Antigone

Antigone is a tragedy by the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, first performed around 441 BCE, the third in dramatic chronology of his three Theban plays though written before the other two. The play begins after the deaths of Oedipus's sons Eteocles and Polynices, who killed each other in single combat while fighting on opposite sides of a civil war for Thebes, and follows Antigone, their sister, who defies the new king Creon's decree forbidding burial of Polynices as a traitor and buries him herself, invoking unwritten divine law over human decree. Creon condemns Antigone to be sealed alive in a tomb despite the pleas of his son Haemon, who is betrothed to her, and the blind prophet Tiresias's warnings, and the ensuing deaths of Antigone, Haemon and Creon's wife Eurydice leave Creon devastated and alone. The play's central conflict between Antigone's appeal to divine and familial obligation and Creon's insistence on civic law and order has made it one of the most frequently reinterpreted works of Greek tragedy, cited across later philosophy, political theory and drama as a paradigmatic clash between individual conscience and state authority.