragedies, in art, in poetry, in slightly different versions. You know, we know an awful lot about them, as we discovered when we looked, say, at Helen of Troy. When we're telling the story of Antigone, there's one or two other little bits, there's a couple, but not very many, many physio representations of her. But essentially, when we talk about Antigone, we're talking about Sophocles play Antigone and the title role in that.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, she comes up a little bit in Sophocles other play about Oedipus, called Oedipus at Colonus, which is talking about the end of Oedipus life. And in that play, she is the child who has. The child of Oedipus, who is stuck by his side and has acted as his guide in exile to her blinded father. And it's kind of interesting that she has this attachment to family. She's a loyal family member, and I think that that does resonate through. Although, actually, you know, these plays, three plays that Sophocles wrote that touch on Oedipus and Antigone, were all written at completely different times in his career. They were not a trilogy.

[Mary Beard]

Anyway, I think it's quite interesting because the other thing that we've just mentioned is that this all happens in Thebes. This is an Athenian tragedy written in Athens, to be performed in Athens. But the setting, the dramatic setting, is the city of Thebes, a bit to the north of Athens. And it's always, I think, worth looking out for when Thebes, that city, makes an appearance in Athenian culture, because it's often used by Athenian writers as a kind of place, a foreign place, a slightly foreign place onto which you project some of the debates and the struggles and the controversies of your own city of Athens. It's kind of. It's a. It's kind of. It's the other. But it's very close to us, and it's. It's so somehow Thebes is not just a real place. It's also a place where the Athenians sort of work out their own problems in the imagination and they go.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And it's where they go to put their weirdest stories, in a way, the most twisted and the most incestuous and the most violent. So it has, you know, it's the place. Yeah. It was founded by this character, Cadmus. It's the place where Euripides sets his amazing play the Bacchae, which is also very violent and unpleasant. It's where the play Oedipus is. It's a very storied city. In fact, when I wrote my book Greek Myths, Mary, it's the only chap in the complicated way I organized my stories. It's the only section of the book that is organized around place because there are so many, so many interwoven stories and generational stories about this ruling family, you know, Crayon coming up over and over again. The prophet Tiresias tends to put in an appearance in a lot of these plays. So, you know, it's all. It's all interwoven in this kind of slightly weird way.

[Mary Beard]

I mean, to put it in kind of perhaps inappropriately modern terms. I mean, Thebes, for the Athenians, Thebes is a safe space for working out horrible problems, for talking about horrible problems. I think you've already mentioned, Charlotte, how the play opens.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yes.

[Mary Beard]

Which is with the news that Creon, the new, the post civil war ruler, has forbidden the burial of Polynices. And it opens with Antigone and her sister is many, you know, discussing what is to be done. And is Manet being more law abiding to the. To the new regime and not really wanting to have anything to do with Antigone's plans, which are to break the law that has just been established and to bury Polynices and so to give him access, you know, to. To the underworld and the world of the dead, which he wouldn't otherwise get. But a lot happens after that.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And I will run us through that without, I hope, becoming too tedious, but very broadly, not in huge detail, but I would say it's a tremendous opening of a play. Like, you know, if drama is. If drama is based on people wanting different things, it starts immediately with this sort of sense of conflict. Crayon has said one thing. Polynices is not to be buried. Antigone is out there straight away saying Polynices must be buried. And this mania is saying, oh, I'm not. I don't. Don't think that's a very good idea. Anyway, so what happens is that a guard comes to Creon in the next scene and says, well, it looks like someone's tried to bury Polynices. There's a scattering of dust is reported over his body and Creon gets quite cross and says, you must find the person and bring them to me immediately. Next scene, it's Antigone, surprise, surprise, brought

[Mary Beard]

on because they actually catch her in the act, don't they? She's obviously sprinkled Polynice's body with dust. The guards, Crayon's military guys, they kind of remove the dust obviously from the burial. But when the guard, who's a bit chastened by Creon, getting so cross with him, goes back, he finds he catches Antigone in the act of putting more dust on the body, as it were, reburying him, going on with the burial.

