Antigone in an Ancient Light

Reading Gerhard’s article and Brecht’s poem got me thinking about the contemporary context Antigone would have had in the ancient world. Gerhard claims that Antigone’s defense for her efforts to bury Polyneikes is not strong to a modern audience. This is true, but probably not in the case of ancient audience. In the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the four Chinese classics, the main character, Liu Bei, at one point berates his general, Zhao Yun, after a battle. Zhao Yun had charged deep into the enemy lines to rescue Liu Bei’s wife and infant son; however, Liu Bei, angered that Zhao Yun had ‘unnecessarily’ risked his life, exclaims that, ‘Wives and children are as clothing, but brothers are as limbs.’ Sophocles mirrors this sentiment when he has Antigone explain that she would not have gone to the reaches she has for Polyneikes if it was a husband or child that had died – since they can be ‘replaced’, while a brother cannot be.
On another note, the main conflict in Antigone – her desire to bury her brother’s body – can be seen as a subtle criticism of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which had just lost the Greko-Persian War (498-448BC) by the time Sophocles wrote Antigone (around 442BC). For the official religion of the Achaemenids, Zoroastrianism, forbade burying or cremating the body after death, as earth and fire were viewed as sacred and could not be ‘corrupted’ by the ‘un-pure’ flesh. Instead, the dead were exposed to the elements atop of open-air constructs called ‘Towers of Silence’, where they were left to rot until only the bones remained – at which point the bones could be interred. This belief was the polar opposite of the religious practices of the Greeks, who considered it a most vile act to leave the body exposed. Thus, Sophocles’ Creon can be seen as the Persian ‘King of Kings’ imposing his will over the Greeks if they had lost the Greko-Perisan War and would reinforce the Hellenic prejudice of considering all non-Greeks as ‘barbarians’.