Antigone ’s Remainders

The Decree: Innovation and Deliberation

We first encounter the Chorus as a council of elders, gathered together for a special meeting (sunkleton) with Creon. Before the meeting begins, the Chorus reflect in lyric verse on the recent civil war that has devastated Thebes. They are quite optimistic that the sun’s light now shines brightly on Thebes after it was devastated by the “contentious quarrels of Polynices” (110–11). In their account, Zeus intervened in the war because Argos attacked Thebes with arrogance and Zeus “detests the boasts of a proud tongue” (127). Yet though, for the Chorus, the blame is with “contentious Polynices” and the army he recruited from Argos, they show equal pity for the “unhappy two” ²¹ (toĩn stugeroĩn) (144)—brothers, Eteocles and Polynices—who died at each other’s sword. Now that the war is finally over, the Chorus want to cleanse themselves of the burden of the past. They want to “be forgetful” and to “visit all the temples of the gods with all night dancing” (151–54) and they want Bacchus himself, god of oblivion, revelry, and renewal, to rule the city in its restoration.

The Chorus demonstrate their desire for renewal and change in their hope that Creon will be a new kind of leader. Though they know him well as Jocasta’s brother and a lifelong citizen of Thebes, in this postwar context they are ready to embrace Creon as a new kind of man (neochmos) who will have a new way of responding to the new conditions of postwar Thebes. ²² But by the end of Creon’s first long speech, the Chorus understand what Creon’s new rule will actually entail. Creon is indeed a new kind of leader, but in all the wrong ways. To start, he oversimplifies Theban history by casting Polynices unambiguously as enemy. As Creon tells it, Polynices had come “meaning to burn to the ground his native city and the gods of his race, and meaning to drink the people’s blood and to enslave its people” (198–202). Yet even in his opening lines, Creon had presented Polynices and his brother Eteocles as equally supported by the Theban people (168–72). (While Sophocles does not provide us here with the background to the brothers’ quarrel, we know from other texts that the brothers fought over the crown of Oedipus, which they were given to share.) ²³ Creon erases Polynices’s identity as rightful heir, beloved brother, nephew, and child of Thebes. More drastically, Creon’s new “forward-looking legislation” defies established political and religious custom by declaring that Polynices’s body must remain unburied within the city gates to be defiled by ravenous animals. ²⁴

The Chorus’s ability to balance the desire for forgetfulness and new direction with attention to and respect for the traditions of the past stands in stark contrast to Creon’s rigidly balanced backward-looking conception of vengeance and forward-looking attempt to erase tradition. Creon’s tyrannical decree implies a kind of selective amnesia, but one that is directly opposed to the renewal the Chorus had hopefully anticipated. His commitment to vengeance shows him to be incapable of thinking beyond the cycle of retaliatory justice that has plagued Thebes for generations. We learn, for example, from Tiresias at the end of the play, that this violation of traditional burial laws was enough to restore the plague to the city and anger the gods (998–1022). Creon blindly repeats the cycle of pain and punishment that has destroyed his city; his innovation in so doing is to cast aside those unwritten customs that establish continuity in his community’s collective narrative. In leaving the body unburied within city walls, his decree also refuses to grant to the Chorus the forgetfulness and renewal they desire since they, along with the whole of Thebes, will be unable to escape the dead body’s presence.

In Creon’s new Thebes, the Chorus’s role as advisors is diminished. Despite the king’s opening gestures to seek counsel (178–79), he has no interest in welcoming the opinions of others (191, 215). The Chorus understand that Creon’s new law is “his pleasure” (soi taũt areskei) and, while they agree to respect his authority, they do not want the burden (bastadzein) of enforcing his policies (216). Thus, when Creon responds that he expects them to show no sympathy with dissenters, they acquiesce because “there is no one foolish enough to desire death” (220).