[Charlotte Higgins]

So the guard comes back with Antigone with him, you know, led, led on it, captured, as it were. And this is really serious. The, you know, the culprit is the king's niece and the punishment for doing this is death by stoning. I mean, so this is kind of pretty. Crayon does not decide, oh, gosh, maybe I was a bit harsh by. No, he doubles down at a certain sort of. At a certain point, his son appears, right? So we've got another character, sorry, his son is called Hymon. And it turns out that Hymen and Antigone are betrothed to each other, engaged to be married. So here's another sort of slightly, slightly creepily, sort of semi incestuous relationship. And Hymen pleads for clemency. He pleads for Creon to take a more. A more pacific attitude, which he simply doesn't do. Eventually, Creon is going down this road. Antigone is effectively being taken off to her doom. Enter the prophet Tiresias.

[Mary Beard]

The Theban prophet Tiresias, who is always, as you say, coming in these plays, right?

[Charlotte Higgins]

He always turns up. He always turns up in a play about Thebes. He says to Creon, look, you can't do this. You know, this point that Antigone's been making throughout the play, really, which is that the gods have one set of laws and they're just way more important and powerful than any laws a human could make. The gods don't want this to happen. The gods are right. You need to obey the gods. You need to unravel this. But. And Creon actually, what's really interesting is that Creon immediately folds at this point. He does not keep on with his fury, but everything is all too late. So basically everybody's dead. He had relented sufficiently that he would decided not to stone Antigone to death publicly, but rather to wall her up in a cave so that she could die over a period of time. And that's an incredibly weird and unpleasant thing to have decided, but for the purposes of this culture, it's kind of slightly less aggressive than stoning someone to death because it allows death to take its course.

[Mary Beard]

It's very hard to know, isn't it, quite how you see this walling up. But what's pretty clear is that you all, in this case, and in other cases like it, you wall them up with a bit of food. And in a certain kind of slightly twisted intellectual level, what this means is you haven't actually killed them. They die, but they had food there. So it's a. You, you. You're slightly letting yourself off the hook, which is that's what's going to happen to Antigone.

[Charlotte Higgins]

So, you know, crayon is now, oh, gosh, I must stop all this and, you know, unravel it, and Santa, you know, free everybody, get Polynices buried. But it's just too late. A messenger comes on and brings this sort of awful news. Antigone has hanged herself. Hymon, meanwhile, has also gone inside the cave with her and has stabbed himself. And then, you know, shades of Romeo and Juliet, actually. There is a kind of sense of love between those two. And then hearing the news of this, by the way, is Creon's wife, who's called Eurydice. Nothing to do with Orpheus and Eurydice, they just share the name. She hears this news and she goes off stage and she stabs herself to death. So Creon is left with, you know, nobody. His wife is dead, his son is dead, his niece Antigone is dead. It's a sort of really catastrophically dark and tragic ending of this play. Guys. Sorry.

[Mary Beard]

No, it's, you know, there's not much good news here. But it's also. I mean, it's the other thing that we just perhaps ought to point out, because quite often when modern productions are put on, what the modern production does is get rid of what actually in the ancient world was a really important thing. Bit, you know, element in the story, which is the role of the chorus. We have a chorus of old Thebans here, and they're often just written out because people. The chorus is always quite difficult, I think, for modern productions, but in this case, they, they are perhaps more integrated into the action than they are in quite a lot of plays that they are participant observers of what's going on. And they have some of the most extraordinary, memorable and beautiful kind of commentary on this plot that you get anywhere in, in great tragedy. I mean, there is a wonderful, wonderful bit about the very nature. How do you understand the cleverness of man, humanity? How do you understand the place of human beings in the world of the gods?

[Charlotte Higgins]

It's so beautiful. So it begins, it's often pulled out and presented on its own. It's known in that case as the Ode to Man, rather annoyingly. But anyway, it's sort of an ode to humanity and you know, it's suggesting that mankind, humankind is on the one hand the most extraordinary, inventive, clever, resourceful creature you can imagine. On the other hand so destructive. I mean, it's, you know, it's one of those sort of resonating, truthful, gloriously poetic pieces of writing and just worth lingering on. But, you know, it stands on its own. It's hugely influential in the rest of Greek and Roman poetry and through to, you know, to Western literature in general. But in terms of the play, it's also, one has to see it for us in the context of the play, which is also about this kind of, you know, where it's where, where that kind of the, the worst and the best that humans can be is in this play.

