Historical context for Antigone

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Historical context for Antigone
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Difference between Greek and Hebrew concepts of
God

• Greek
• Includes both harmonious and disharmonious forces
  of nature

• Hebrew Emphasizes only the harmonious forces of
  nature
• Blames disorder in the universe on humans

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• Greek
• Gods also an expression of disorder in the world

• Hebrew
• A priori assumption on a just and powerful God

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• Olympian gods are like the natural forces of sky,
  sea etc. They have conflicts with each other
  like humans, but totally disregard humans.

• Hebrew mythology
• No such conflicts

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• Behind all the gods stand the one powerful God
  Zeus but he is not all powerful behind him
  stands the mysterious power of Fate

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• Greek Gods not connected with morality
• Morality is a human creation, Gk gods may approve
  of it but they are not bound by it

• Hebrew God bound by morality

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• Gods here are immortal
• Death is a human fear, just as the courage to
  face up to it is a human courage

• Immortal too
• All resides in the hands of the one God

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• Fate is God in ancient Greek milieu but Fate is
  equally capricious, for unlike Hebrew God it is
  not bound by morality

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Greek Civilization

• Civilization is the fruit of mans struggle to
  discover and assert his humanness in the face of
  the impersonal forces of nature, and his own
  potential violence on the one hand and the remote
  powers of the gods on the other (2) Charles
  Segal Tragedy and Civilization An
  interpretation of Sophocles

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Importance of Burial

• Vicos 3 human customs
• All nations have some religion, all contract
  solemn marriages, all bury their dead and in no
  nation , however savage or crude are any human
  actions performed with more elaborate ceremonies
  than the rites of religion, marriage burial.

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Importance of Polis

• Poliscity-state
• bounded space dividing the human world from the
  wild.
• Aristotles Politics, hypostatizes the polis as
  the fundamental unit of civilization

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Aristotles Politics

• Man is a being who by nature is political
• Political action ( deliberation, decision,
  legislation, litigation) is his most human
  activity

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• Greeks view the human condition in in terms of
  spatial configuration.
• Man is threatened by the beast world pushing from
  below, but is also illumined by the light of the
  Olympian Gods from above
• Upward and downward movements

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• Human task is to achieve the proper mediation
  between earth and Olympus, lower and upper realms
• Therefore the great civilizing heroes like
  Oedipus and Odysseus defeat the savage hybrids of
  human and bestial shapes like the Sphinx and
  cyclops

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• These heroes represent paradigms of mans efforts
  to impose human order on the chaos that threaten
  to engulf him.
• Sophocless plays are concerned with the tension
  between mans autonomy and his dependence,
  between his power to transcend the physical and
  biological necessities that surround his life and
  his position within those necessities (Segal)

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Interest in the origins of civilization

• Of great importance to 5th century Greece, not
  just the tragedy writers.
• Periclean age relies heavily on reason as the
  civilizing force.
• Additionally, there is a new emphasis on psyche-
  the inner life and moral consciousness of the
  individual- in the tragedies and philosophies of
  Socrates and Democritus

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Conflict between Antigone Creon

• Laws of the gods vs laws of man