The Chorus’s exclusion from Creon’s deliberations marginalizes their position as advisors and thus marginalizes them from political discourse and judgment in the new Theban order. They do not, therefore, speak again for the next fifty-seven lines during which Creon engages with the guard who has arrived to report that the body had been buried against the king’s decree. When they do speak up, they revise their hopeful claim that no one would be foolish enough to desire death by disobeying the king. They now see someone has broken the law and, as a result, Creon’s policy will need to be enforced. Their response, “my anxious thought has long been advising me (hē sunnoia bouleūei palai emoi) that this action may have been prompted by the gods” (278–79), shows two subtle but important shifts in their perspective.

First, having learned that someone risked death to bury the body seems to have prompted the Chorus to reconsider their understanding of what it would take to risk defying Creon. They recognize a caveat to their earlier position: if no one is foolish enough to desire death, then a desire for life might be in competition with other stronger desires, such as the desire to please the gods (as we will see in the fourth ode, the Chorus will cultivate a more nuanced understanding of the power of desire as the play progresses). Second, in expressing their concern that the gods might have something to do with the burial, the Chorus offer their first subtle challenge to Creon’s legislation. While they recognize that that their counsel is not, in fact, welcome in the king’s Thebes, they take a risk and prompt Creon to see that his decree may have gone too far: it may have upset the gods. When Creon rashly dismisses this suggestion, attributing the defiance to conspiracy and bribery (280–304) they accept that the king will not, at this point, be persuaded, and fall silent. Thus, rather than read the Chorus as complicit in Creon’s plan or as cowardly, ²⁵ I read their silence as deliberative and their interventions as subtle resistance. Moreover, I believe we see a perspectival shift in this opening scene as the Chorus are forced to quickly temper their optimism and hope in the new leadership and contend with the disorder his laws have already prompted in their city. We see evidence of the Chorus’s revised perspective in the reflection that immediately follows.

Ode to Man: deinos and the Chorus’s Law

The “Ode to Man” serves as the first extended insight into the rumination of the Chorus. It begins, “Many things are awesome (deinos), but there is nothing more awesome than man (ouden deinoteron).” ²⁶ As Heidegger observes, the use of the term deinoteron contains both a powerfully frightening and a strange aspect. To call man the most awesome of all the things is to exalt in man’s “overpowering power” at the same time as it is to distance oneself from the strangeness of this power. ²⁷ The Chorus’s opening paean straddles this ambiguity. Man’s terrible power has led him to harness and wear down the earth. He has cultivated skills to master the harshness of his environment, anticipated and acted into unknown futures with creative and destructive energies. He has mastered speech and “wind-swift thought,” and “the temper (orgas) that rules cities” (354–56). He can condition and escape all limitations, but his end is in Hades.

Man’s terrible awesomeness is also a twofold capacity: to create and destroy. These two aspects of awesomeness are inseparable features of the human condition. The distinction between man’s awesomeness as a creator and as a destroyer is, moreover, clarified and nuanced when considered in light of man’s plural condition. Viewed from the perspective of man in the singular, the power to create and destroy is the very condition of our dynamic becoming and is the condition of possibility for differentiation and excellence. But viewed from the perspective of not man, but men, man’s awesomeness more clearly assumes its two-sided valence. Man’s unbridled power allows men to collectively explore, build, and expand. But this capacity also contains the terrifying and alienating possibility that individual members of the community will cultivate singular power against the collective. This is expressed both as excessive over-reaching and as auto-nomy—auto-nomos—the desire to legislate alone and without regard for others. The plurality of man’s condition means that men in the plural are collectively vulnerable to man’s awesome expansive potential, just as the community is preserved and thrives when our singular capacities are harnessed in the interest of the collective.

