Pride also shapes the fate of Antigone, out of pride for her set of beliefs she commits herself to a series of choices that she knows will result in her own execution, such as burying Polynices.
Pride opens up the many other themes the play is about, with pride comes dignity, determination, stubbornness, blindness and cruelty.
Another very crucial theme the play is about, is gender and the position of women. Antigone’s gender has profound affects on the meaning of her actions. Sophicles seems very conscious about laying out the values most cherished by his characters. Ismene seems doubly powerless. She provides a contrast to her strong sister throughout the play. Ismene is very sad about the fate of polyneices body, but believes there is nothing she can do about it, as she reminds Antigone they are only women and relitively helpless after all. ‘Remember we are women, we’re not born to contend with men’.
We also so Creon struggling with Antigone, because he feels his manhood is at stake. ‘ I swear I am not man and she is the man, if she can win this and not pay for it’, at this point Creon has equated masculinity with victory and compromise with defeat. Antigone’s gender makes it all the more important that Creon enforces his will, because he believes women should be ruled by men. Creon also makes a speech in the play that gives the reader another insight to Creon’s views on women. ‘From this time forth, these must be women, and not free to roam’ Creon is saying that restriction of movement and submission to the authority of men is not just appropriate for women, it defines women. Creon shows us that he sees the maintainance of gender catorgories as an essential part of maintaining general order. Locking up Ismene and Antigone is a way to make them be women. Creon also seems to feel like his manhood is dependant on victory over Antigone. Antigone’s defiance is seen by Creon as an attempt to unsurp male status and claim it as her own. Creon’s need to defeat Antigone seems at time to be personal. At stake is not only the order of the state, but his pride and sense of himself as a king and, more fundamentally as a man. Later he speaks to Haemon about the need to defeat Antigone, especially because she is a woman. The sex-gender system’s instability is solely the concern for Creon, who, as a man and a man in power, has the most to gain from the protection of that system. Sophocles’ play seems to have a lot about the role of women in Greece. This theme leads us into the next theme the play is about, power and the threat of tyranny.
Athenians were sensitive to the idea of tyranny and the fine line between a leader and a brutal tyrant. Creon is in many ways a sympathetic man, but he often abuses his power. His faults are not a struggle for power but are usually completely noble. He is loyal to the state ‘And whoever places a friend above the good of his country, he is nothing’, but he is also subject to human weaknesses. Creon’s anxieties about power make him behave at times like a tyrant; ‘Is not the city thought to be there rulers?’. Here he is claiming ownership over Thebes. Haemon gives the populist view, ‘There is not city, possessed by one man only’. The theme of tyranny and it’s threat is dealt with in an insightful way in Antigone. Creon’s abuse of authority is due to his concern for Thebes and he is interested in the well being of the city, we know this because again and again Creon praises loyalty, patriotism, and obedience to the laws, Creon take this too far at times and portrays himself as a bad ruler ‘should the city tell me how to rule them?’, Creon is at his worse when he orders his servants to bring Antigone so she can die whilst her husband-to-be watches, he wants this to happen just because Haemon doesn’t agree with his views. Creon’s love for the state and keeping it in order is carried to immoral extremes, one that even violates the family bond.
The main central idea to the play is Divine law versus Human law and religion. Antigone’s religious values line up with divine law, whilst Creon beliefs lie with human law. Antigone uses divine law to defend her actions, she sacrifices her life out of devotion to her religious beliefs in divine law which is far higher than human law. An important ideal in Ancient Greece was the belief that the government was to have no control in matters concerning religious beliefs. In Antigone's eyes, Creon betrayed that ideal by not allowing her to properly bury her brother, Polynices. She believed that the burial was a religious ceremony, and Creon did not have the power to deny Polynices that right. For Antigone the importance of attending the next world outweights, in her mind, the importance of human laws ‘These laws-I was not about to break them, not out of fear of some man’s wounded pride’. Creon makes his mistake by sentencing Antigone, and his mistake is condemned by the gods. We can see the God’s are less than pleased with Creons decree. Before Antigone attempts to bury her brother the second time, a storm appears. The guard assumes that the storm was created by divine power, but Creon ignores the event. As Antigone argues with Creon she defends the supremacy of the God’s law, ‘that you, a mere mortal, could override the gods, the great unwritten, unshakable traditions’, but once again Creon decides to ignore Antigone’s view of the God’s law.
The majority of the play is about honor to the laws of the land and obidence to the religion of the gods and how Creon’s struggle for power temporally blinds him to the importance of the god’s will. When Antigone goes against Creon’s human law, she says she will be seen as a criminal but a ‘religious one’
Overall Antigone’s action are seemed to be more heroic, she denies the power of the state out of the love for her brother, and her religious beliefs in divine law and the gods themselves seem to validate her actions, unlike Creon’s.
