Antigone

Antigone, performed in 441 BC, dramatizes the aftermath of the war of the Seven Against Thebes: King Creon forbids burial of Polynices as a traitor to the city, and his niece Antigone defies the edict to bury her brother according to religious duty, knowing the penalty is death. The play stages an irreconcilable clash between Creon's civic law, which he insists must bind everyone equally to hold the city together, and Antigone's appeal to unwritten divine law that predates and outranks any human decree, a conflict neither character will yield on until Creon's stubbornness costs him his son, his wife, and finally his own will to rule. Widely read as a foundational text on the limits of state authority and the individual conscience's claim against it, the play resists any simple verdict that either character was entirely right.