The Chorus’s own law follows from this shift from individual man to the collective of men. Their law balances together respect for “laws of the earth and the justice, to which one is bound by oath, of the gods.” ²⁸ Following these laws well means that man will be held high-in-the-city (hypsipolis) (368–71). The Chorus’s use of the term hypsipolis thus pertains to both city and man equally. Obedience to the laws of the earth and the laws of the gods is a requirement that the individual achieves in and with the collective, that is, by way of the city. Recklessness and ignoble action, in contrast, severs the bond between individual and community by casting the individual outside and beyond the constraints and support of the political. It is this over-reaching individual that the Chorus denounces by exclaiming, “May he who does such things never sit by my hearth or share my thoughts!” (373–75). From their perspective, he who is without a city (apolis) “is he with whom the ignoble consorts because of his daring (tolma)” (368–71).

The Chorus’s claim that he who transgresses “never share its thoughts” underscores the violent potential of man’s collective context. Insofar as the collective encourages a kind of sameness, it cannot tolerate individual deviation or rebellion, even when individual deviation might be necessary for steering the community toward either progress or justice. Indeed, the power of the community to create and impose its own limits on man’s formidable energy makes the collective a strangely terrifying and even violent force against the individual. ²⁹ Read in this way, the Chorus’s law is as violent as the auto-nomos of Creon and Antigone. But there is an important difference here. Unlike Creon and Antigone, who claim a particular interpretation of the law as their truth and who therefore present laws that preclude deliberation and plurality, the Chorus present their law as a process. Their law seeks to mediate between the individual and the community. Since the laws of the earth (chtonos) and the laws of the gods are particularly obscure to men and therefore lend themselves to a great deal of interpretation and revision over time, their only criterion for rejecting an interpretation of law is the failure of man to orient his overpowering power to the benefit of men and, in particular, to the benefit of men with whom he shares a hearth and a polis. Their dismissal of reckless and ignoble action is not, therefore, an injunction to think the same thoughts, which would be just another static mono-vocalism and expression of auto-nomos, but rather an insistence that judgment be configured always within the dynamic parameters of the many-and-one that constitute community. For the Chorus, the central violence at issue, then, is not the limiting power of man’s familiar conditions, which constrain individual power as Heidegger thought, ³⁰ but it is rather the silencing tendency that the individual (or the body politic when it speaks with only one voice) holds over the ability of the community to function and judge as a plurality.

The Chorus’s plural composition contains within it a unity that requires a process of interpreting, judging, and revising that is never static or finished. As we have already observed in the opening scenes of the play, the Chorus are willing to revise and reconfigure their judgments. This capacity, I believe, is a feature of their law and reflective of the way their judgments are embedded in and responsive to experience. Because the Chorus understand law as a process rather than a set of imperatives, they also recognize that this process unfolds over time through experience, reflection, and reaction to the shifting parameters and needs of the individual and community. In this way, the Ode helps us to see how the internal dynamics of the Chorus, who are both single and plural, are reflected in their conception of legislation and enacted in their character within the drama.

The Chorus’s law also serves as a reminder of the dangerous power individual actors have, as agents of politics and morality, to eclipse the process of collective judgment and to render it impotent by willing and commanding from a perspective that denies the possibility of difference and revision. As Bryan Garsten puts it in a different context, “judgments are inscrutable or incommunicable if they are based entirely on an individual’s solipsistic perspective—they are not truly judgments.” ³¹ Read in this way, the ode provides an early basis within the play for judging Antigone and Creon that anticipates the terrible isolation each face as punishment. The Chorus’s reflection on the relation between man’s individual creative power and his collective context enables us to see clearly that auto-nomos legislation—divorced from the process of collective deliberation—is destructive to the collective. Insofar as Creon and Antigone act in the name of individual will or solipsistic morality and share a reckless disregard for the common sense of the community, the Chorus show that they are both apolis and apolitical. ³²

The One and the Many: Thoughtlessness and Thoughtfulness

The Chorus’s musings are interrupted by the arrival of the guard and captive Antigone. While the Chorus might have anticipated that the body was buried out of some religious imperative, they did not expect the culprit to be the king’s niece. After listening to the guard’s description of her deed and Antigone’s impassioned defense, the Chorus are not swayed to her side. Her speech allows them to see clearly that she is savage (ōmon), like her father, and does not know how to yield before her troubles (471–72). As before, the Chorus remain silent during Creon and Antigone’s heated exchange, siding with neither. They speak up only to announce Ismene’s arrival, marked by “tears of love for her sister” and her “flushed face” (526–30). The Chorus’s sympathetic portrayal of Ismene as loyal and loving stands in stark contrast to their savage view of Antigone. Thus, while they are silent in Antigone’s case, they push Creon to ensure Ismene is not punished along with her sister (770–71). This intervention, while slight, is, importantly, the only one to make Creon think twice, and, as a result, Ismene is spared.