[Mary Beard]

And I think that it's not only modern productions, but I think modern readers, you know, you're following the story, the plot line and you come to the, to these choral odes and you think, oh, skip over those quickly and you know, find out what happens next. Actually, if you do that, you're missing some of the most extraordinary best books bits of the play, but you're also missing, they're kind of a commentary on the action. And this is one of the clearest places where these in some ways apparently possibly self standing odes sung by the chorus, and it would have been sung really do engage with the plot of what's happening.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And there's a wonderful part where Antigone and the chorus are in dialogue, which again, you know, can be quite tough as a modern reader because these odes tend to be densely poetic. They quite often lapse into, I shouldn't say lapse into, but drift into kind of quite richly textured mythological references that may be obscure to us or you know, require a bit of, a bit of reading into, but you know, it's so significant in this play. And really worth not skipping. I mean, you cannot skip the Ode to Man Politodena, as it's known to those with a, with a tiny bit of Greek men. You know, man is. Man is full of wonderful things. And one minute he rushes to greatness and the next to terrible acts. I'm paraphrasing, but it's a great bit.

[Mary Beard]

I mean, taking the play as a whole, it's very easy to see why it's gone down like it has. I mean, I'm going to confess here that a long time ago, many decades ago, it was the text that I studied, my set text in my A level Greek, right.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Was this indeed Mary Bird? It was just yesterday.

[Mary Beard]

Yes, just yesterday. And you know, I've still got actually the Greek, the Greek text that I used. You know, I think I probably, probably wickedly stole it from my school. You know, looking back on it, I can see the kind of my little pencil notes and what I've underlined in the text. Actually rather like the bit that we read at the very beginning of this episode. And you know, I strongly remember, but I can also see the proof that I was reading this as a pretty determined 17 year old woman who saw in this play, leave aside the tragic ending, who saw in this play a kind of a role for a woman who stood up for herself, who wasn't going to be battered by the unjust rule of an unjust tyrant, et cetera, et cetera. And it spoke to me, you know, this was iron in the soul kind of time when I was doing my A level Antigone, you know, to say she's a role model would be putting it a bit, pushing it a bit because it's gonna, she dies in the end. But this play spoke to me about what women could do and of course,

[Charlotte Higgins]

and it's, you know, on this level, and I just think it will always be, it will never not be relevant and resonant because it just stands as a monument to the idea of the individual defying tyranny, the individual standing up against authoritarianism. And it will always be meaningful and resonant. You know, how this story of how individuals behave towards each other, what power does to people and how, you know, the power of one person standing up against tyranny and you know, all the way through to Tiananmen Square and Tankman, you know, the guy with his plastic bag standing in front of the tanks. It resonates throughout history and it will never not be relevant in the 20th century.

[Mary Beard]

There are really, really major reworkings of it in response to the corruption of power in the 20th century. I mean, there's Ennui and Brecht both do versions of the play in which Crayon and his edicts are precious close to fascist dictatorship and fascist rulings. And there's a marvelous account, Mandela himself, Nelson Mandela tells us about it in his autobiography, that the prisoners on Robin island under apartheid, you know, they produce their own version of Sophocles play clearly with the brutality of apartheid in mind. You know, it's always there, kind of empowering resistance, you know, giving voice to the voiceless. And, you know, in a sense, yeah, Antigone does die in the end. I mean, the heroine actually loses her life in the course of standing up to authority. But we know that Crayon is ruined, too. That, you know, Crayon has lost by the end of the play. He's lost everything that might matter to him in his family.

[Charlotte Higgins]

That's very sad. It's a very sad play. There's no getting away from it because

[Mary Beard]

I read it first at a level, because I've seen it and read it and taught it, you know, many times since. I mean, I can. I suppose I can also look back, though, and see the way that my reactions to it have shifted slightly. I think now I don't see it quite so straightforwardly as this is the. You know, this is the girl standing up against power. It's become, for me, a more puzzling play than it looks at first sight. I mean, I think, for a start, if you just count up who's the biggest part in this, it isn't Antigone, it's Crane. Crayon has the most lines, you know, by considerable margin. And if there is a tragic hero in this, it is Crayon who, in the end, has lost everything. There is a way in which you can see that people engage with it and have engaged with it for the centuries, actually, in seeing it as a bit more complicated. I mean, I think one of the most famous analyses was by the German philosopher Hegel. And he thought in many ways it was the perfect tragedy. But he saw it not as a conflict, as we tend to do, between right in the person of Antigone and wrong in the person of Crayon. But he saw them both, Crayon and Antigone, they were both right in their own way. And so Hegel famously kind of said that this was a play which was a conflict between right and right, not between right and wrong.

