Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Creon, now master of Thebes, decrees that Eteocles—who died defending the city—shall be buried with honor, but that Polynices—who brought foreigners against his homeland—shall lie unburied, food for dogs and birds. Anyone who buries him is to die. Antigone, sister of both, refuses to leave Polynices’ corpse under that ban. She claims the unwritten laws of the gods and of kinship outweigh a mortal ruler’s edict. Ismene at first shrinks from the risk, then tries to share the blame; Antigone rejects a courage that came too late. Antigone covers the body with dust (a symbolic burial) and is caught. Brought before Creon, she confesses openly. Creon condemns her to be entombed alive in a rock chamber—technically not shedding her blood, yet leaving her to die. Haemon, Creon’s son and Antigone’s betrothed, pleads for her; father and son quarrel bitterly. Teiresias warns Creon that the gods reject Thebes’ sacrifices while the dead lie abused and the living are wrongly entombed; he prophesies a corpse for a corpse in Creon’s house. Too late, Creon relents: he buries Polynices and goes to free Antigone. She has already hanged herself in the tomb. Haemon, finding her dead, kills himself over her body. Eurydice, Creon’s wife, on hearing the news, takes her own life. Creon is left alive and ruined—the civic hard line broken by the same divine and familial forces that have dogged the house of Laius. Sophocles’ *Antigone* thus closes the generation of Oedipus’s children with piety and tyranny in collision, and prepares the ground for the Epigoni by leaving Thebes under a shaken Creonid order.