The Chorus’s third ode follows Ismene’s defense of her sister and her failed attempt to appeal to Creon’s own familial loyalty. Antigone and Ismene have been sent into the castle, and the Chorus are left with Creon to reflect on the the sisters’s fate. This ode thus speaks to the darkness of the immediate context and, much more broadly, it provides a revised metric for judging the action of the drama.

In the ode’s opening, the sea that man so easily traversed in the second ode becomes a dark swelling abyss, where men cannot control when the gods infiltrate and pervert men’s minds and speeches, leading them to self-destructive folly (582–603). Faced with the ruin of the house of Labdicus all over again, it seems fitting that the Chorus emphasize human impotence before the gods. Indeed, the Chorus suggest that gods are responsible for the two transgressions that currently threaten Thebes: “folly in speech and the Erinys in the mind” (601–3). But in the third and fourth stanzas, the tone changes. The Chorus now present men’s hopes to be “widely wandering” and often fruitful. The problem is that men’s hopes are also often deceived by “thoughtless longings” and men are thus frequently led into situations far more dire than their thoughtless (kouphonoos) longings anticipate (615–18). The emphasis on thoughtlessness here suggests a slight revision to the first half the ode.

In their view, no human is immune to thoughtlessness. This is a starting point that they accept. We cannot always protect ourselves from being ravaged by forces we do not anticipate and which cause “folly in speech and the Erinys in the mind.” Nevertheless, as we saw in the Ode to Man, and as the Chorus reassert in the second half of this ode, human actors are still responsible for their judgments. Thoughtless longings are different than madness because they point to a lack of deliberation and reflection within the self. In this way, the Chorus’s revised position allows us to arrive at a more nuanced account of individual responsibility. On the one hand, we see that poor judgment is not always or necessarily a matter of moral integrity or autonomous choice. It can easily result from forces beyond one’s control, such as the will of the gods or madness. On the other hand, we also are reminded that human folly often arises from fixation on a singular longing. In this respect, it is the result of allowing one desire or commitment to dominate all others and of blindly attaching oneself to a singular purpose at the expense of a wider set of commitments and obligations. Thus, while the Chorus attenuate their presentation of individual judgment by acknowledging that man is often acted upon by forces that exceed his awesome potential, they maintain that humans are nevertheless called upon to be thoughtful and to make decisions with a view to the benefit of the many and one.

Erotic Intransigence

The fourth ode on eros follows Creon and Haemon’s doomed agon over Antigone’s fate (631–780). It opens with a celebration of Love’s ubiquity: in battles, in property, in the lovers’ embrace, and in the wild (783–6,790). The ode continues the reflection initiated in the second and third, except that here it recasts man’s awesome power as an erotic desire “for which the sea is no barrier” (785–86). ³³ Eros underwrites the desire both to conquer and create anew. We now find that it is passion that spurns our awesome power and eros that “wrenches just men’s minds aside from justice, doing them violence” (791–92). Singular desire is, for the Chorus, the driver of Antigone’s reckless protection of her own; it also animates Haemon’s dangerous rage and is the source of his own fateful attempt at parricide (1192–43). As Ismene indicates at the beginning of the play, in wanting to protect and nurture the dead as her own, Antigone shows that she is in love with the impossible. This love, moreover, makes her act alone with exclusive regard for Polynices and the gods (90).