[Charlotte Higgins]

And I think that's going to be a great kicking off point for us to discuss this after the break. Mary and I think that sort of point of Hegel's is going to really help us see that this is an even more interesting play than if it was a mere dichotomy between right and wrong. I think it's got much more to say to us than that.

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[Mary Beard]

Hello, lovely listeners. If you're not yet part of our Instant Classics Book Club, well, now is the perfect time to join because we are making our way through one of the most exciting works of literature ever. That's Homer's Odyssey.

[Charlotte Higgins]

We would love you to join our book club, which we absolutely adore. So please do join now to give you all the access to our previous episodes and loads of other perks like being able to join our online community and getting early booking access to our live events.

[Mary Beard]

All details are on our website, instantclassicspod.com I think that the more you look at this play, it's not just that, you know, crayon's the big part in it. The more you look at it, the harder you find it to sort of massage it, to fit it into the schema that you sort of want it to take. Because you look at Antigone, and this is clear from the very beginning, Antigone is inflexible. She's egomaniacal. She is thinking only about her own version of what the right thing to do by the gods is. And it's been pointed out several times recently, and I think it's a nice hint of this, which is that when Antigone speaks, she speaks in the first person singular. She's always saying, I, me, I, me, me, me. She isn't speaking as part of a community. She's not speaking in the first person plural. She's not saying we. It's always focused only on her.

[Charlotte Higgins]

It's an interesting flip side, isn't it, to the individual standing against, you know, me against the world, as it were once? If it's the flip side of that is this, you know, when does it stop being this brave, solitary figure and start Being actually someone who's a little bit, as you say, egomaniacal or inflexible. I mean, one of the interesting things in the play is the relationship between her and her sister, because Ismene sort of maybe stands for, well, depending on how you want to look at it. And I do think this play is everything about depending on how you look at it. Like, you shift it ever so slightly and everything looks different. That's one of the virtues of the play. So her sister is. Mainie, can look like a kind of

[Mary Beard]

weak

[Charlotte Higgins]

person who just gives in, collaborates with the state, just that. But further into the play, Ismene offers to help Antigone to stand by her. And Antigone at this point, absolutely rejects her help. Absolutely casts her out. Interesting. She had the choice there to reject the I and become more of a we, and she dismisses that. The other thing that I was very struck by, again, I mean, I didn't do this for a level Mary, but I studied it at university, of course, and, yeah, had a very similar relationship, as you did, with this sort of the kind of power of this extraordinary female figure. But she doesn't half talk about death a lot. She is kind of in love with death. And that is, you know, in the kind of in the deep reads of the Greek language and the poetics of what's happening in the lines of the play. There is a huge amount of linguistic play and poetic play around Antigone's closeness to death. It's as if she's on a death wish right from the beginning. Now, that doesn't undermine the fact that she dies for her principal and all that. I mean, all these readings are available. It just kind of. It kind of complicates it.

[Mary Beard]

And I think that Crayon complicates it, too. Not just because in some ways he's the big part, but that he doesn't start out the monster that he looks like he is when you get to the middle of the play.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Right.

[Mary Beard]

And I think it's very interesting that in the Robin island production, it was Nelson Mandela who played Crayon. A kind of very strange, curious bit of casting. But Mandela himself says that, look, he doesn't start out bad, he becomes the rigid tyrant. But at the beginning, he's standing up for the community. They've just had civil war with the brothers. Eteocles and Polynices have been literally at each other's throats. We've got Antigone kind of carrying that on by saying, I am going to bury my brother. That's still kind of civil war talk, what Crayon is saying. And one of the ways of reading you're not going to bury him is that we're leaving that behind. And we are now, you know, this is post civil war deal. It is not about a warring family. And I think that we tend to, when we talk about Crayon, we tend to say that he's, you know, he's standing up for the state. And then you say standing up for the state. That seems, you know, uncomfortable. You know, the authority of the state. If you say, and the Greek is compatible with this, if you say what Crayon is doing is standing up for the community against personal interest, then at the beginning you see him as the man who is bringing the community together or trying to bring the community together after civil war.

