When We Are All Enemies

Antigone in America

When I was in high school, we were taught that Sophocles’ Antigone represented the eternal struggle between the individual and a repressive state. As far as I can tell, it’s still taught that way. That interpretation would have puzzled the Athenian audience of the mid-fifth century BC, but for children of the 1970s like me, anyone who fought what was then called The Establishment was to be admired, for their courage if nothing else.

Fast forward – far forward – to late October, 2025.

On October 17th, eight million Americans took part in No Kings Day, a peaceful protest, their safety guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. No police were injured or killed, no public property was destroyed. That evening, the President of the United States — the President of the United States — the most powerful individual in the world, circulated an AI video of himself wearing a golden crown, flying a fighter plane over the marchers, and bombing them with what appears to be a flood of liquid feces. (See it, and more AI images he has circulated, at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/21/business/media/trump-ai-truth-social-no-kings.html)

There is a connection between this shocking stunt and an ancient Greek tragedy, more than a story of heroic resistance. Antigone is the cry of a broken community, one in which there is only allegiance or punishment, indulgence or disgrace, and no shared notion of basic human decency. Everyone becomes someone’s enemy, and everyone is punished for it.

Here is the story:

The original audience would already know about the curse-riddled ruling house of Thebes. Antigone (an-TIG-oh-nee) is a princess; her father Oedipus – that Oedipus – was king. Both her mother and father are dead. She is unmarried but betrothed, and so the audience would know that she is very young. Women in their teens were of marriagable age.

The audience would also know the backstory. A civil war has ended only hours before the opening scene. Antigone’s two brothers each claimed the throne after Oedipus died. One of them, Polyneices, led a foreign army against his native city; the other, Eteocles, fought to defend his claim to the throne. They died at each other’s hands, fulfilling a curse from their father on his last day on earth.

With the rightful heirs dead, Antigone’s uncle Creon assumes the throne. In this he follows accepted custom; he is the eldest male of the family, the late queen’s brother. Eteocles has received proper funeral rites. Polyneices’ defeated army has abandoned the field, and he lies where he fell. Because he assembled an army against the city, Creon has declared him a traitor, and traitors are left unburied as an example to anyone who might try to unseat the new king.

At Creon’s command, Polyneices’ corpse is to be left rotting in the sun, torn apart by vultures and scavenging dogs. This dead body, although never seen onstage, is the center around which the play revolves.

Antigone was performed during an uneasy respite from war with other Greek city-states. All able-bodied Athenian citizens served in the military, as did Sophocles himself. The original audience of about 15,000 in the Theater of Dionysus included huge numbers of combat veterans. They had seen abandoned corpses left to rot.

The play opens with a distraught Antigone rushing on stage to tell her younger sister Ismene what Creon has commanded: Not only are funeral rites for their brother Polyneices forbidden; anyone who even tries to bury him will be executed.

Refusing burial rites to traitors was not unheard of in Sophocles’ day; it was an accepted means of quashing sympathizers. But not allowing an opposing army, or their families, to bury their dead – that was considered primitive and barbaric.

Polyneices is the son of Creon’s sister. Antigone is betrothed to Creon’s son Haemon. Creon’s decision is to ignore the bonds of family and human decency. Obedience to him is more important than any such ties.

Antigone is sure that Ismene will join her in defying Creon. The two of them aren’t able to dig a grave for their brother, much less bring him home to be cleaned and wrapped in a shroud. But they can throw a few handfuls of dirt over his body. This act will count as burial, however uncustomary. Female relatives were entrusted with preparing a corpse for burial and conducting traditional rites of mourning. Not performing funeral rites for a relative was an unthinkable violation of religious custom.

To Antigone’s great surprise, Ismene begs her not to defy their uncle. She is understandably frightened, and counsels suffering in silence. She reminds Antigone of the horrors that the two of them have already seen: their father’s self-blinding, their mother’s suicide, their brothers’ deaths at each others’ hands. Isn’t that enough? We are women, she says; we can’t survive a fight against men. And she is right.

Antigone turns her anger against her sister. She tells Ismene that she hates her – twice – and accuses her of sacrilege. You go ahead and dishonor what the gods honor, if you think it’s best. With that, she rushes offstage, leaving a heartbroken Ismene alone.

As horrified as we are by Creon’s decree, we now somewhat uneasy about Antigone’s temper. Her rage is her strength; she is like a Homeric hero. She tells her sister that she hates her for her cowardice, all the while insisting on the loyalty due to family. Her brothers are dead, and now Ismene is, as we say, dead to her.

Ismene exits, and now Creon and the chorus of Theban elders enter. He tells them, “I now hold all the power and the throne according to my kinship with the dead.” Aware that ‘the dead’ include his nephew Polyneices, he continues: “Nor could I allow any enemy of our city to be a friend to me.”

If what he says is true, that Polyneices wanted to burn down the city and its temples, to feed on kindred blood and enslave the rest, then his edict makes sense – but only if the city is more important than the bonds of family and the observation of religious custom. Besides, the welfare of Thebes may well be of primary importance. As Creon points out, only in a stable city is it even possible to have friends.

He doesn’t see that the decree itself, however well-reasoned, is a destabilizing force. He is proud of himself and in love with his power. People are scared of him now, and no one is willing to challenge him – except for a teenage girl.

Tyrants tend to bolster their perfectly reasonable ideas with death threats.

