Antigone, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

When Oedipus had gone into exile, the kingship of Thebes was disputed between his two sons, Eteocles and Polyneices. They had agreed to rule in alternate years; but Eteocles, when his year was done, refused to step down, and Polyneices went into exile and married the daughter of Adrastus king of Argos, and led an Argive army against Thebes — the famous expedition of the Seven against Thebes. The two brothers met in single combat before the gates and slew each other; the Argive army was driven off, and the kingship passed to Creon, the brothers' uncle, who was Antigone's mother's brother.

Creon decreed that Eteocles, who had died defending the city, should receive a hero's burial, but that Polyneices, who had brought the foreign army, should be left unburied — a body for the dogs and the carrion-birds, with the death-penalty for any who attempted to inter him. The decree was an offense against the divine law, which required that the dead be given to the earth; but no one in Thebes dared oppose it. Antigone alone went out by night, scattered earth upon her brother's body in token-burial, and was caught by the watchmen and brought before Creon.

She did not deny what she had done. Creon condemned her to death — not by the executioner, but by being walled up in a rock-cut tomb with a little bread and water, that the city might not be polluted by direct killing. Her sister Ismene, who had not joined her in the deed, asked to share her fate, but Antigone refused her: "You chose to live; I chose this." Haemon, Creon's son, who was Antigone's betrothed, pleaded for her life, and was rebuffed. Tiresias the prophet then came and warned Creon that the gods were offended; Creon, repenting too late, hastened to the tomb to release her — and found Antigone hanged within, by her own hand, and Haemon collapsed beside her body, and when Creon entered, Haemon stabbed himself and died. Eurydice the queen, hearing the news, killed herself also. Creon was left alive, alone, with the consequences of his decree.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

The story is preserved chiefly in Sophocles's Antigone (c. 441 BCE), one of the most influential plays of antiquity and the foundation of much later thinking about the conflict between civil and divine law (Hegel's discussion in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the great early-twentieth-century European drama, the Anouilh adaptation of 1944, etc.). Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes (467 BCE) ends with Antigone's defiance announced; the burial-scene is sometimes thought to be a later addition to that play. Euripides wrote a lost Antigone in which she is married to Haemon and bears him a son; this version of the legend is preserved in fragments and in Hyginus (Fabulae 72). Pseudo-Apollodorus (Bibliotheca 3.7.1) gives a basic version. The hero-cult of Antigone is not strongly attested, though there were tombs of the Seven at Eleusis.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Child ofOedipusCreon, the brothers' uncle, who was Antigone's mother's brother
Companion ofTiresiasTiresias the prophet then came and warned Creon that the gods were offended

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for The Heroic Cycle and the Tragic Houses. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

c. 1600–1100 BCE: Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
c. 1100–800 BCE: Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
late 8th–7th centuries BCE: The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
7th–6th centuries BCE: Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
6th–5th centuries BCE: Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
5th century BCE: Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
4th century BCE: Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
323–31 BCE: Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.