[Charlotte Higgins]

After all, it was Polynices who, you know, this is very clear, it was Polynices who created the civil war, who invaded Thebes. And so in that sense, he's trying to sort of bring everything back. Of course, as you say, he becomes much, much more inflexible and he entrenches. His position, becomes very extreme, which is a very, I think, in the way we look at politics in the modern age, that's a very relatable position. We see it a lot. But one thing that I find and have always found a kind of fascinating place to at least speculate, is how the original Athenian audience in probably about 442 BCE sitting there. It's quite a hard play to date, but here we have, imagine, you know, all the actors are men and boys. The audience is probably almost entirely men and boys of Athens. How would they have seen this young woman standing up against the authority of the ruler? I mean, what do you think? What's your instinct?

[Mary Beard]

My instinct is to think that they would be a bit puzzled by our. The stereotypical reaction that this is the heroic woman who faces down male tyranny. I mean, partly because In a Athenian 5th century culture there isn't a role for a heroic woman. We know exactly.

[Charlotte Higgins]

The whole concept would have been pretty unavailable, I think.

[Mary Beard]

And you can't help but thinking that in some ways Antigone is monstrous in her claims to virtue and to doing what she thinks is right. And that actually, if you go back to the idea that it's Crayon that's the tragic hero, what you see is a man who tries to do the best, being led into both tyranny, but also tragedy for himself by this young woman who is out of place in what she's trying to do.

[Charlotte Higgins]

But Mary, she is right. Do you know what I mean? I mean, the play, the play justifies her position. So, I mean, this is why I think it's such a great play because again, you just shift it a tiny bit on its axis and it all looks different. But, you know, this is a play in which Tiresias comes on stage and says, creon, you've. You've played it wrong. This is wrong deal. You know, Antigone is. Antigone is right. The claims of the gods were greater than the claims that you're making for the state. So how do you pass that in relationship to, like the contemporary audience?

[Mary Beard]

I think that was the kind of the problem that Hegel found himself facing. You know, that, you know, it's very hard when you read the text carefully not to see right on both sides. Yes. And you know, Antigone is doing what you should do to a Greek body. Crayon is himself trying to restore community order after civil war. And in the. I mean, I'm not sure I believe the line that I'm taking here, but certainly I don't feel it when I read the text. But I think that this is woman as a catalyst to destroying men. I mean, Crayon is destroyed by this. He's wrong, but he's destroyed. It is the hard lineness of this, in a way, not just unusual, but kind of monstrously heroic woman that puts us in that way. I couldn't claim that that is just what I feel when I read, when I read or see Antigone. But when I try to put myself in the position of, you know, Athenian men watching this and wondering how they would have read it, that kind of really has to be on my agenda, I think so.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Interesting. And I think the way this play is constantly throwing back, throwing back onto us, the audience, the responsibility to situate ourselves in relation to these different kind of entrenched or extreme views is fascinating.

[Mary Beard]

I think that's absolutely right. And I think that one of my Cambridge colleagues, Simon Goldhill, has worked on this play a lot. And his line is that in some ways what it does is pushes the spotlight back onto the audience, onto us, all the people in the play, like the messenger and the guard, who represent the ordinary people in this conflict, that it's raising a question, that look, we have to face now, which is what we've got on stage. What we're seeing in this conflict is the clash of extremisms. We've got two kind of extremisms and the really challenging and kind of destabilizing bit is the way the play is making us try to work out how we situate ourselves in relation to extremism. In that sense, there can be no more modern play than Antigone. As we look at a world in which we see these kind of clashes, constantly extremist clashes, and, you know, in some ways, the tragedy gets focused back onto us. How do we. How can we ever live in a world in which, you know, Antigone and Crayon are at each other's throats?