From the Chorus’s perspective, Antigone’s love of the impossible corresponds with Creon’s reckless decree. If Creon’s reckless legislation and refusal to deliberate makes him apolis, then Antigone’s expression of love for the impossible, demonstrated through her attempt to act in solidarity with the dead at the expense of the living, reveals her to be apolis as well. ³⁴ Erotic desire, understood as that which motivates man to “travel over the sea and through the huts of dwellers in the wild” (783–86), now adds nuance to the duality of man’s awesome power. ³⁵ Indeed, erotic desire expressed with a view toward the impossible now appears to be the condition of possibility for man’s awesomeness: it is what makes man creative and powerful and a dangerous threat to the community. Experienced blindly and with singular regard, it can lead man to recklessly disregard the will of the collective. Antigone, much more so than Creon, believes that she can act in an unknown, non-temporal, and non-mortal sphere because of her love. She, whose name famously means anti-generation, forsakes her own future marriage and invites an unnecessary union with Hades. To desire to such an extent that one must, in loving, deny the life in the polis, is to symbolically invite that one limit which the collective cannot overcome.

The Chorus’s attention to the potential proximity between injustice and love on the heels of their reflection on thoughtlessness deepens their understanding of the kinds of forces that “wrench men’s minds from justice” (791–20). Building on their understanding of deinos, they recognize eros as an inescapable power that not only mobilizes the human condition toward creation but also death and destruction. This ode establishes, therefore, that it is not only a thirst for domination and authority that poses a threat to community and good judgment, but that erotic desire can also motivate reckless action. Where they once thought that no one was strong enough to desire death (220), they now see the multiplicity of desire. They see that the destructive potential they saw in the relationship between the one and the many may also be present in the private attachments of lovers. They recognize that eros is not only an intoxicating and life-affirming drive, but can also turn leaders into tyrants, inspire madness, and hasten the death of the young. ³⁶ Indeed, they recognize that it “has its throne beside those of the mighty laws” (798–99).

The Chorus show their nuanced understanding of love lines later when they find themselves overwhelmed by Antigone’s death sentence: “But I myself am carried beyond the laws at this sight, and I can no longer restrain the stream of tears, when I see Antigone here passing to the bridal chamber where all come to rest” (801–5). Their embrace of their own sympathetic feelings, feelings that they in turn relocate in a reflection on human mortality writ large, performs the dynamic approach to reflection and judgment their odes describe; they recuperate the power of love now as a force of compassion and civic solidarity. Being carried beyond the law is a danger but also, it would seem, at times a paradoxical feature of maintaining their law.

Replaceability and Remembrance

The Chorus’s final exchange with Antigone is in lyric song. They initiate this shared lament when they see her brought from the palace ready to face her verdict. Their pity is, however, short-lived. Instead of using this opportunity to communicate or reflect on her deed, Antigone laments that she will die without a bridal song, taking instead Acheron, the river of woe in Hades, as her betrothed (806–16). Not missing the irony that Antigone has courted her own unhappy death, the Chorus ask: “Is it not with glory and praise that you depart to this cavern of the dead? . . . of your own will you alone of mortals while yet alive descend to Hades” (817–22). Antigone, however, seizes not on the invitation to reflect on her choice but rather on her proximity to the goddess Niobe, who, having offended Artemis and Apollo, lost all of her children and spent the rest of her days alone among the rocks in Sipylos (Iliad, 24.602–20). The Chorus remind Antigone that Niobe “was a goddess and the child of gods, and we are mortal and the children of mortals” (834–35). And yet, as they admonish her, they also attempt to soothe her fear that she will be forgotten: “yet it is a great thing for the departed to have the credit of a fate like that of those equal to gods, both in life and later in death” (836–38).