Enter the unfortunate soldier who stood guard over Polyneices, with some news that tempts Creon to kill the messenger: someone has thrown dirt over the corpse. By the rules of ritual, even this minimal covering of earth counts as burial in the eyes of the gods.

Creon is enraged. His nephew’s body was barely covered with dirt. There were no mourners or rites of burial. But still, Creon insists that the guard brush the dirt off. There is no point to his command other than to show that he is in charge; or, the cruelty is the point (to quote the title of Adam Serwer’s book about the Trump administration, published in 2021). He goes into the palace, and the guard goes back to the body.

The guard returns, calling for Creon. He has Antigone with him. He tells Creon and the Theban elders that he and the other guards obeyed his command, “stripping the corpse back to its slimy nakedness.” They sat upwind to avoid the stench. Then a dust storm blew up, “sent by the gods.” When it died down, they saw Antigone, shrieking and cursing whoever had removed the dirt from the body. Before they could get to her, she had poured three libations for the dead, the rites of burial, and thrown dust over the body again.

She is defiant and scornful. Creon’s decrees are not more important than Zeus’s, she says, and she is ready to die for what she has done. Creon repeats what he’s said before: He gave an order. No one, especially a woman, even if she is his sister’s child, is to disobey. Polyneices was an enemy, and therefore hateful.

Creon orders Ismene to be brought before him; she must have helped. She claims that she did, and insists that she too should be punished. Antigone spurns her even more cruelly than before, and at greater length. Ismene pleads with Creon to spare his son Haemon’s betrothed. Antigone, however, makes no mention of him at all. For her, the dead are more important than the living.

Antigone and Ismene are taken away. Haemon appears and at first addresses his father calmly, hoping to persuade him. Creon repeats his only two concerns: he will not be disobeyed, and certainly not by a woman. He taunts Haemon at length for caring what happens to her, and especially for taking the side of a woman against his father. No one is to challenge him – especially a woman!

Finally, Haemon says goodbye to his father: “You will never look at me again, never again lay eyes on me.”

Creon then orders that Antigone be taken to a cave and left just enough to eat so that she does not die immediately. That way, he says, the city will not be punished by the gods for killing a blood relative. Creon throughly identifies himself now with the city. He speaks for the city; his words are law. He returns to the palace.

Antigone is brought out again. Young women who died before marriage were buried in their bridal clothes. Imagine her there, the bride of Hades. Before being led away, she talks to the chorus, veering from heroic bravado – I won’t be laughed at! – to a gradual recognition of what is to happen to her, to a confused justification of her actions. Her speeches are too long and moving to represent fairly here. She defied Creon’s order, she says, because she can never have another brother. But, she says, she would never do it for a husband or a child. We are reminded that she is very young; she knows nothing of husbands, much less how she would react to the death of the child she will never have.

At this point the gods intervene, but indirectly. A prophet, Tiresias, tells Creon that the gods are refusing sacrificial offerings in disgust at the corpse left to rot. The world is upside down when the dead are left unburied and the living are consigned to die underground. The gods will punish him for putting a living soul underground and keeping a dead body above ground.

Creon will not alter his position — that would be weakness. Tiresias gives him one last warning: the gods will deprive you of your own son in return for these deeds.

The chorus reminds Creon that this prophet has never been wrong. He frantically tries to stop the chain of events he has set in motion, but too late. Antigone has used her clothing to hang herself. When Creon’s son Haemon found her, he killed himself with his sword, next to her body. In a final blow to Creon, when his wife, the queen, finds out that her son is gone, she kills herself inside the palace.

And so the play ends. “Lead me away,” a stunned Creon says to the city elders. “I am worse than useless; I am impious.”

Sophocles’ particular genius, in every one of his tragedies, is to push his protagonists into the heart of at least one moral quandary. This play may well have presented his living audience with a very real moral dilemma. As noted earlier, the refusal of burial rites to traitors was not unheard of in Athens. But was it right? Was it decent? Did it offend the gods?

When we think about Antigone, now, in late October, 2025 we can ask our own questions.

Has any good ever come to a nation whose rulers dehumanize their fellow citizens? Does anyone flourish when one man declares that whatever he wants to do is legal? Or, if it isn’t legal, that he can do it anyway and suffer no harm? Who said, when running for election almost ten year ago, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Who is proud to imagine himself the crown-wearing pilot of a fighter jet dumping excrement on a crowd of peacefully assembled citizens?

As I asked at the beginning of this post, What does any of this have to do with Antigone? What can be learned from it?

At least this: When fellow citizens become enemies, their bonds of friendship and family are weakened if not destroyed. When primary identity is reduced to “us” and “them,” the definition of justice narrows. It becomes simply what helps “us” and harms “them.”

When a leader urges citizens to identify his enemies as enemies of the state, what those citizens may end up having most in common with each other is anger, fear and mutual contempt.

And what of the Ismenes and Haemons of the world, those who try to dissuade others from rash actions and de-escalate tensions? The historian of the war that ended Athens’s greatness, Thucydides, Sophocles’ younger contemporary, observed that when a community is at war with itself, “moderates suffered most, because they were subject to attack by both factions.”

Sophocles offers another lesson in Antigone. A single person in power, if he persuades or frightens enough people, can cause the suffering of innocents and the loss of institutions and customs on which civic order relies. He can then decry the loss of civic order, name his enemies as responsible, and do whatever he wants.

Or he can try.

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