[Charlotte Higgins]

Gosh. I mean, when you speak of it that way, Mary, it does seem like a supremely modern play in the sense that we are living in a world of extremes and extremely entrenched views and people getting more and more entrenched in their positions and apparently sort of insuperable gulfs between us, and it all ending kind of badly. But I do think it's. I think what's so interesting about having had this discussion about the complexities, the sort of multivalent part of Antigone, as opposed to the much more straightforward, Antigone is good, crayon is bad. Nevertheless, I think it still doesn't undermine the way that it has been reinterpreted as that. I think all these things can be true at once. The fact that it was played in Paris in 1944 as an act of resistance against Nazi occupation is unbelievably powerful. And we have to let it be that play for the moments that it. That it's demanded to be that play when it. I mean, you know, in 1948, Brecht playing it in Switzerland with the crayon figure very much resembling Hitler. That was incredibly important thing, culturally, to be doing at that moment. And all of those interpretations, I think, are absolutely valid. And that's what makes. What makes plays like this so exciting, is that they keep speaking to the moment. And I don't know, Mary, there's one recent interpretation that we both know a bit about or have enjoyed a lot, which is Carmela Shansey's novel Home Fire, which is. I think it's a really interesting exemplar of how a Greek play and the mythological character can be a text that lives very fully in the present. So she. She's a British Pakistani novelist. She won the Women's Prize with this novel that was set in 2015 and came out in 2018. It situates the plot of Antigone between a British Muslim family. Anika is kind of. Is kind of Antigone. And Paves is kind of polynices. And I don't want to say too much about this novel, really, because the plot is unfolded with such sort of grace and intelligence. But there is a crayon character, and he is an MP called Cara Matlone, who becomes Home Secretary. And we discover that Paves has gone off to volunteer in Syria with ISIS and, you know, things unfold. But I think what she does in the novel is do precisely what you've described about. You know, all the characters are extreme in their own way, and actually none of them are simply wicked.

[Mary Beard]

They.

[Charlotte Higgins]

They're all trying to do their best and it all goes terribly wrong. And what was unbelievably uncanny about Kamala Shamsi's novel is that when. When it was published in the uk, it seemed. It seemed a slightly fantasy idea that Britain would ever have a Muslim Home secretary, as she wrote in her novel. The year that novel came out, Britain got its first British Home Secretary, who was a Muslim, Sajid Javid. And in the novel, there's a sort of recurrent idea about this new Home Secretary being about. Likely to be tougher on extremist jihadis and extremist figures of all kinds, but particularly Muslim extremists. He's going to be tougher on them than any other person would be in order to sort of counteract any kind of reputation or, you know, and this. This seemed to happen with Sajid Javid, maybe. I mean, he. He famously stripped the British citizenship from a young woman, a girl called Shamima Begum, who had, as a schoolgirl, gone off to volunteer with isis. So the whole, in a sense, the plot of the novel became true a couple of years later. Not quite in all its every single aspect, but in certain aspects.

[Mary Beard]

The underplot of Antigone, Sophocles, Antigone provided a template through which we could see some of those kind of conflicts within British society. And I thought it was extremely moving. And, you know, I think I should say that although part of me wants to kind of pipe up and say it's all more complicated when people now put on productions of Antigone in which Antigone is the. The heroine who stands up against the forces of tyranny. Is that not what I'm saying? No, it's not quite as simple as that. Tyranny is more complicated than that. Right. But, you know, in the end, I think you're absolutely right that whatever, you know, whatever an old classicist wants to make of this play, it has indelibly become something about struggles in political culture across the ages. And it's. I mean, it's probably the best example, really, of, you know, a single work of ancient literature being very much a work in progress. You know, it never stops kind of shifting its meaning. It never stops quite saying, are you sure? You know, try seeing it this way. And Shams Novel, I think, is brilliant at making that even more. Or intriguing, problematic, difficult, set in a completely different setting.

[Charlotte Higgins]

Yeah, it's a great play. There's no other way of looking at it.

[Mary Beard]

Yeah, go and see it and read it.

[Charlotte Higgins]

As ever, we want to know your thoughts and comments, ideas, questions. And so if you have them, please do send them to us at Instant Classics pouredmail or on our social media at Instant Classics Pod. Bye.