Antigone only hears the Chorus’s measured response as a “mocking.” She therefore becomes more defensive, claiming that the defiance for which she was sentenced to death and left “unwept by friends” was due to Creon’s questionable laws (847–48). In response, the Chorus remind her that she advanced “to the extreme of daring” and therefore “stumbled against the loft altar of justice” (853–56). Her deed showed “a noble kind of respect; but power, in the hands of him to whom it belongs, is in no way to be flouted, and you were destroyed by your self-willed passion (orga)” (872–75). From the Chorus’s perspective, Antigone courted her own death by acting alone against Creon’s law. Thus, while it is possible that the Chorus had hoped for a different kind of final exchange with Antigone, they remain firm in refusing to approve her action. Even if the city had rejected Creon’s rule and endorsed the burial, they would not condone her lack of foresight or her renegade attempt to take matters into her own hands. That the Chorus’s responses to Antigone become increasingly unsympathetic suggests that they are disappointed that she demonstrates no capacity to reflect on and revise her position.

Creon’s return prompts Antigone’s famous parting speech. It is here that she finally calls into question her certainty in knowing the gods’ will, yet cleaves to the hope that her pious act will be approved and avenged. Here too she introduces the strange justification that she buried her brother because, unlike her parents and future husband and children, he alone is irreplaceable (909–12). For the Chorus, Antigone’s bizarre logic demonstrates that she is still possessed by an unthinking spirit and has not learned anything from her suffering (929–33). Indeed, that she still frames her understanding in terms of pious law and resorts to this strange justification of “replaceability” reinforces that she has not reflected on the impact of her action on her living community—for under her same logic Ismene too, presumably, is irreplaceable. ³⁷

As Antigone is led away, the Chorus drift into their fifth ode. Here we learn that “the power of fate is strange; neither wealth nor martial valor, nor a wall, nor black ships crashing through the sea can escape it” (951–54). The Chorus supplant this truth with three examples of those whose fates were also linked to tomblike imprisonment and the gods: Danae, daughter of Acrisius, Lycurgus of Dryas, and Cleopatra, wife of Phineus. These reflections on the cruelness of fate are only loosely connected to Antigone by themes of suffering and imprisonment. Yet it is striking that where they had previously chastised Antigone for comparing her fate to the goddess Niobe, they now grieve her death by comparatively invoking mythic figures whose fates were also inextricably linked to their close connection to the gods.

Situated within the intergenerational context of Theban history, Antigone’s deed takes on new significance. In this light, she is not simply a recklessly defiant girl, but an actor whose defiance has changed Theban history. Indeed, their attempt to elevate Antigone’s memory to mythic status now that her story is complete suggests a shift in their orientation toward her. What they could not endorse when Antigone was alive becomes preserved as a story for future generations alongside other mythic narratives. Where the Chorus previously saw Antigone as Oedipus’s daughter (471–72), they now reflect on her deeds and place her in connection with other mythic heroes, who “Fates bore hard” upon (986–87). Though Antigone’s deed perpetuated her isolation and produced polarizing relations between her, Creon, and the city, the Chorus now attempt to ameliorate this separation by bringing Antigone into a new relationship with the city. Where moments ago she was the self-willed and defiant daughter of Oedipus, now she is joined to the mythic landscape of Theban history. If death is the limit for singular invention and desire, and the one limit the individual and community cannot overcome, the Chorus show that remembrance and storytelling have the power to soften its finality and mobilize it for the future. ³⁸

Prophetic Wisdom and Persuasion

Unlike other characters in the play, when Tiresias appears on stage, he has Creon’s immediate attention and respect. Ordered by Tiresias to obey his counsel, Creon responds, “In the past I have not been used to depart from your counsel” and “I can testify from experience that (listening to Tiresias) was profitable.” Tiresias’s advice is sound. He warns Creon that the plague has returned to the city. The birds and animals have fed on Polynices’s unburied body, polluting the god’s altars and causing the gods to refuse sacrifice. He also argues that it is not too late for Creon to change course, “do not continue to stab him as he lies dead! What is the bravery of killing a dead man over again?” (1029–30).

