The imprisonment of women in Greek tragedy

Abstract

In Kreon's famous edict in Sophokles' Antigone the punishment for attending to the dead Polyneikes is death by public stoning (36). In the event,at the climax of his bitter argument with his son Haimon, who is betrothed to Antigone, Kreon threatens to have Antigone killed in front of Haimon's eyes (760–1). But when Haimon then angrily departs, Kreon orders Antigone to be imprisoned in a deserted place, underground in the rock, with a little food (773–5). Various motives have been suggested for this change of penalty, e.g. that the city may not want to cooperate in the stoning of Antigone. But the main factor must be the aptness of imprisonment underground for the specific case of Antigone. As Kreon himself ironically puts it, ‘there she can ask Hades to save her from death, Hades who is the only god she reveres’ (777–8). Imprisonment underground, in what is described as a tomb, suits the crime of one who has seemed too devoted to Hades, and produces the complementary inversions described by Teiresias (1068–71): the dead Polyneikes is above the earth, while the living Antigone is below, in a tomb.