AntigoneSophocles

Sophocles' Antigone, produced around 441 BC, stages the collision between two obligations the tragic world offers no way to reconcile. Antigone's brother Polynices has died attacking Thebes. Her uncle Creon, the new king, decrees that the body will lie unburied as the penalty for treason. Antigone buries the body anyway, citing the unwritten laws of the gods that require burial of kin. Creon condemns her to death. By the end of the play, Antigone has hanged herself in the tomb, Creon's son has killed himself on her body, and Creon's wife has killed herself on hearing the news. Creon is left alive to understand what he has done.

Creon speaks for the city, for the law that makes the city possible, for the distinction between the citizen and the enemy which treason violates. Antigone speaks for the family, for the obligations that precede the city, for the gods below the earth whose laws no decree can repeal. Hegel read the play as the paradigm case of tragic collision, in which each side embodies a good the other cannot accept, and each is destroyed in the refusal.

The play is the Syntopicon's chief source on law considered as the point where civic and divine obligations can come apart, and on duty treated as something prior to the state and binding against it. Every later discussion of civil disobedience in the tradition, from Aquinas on unjust law to Thoreau, takes Antigone as the starting case.