Despite Creon’s opening show of respect, his response to Tiresias’ advice is characteristically obstinate. He accuses Tiresias of seeking personal profit in claiming to speak on behalf of the gods, for in Creon’s view “no mortals have the power to pollute the gods” (1043–44). When Tiresias pushes Creon to see that the “best of all possessions is good counsel (euboulia),” Creon insists he is foolish in thinking that he has prophetic powers (1055). When Tiresias reminds Creon that his counsel once helped him to save the city, Creon acquiesces but still accuses Tiresias of seeking profit (1061). Creon’s refusal to listen and his lack of respect finally provoke Tiresias to leave but not before hurling his prophecy at Creon like a curse, “For after no long lapse of time there shall be lamentations of men and women in your house; and all the cities are stirred up by enmity . . . (corpses) or which fragments have been consecrated by dogs or beasts, or some winged bird, carrying the unholy scent to the city with its hearths” (1081–83).

The Chorus, having witnessed Creon’s refusal to listen, urge him to heed Tiresias’s counsel. They have learned from experience that Tiresias’s predictions are always accurate (1091–94). In fact, Creon knows this as well, but he fears that yielding will make him appear weak (1095–97). The Chorus seize this opening. Seeing in Creon’s admission that he may be swayed, they speak up, convincing him that he requires the counsel of others (1098–99). It is they who persuade Creon to “go and release the girl from the subterranean dwelling and make a tomb for him who lies there!” (1100–1). It is also the Chorus who insist that the king act swiftly and on his own (1103–4, 1106) and who prompt Creon’s admission that “I am afraid that it is best to end one’s life in obedience to the established laws!” (1112–14). In contrast, then, to Tiresias, the androgynous seer whose singular prophetic insight comes from outside the city and who, perhaps because he is an outsider in so many ways, is ultimately unpersuasive, ³⁹ the Chorus have learned by force of habit, observation, and reflection when to intervene and when to hold their tongue. They are persuasive now because they were patient and attentive listeners earlier. And yet, once they see an opening to offer guidance, they are decisive and directive.

Tragic Phronesis

The Chorus’s reflective arc is completed in the sixth and final ode. Faced with a very literal purging of the house of Labdicus—for Creon, of course, was far too late to reverse his decision or to save his family—the Chorus must now rely on their own judgment in steering the city to a new course (1334-5). They revisit their desire for the cleansing power of Dionysus, praying for him to purge the city with his maenad attendants through “the dance of the stars breathing fire” (1144-5). Dionysus, god of both destruction and creation, mirrors the duality of man’s own creative and violent power. Out of the plague-ridden darkness, madness, and chaos, there is the possibility for renewal, yet they no longer invest their hopes for change in an external source of authority as they did at the play’s opening. The Chorus’s last lines thus emphasize not only Creon’s failure but also their own experiential good sense:

Good sense (phronein) is “by far the chief part of happiness; and we must not be impious towards the gods. The great words of boasters are always punished with great blows, and as they grow old teach them wisdom.” (1348–49)

What the Chorus call “good sense” (phronesis) is no simple solution to the problem of man’s destructive overreaching. Indeed, it is important that immediately preceding their final reflection on human wisdom and good sense, they claimed that “there is no escape from fated calamity for mortals” (1337–38). This acknowledgment that no man can escape calamity is a central feature of the Chorus’s good sense. The Chorus uniquely recognize their constricted role in an irrational universe and at the same time affirm the limited space for human deliberation and community within this world. Their phronesis, or good sense, offers a particular kind of political orientation that is animated by attention to the precarious limits of the human within the community and of the community in relation to man. It is an orientation that extends this recognition of limits to man’s own precarious position within the cosmos. Attention to man’s dynamic existence as one and many, creator and destroyer, thoughtful and maddening, lover and tyrant, seems to be a condition of possibility for their phronesis.

