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SophoclesAntigone
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Scenes 7-8
Scene 7 Summary
A messenger enters, telling the Chorus that both Antigone and Haimon are dead. Haimon has killed himself in fury at his father. The Chorus exclaims that the seer’s prophecy has been fulfilled.
Eurydike, the wife of Kreon and mother of Haimon, enters, demanding to hear the news. The Messenger tells her that after they left with Kreon, they first buried the body of Polyneikes. They then proceeded to Antigone’s tomb to find it already open. Within, Haimon was wailing, clutching the body of Antigone, who had hanged herself. At seeing Kreon, Haimon wordlessly spat in his face, then fell on his own sword and, with his final breath, laid down with Antigone.
Eurydice wordlessly returns inside the royal house. The messenger follows her.
Scene 8 Summary
Kreon arrives, shrieking a lament for his son and blaming his own foolishness for this death. The Messenger returns, telling Kreon that Eurydice has also just killed herself in grief and with her last words cursed Kreon. Wailing, Kreon asks his servants to guide him within, “I who am no more / than nothing” (1,409). He prays to die. As Kreon exits, the Chorus speaks its final words: “Grand words of arrogant men, paid back with / Great blows, in old age teach good sense” (1,350-51).
Scenes 7-8 Analysis
These scenes climactically close the fated events of the play with a bloody resolution. In line with the tenets of tragedy, most of the characters die due to the flaws of one figure. In this case, though Antigone is the protagonist of the play, Kreon becomes the tragic figure. All tragic heroes have a flaw, and Kreon’s is his stubbornness to listen to reason and his belief that his decrees should trump all others, even those of the gods.
As the Chorus notices, the death of Haimon alongside Antigone fulfills the prophecy that Teiresias spoke. These events are the final fulfilment of not only Teiresias’ prophecy to Kreon but his prophecy to Oedipus that his house was doomed. The carnage of these final scenes, finding three dead instead of only one and Kreon reduced to a shadow of his former glory, closes the entirety of Sophocles’ Oedipus saga, declaring for the final time the dangers of pride and the inescapability of fate.
Sophocles uses the Chorus, as the voice of reason, to make this statement one more time. The final pronouncement of the Chorus definitively restates the moral of the play—that no man is above the will of the gods, and no man can change the fate laid out for them. In describing a great king brought to nothing, this is also a lesson that transcends any concept of fate and speaks to the danger of hubris and stubbornness for all its viewers, both ancient and modern.
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By Sophocles
