Antigone also challenges male authority, in the face of Creon’s insistence that women are inferior to men and that men should rule over them. Antigone, just a child of thirteen or fourteen or fifteen, stands up to a powerful adult, even when her sister won’t and when the citizens of Thebes are too afraid to do so.

Of speaking truth to power.Īntigone insists on burying her brother Polynices, who has been killed while fighting against her city, Thebes, even though her uncle Creon, who is ruler of Thebes, expressly forbids the burial and will impose the death penalty for her defiance. Of pitting personal conviction against state law. The myth of Antigone, as told by the Greek playwright Sophocles, is one of the most well known of the Greek myths and one of the most meaningful for feminism and for revolutionary politics. These can be limiting and destructive but also inspirational and liberating. They form the foundations and scaffolding of the beliefs that shape our politics and our lives. 2 The Greek and Roman myths have become embedded in, and an influential part of, our culture. What makes a myth a myth, rather than just a story, is that it has been told and retold over the centuries and has become meaningful to a culture or community. I still love the way that myths open up new ways of looking at the world. I liked knowing that the eyes on the peacock’s tail are there because when a beloved giant of Hera, the queen of the gods, had been killed, she plucked out his hundred eyes and placed them, in tribute, on her favorite bird. No one does power and rebellion and love and loathing quite like the gods and mortals of ancient mythology. W HEN I WAS A GIRL I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO READ A BOOK called the Tales of the Greek Heroes. the old men of Thebes on Antigone in Sophocles’s Antigone Clearly the girl has a fierce spirit.… She does not yet know how to submit to bad circumstances.

Antigone rising by helen morales