Conclusion

In my reading of Antigone, I have muted the perspectives of the protagonists in order to amplify the voice of the Chorus. The Chorus’s considerations of the relationship between the individual and the collective, law, thoughtfulness, and eros help us to situate their actions and judgments within a deeper set of reflections. This interplay between thought and action sets the Chorus apart from other characters in the play and gives us greater insight into their silence as well as their speech. We understand, for example, that they had little tolerance for Antigone’s reckless method of carrying out her disobedience, even if they supported her intention. We see that their reticence to speak openly against the king’s decree was well founded, for Creon demonstrated from the outset that he was impervious to sound advice. That the Chorus knew to wait patiently until they saw some sign of self-reflection before urging Creon to correct his error shows that they grasped correctly (even if too late) when Creon might finally be receptive to counsel.

Indeed, as I have shown, one of the unique strengths of the Chorus is that they are uniquely attuned to a wider temporal and collective framework than other characters. This ability to think from a collective and intergenerational perspective is, in turn, tied to and enforced by the Chorus’s tragic orientation. Their recognition that no one is immune from calamity produces solidarity with the city rather than madness, and their law emphasizes the importance of collective judgment as a means of harnessing and limiting the destructive power of the individual. In these respects, the Chorus’s phronesis suggests a kind of practical wisdom that is informed by the deliberative judgment of the many and which actively resists the threat of auto-nomos.

This suggestion invites further comparison to Hannah Arendt’s discussion of common sense and judgment. ⁴⁰ For Arendt, as for Sophocles’s Chorus, the paradox of man as deinos—the twofold aspect of our power to create and act anew—must always be mediated by the plurality of our condition. Arendt rooted judgment in the common sense of the spectator who weighs present actions against the measure of past example at the same time as she celebrated man’s distinctive capacity to act radically anew in the company of others. Indeed, we find some striking similarities between Sophocles’s presentation of the Chorus and Arendt. Both are concerned with the silencing tendency the individual (or the body politic when it speaks with only one voice) has on our ability to access collective judgment and on the importance of deliberation within the community and individual. As Arendt puts it, “even our ordinary common-sense judgment is rendered ineffective . . . when we live in a topsy-turvy world, a world where we cannot find our way by abiding by the rules of what once was common sense.” ⁴¹ To be sure, the potential for collective judgment to be lost or buried is a worry that Arendt and Sophocles share. And this concern is all the more powerfully underscored, albeit unintentionally, when we consider the way both Creon’s and Antigone’s various positions have been seductive to audiences of interpreters. For while it is no surprise that readings of this play would focus on its protagonists, it is surprising that our enthusiasm for these characters costs us our ability as spectators and readers to listen to the multiple laws and positions the play introduces.

And yet, while the Chorus embody plurality within the self and while they show reflection and revision to be an important constitutive feature of the way they experience one and many, they do not lead us to the conclusion that the many are necessarily stable or that internal deliberation necessarily produces good or moral decisions. Indeed, the Chorus show that our embodiment with others in time, place, and as part of a cosmos that is often inhospitable to human interests means that no individual or community is immune to madness, solipsism, or tragedy. As Bernard Williams put it, “There is a gap between what the tragic character is, concretely and contingently, and the ways in which the world acts upon him. In some cases, that gap is comprehensible, in terms of conflicting human purposes. In other cases, it is not fully comprehensible and not under control.” ⁴² Williams’s articulation of the gap between the knowledge we have of ourselves and our susceptibility to a world that acts upon us to alter self and purpose helps to illuminate the tragic aspect of the Chorus’s perspective and attenuate our confidence in the judgment of the many. ⁴³ As sensible as the Chorus might be, there is no indication that they have the courage or will to resist gross injustice. They do not provide us with a model for thinking about radical deviation from the collective or its leadership, nor do they help us to think about what to do when entire communities perpetuate injustice for the sake of some collectively agreed upon good.

In retrieving the Chorus as a model for thinking about political judgment, I do not intend to heroize the Chorus or, the collective judgments of the many. Rather, I hope to prompt reflection on the relationship between the power of the individual who acts alone and the many who are often silenced and invite enlarged attention to the multiple perspectives the play opens up for its reader and spectator. Reading Antigone from the political perspective of the Chorus and as a window into the people’s law thus revives the voice of the many from within this classic drama.