Antigone (/ænˈtɪɡəni/ ann-TIG-ə-nee; Ancient Greek: Ἀντιγόνη) is an Athenian tragedy written by Sophocles in (or before) 441 BC and first performed at the Festival of Dionysus of the same year.

After Oedipus' self-exile, his sons Eteocles and Polynices engaged in a civil war for the Theban throne, which resulted in both brothers dying while fighting each other.

The play follows the attempts of their sister Antigone to bury the body of Polynices, going against the decision of her uncle Creon and placing her relationship with her brother above human laws.

Prior to the beginning of the play, the brothers Eteocles and Polynices, leading opposite sides in Thebes' civil war, died fighting each other for the throne.

The rebel brother's body will not be sanctified by holy rites and will lie unburied on the battlefield, prey for carrion animals,[a] the harshest punishment at the time.

A sentry enters, fearfully reporting that the body has been given funeral rites and a symbolic burial with a thin covering of earth, though no one saw who actually committed the crime.

Tiresias warns Creon that Polynices should now be urgently buried because the gods are displeased, refusing to accept any sacrifices or prayers from Thebes.

The leader of the Chorus, terrified, asks Creon to take Tiresias' advice to free Antigone and bury Polynices.

In 441 BCE, shortly after the play was performed, Sophocles was appointed as one of the ten generals to lead a military expedition against Samos.

It is striking that a prominent play in a time of such imperialism contains little political propaganda, no impassioned apostrophe, and—with the exception of the epiklerate (the right of the daughter to continue her dead father's lineage)[6] and arguments against anarchy—makes no contemporary allusion or passing reference to Athens.

It does, however, expose the dangers of the absolute ruler, or tyrant, in the person of Creon, a king to whom few will speak freely and openly their true opinions, and who therefore makes the grievous error of condemning Antigone, an act that he pitifully regrets in the play's final lines.

Athenians, proud of their democratic tradition, would have identified his error in the many lines of dialogue which emphasize that the people of Thebes believe he is wrong, but have no voice to tell him so.

In a scene modern scholars believe to have been written after Aeschylus's death in order to make it consonant with Sophocles's play, the chorus in Seven Against Thebes is largely supportive of Antigone's decision to bury her brother.

[12] Heidegger, in his essay, The Ode on Man in Sophocles' Antigone, focuses on the chorus' sequence of strophe and antistrophe that begins on line 278.

His interpretation is in three phases: first to consider the essential meaning of the verse, and then to move through the sequence with that understanding, and finally to discern what was nature of humankind that Sophocles was expressing in this poem.

In a series of lectures in 1942, Hölderlin's Hymn, The Ister, Heidegger goes further in interpreting this play, and considers that Antigone takes on the destiny she has been given, but does not follow a path that is opposed to that of the humankind described in the choral ode.

More than one commentator has suggested that it was the gods, not Antigone, who performed the first burial, citing both the guard's description of the scene and the chorus's observation.

Being a tragic character, she is completely obsessed by one idea, and for her this is giving her brother his due respect in death and demonstrating her love for him and for what is right.

When she sees her brother's body uncovered, therefore, she is overcome by emotion and acts impulsively to cover him again, with no regards to the necessity of the action or its consequences for her safety.

[19] A well established theme in Antigone is the right of the individual to reject society's infringement on one's freedom to perform a personal obligation.

"[21] Related to this theme is the question of whether Antigone's will to bury her brother is based on rational thought or instinct, a debate whose contributors include Goethe.

[20] The contrasting views of Creon and Antigone with regard to laws higher than those of state inform their different conclusions about civil disobedience.

Antigone responds with the idea that state law is not absolute, and that it can be broken in civil disobedience in extreme cases, such as honoring the gods, whose rule and authority outweigh Creon's.

Creon's decree to leave Polynices unburied in itself makes a bold statement about what it means to be a citizen, and what constitutes abdication of citizenship.

It is clear how he feels about these two values in conflict when encountered in another person, Antigone: loyalty to the state comes before family fealty, and he sentences her to death.

And the political, cultural and historical spirit of Marie Senff's dramatic creation continues the Thespian civil tradition of Bertolt Brecht's "Antigone".

Sara Uribe's Antígona González, a book of prose set in Tamaulipas, Mexico exploring violent and fatal effects of the drug war, draws heavily on Antigone to reflect everyone in Latin America searching for the missing loved one.

In 2017 Kamila Shamsie published Home Fire, which transposes some of the moral and political questions in Antigone into the context of Islam, ISIS and modern-day Britain.

2023 saw bestselling author Veronica Roth publish a speculative fiction version of Antigone, Arch-Conspirator, which explores concepts of gender equity, reproductive rights, and the loss of freedoms under self-righteous tyranny.

Liliana Cavani's 1970 I Cannibali is a contemporary political fantasy based upon the Sophocles play, with Britt Ekland as Antigone and Pierre Clémenti as Tiresias.