Firstly, the world of the epic was a very familiar world to the Athenian audience. The issue is of course more complicated than this. Yet for two hundred years and more mass audiences sat in the theatre of Dionysus and watched plays about kings sponsored by the democratic state. In democratic Athens public policy and legislation were in the hands of the mass assembly. In fact, of all Greek states in the classical period, Athens was probably the furthest removed from the political world of epic. So the epic world was politically remote. Hereditary monarchy had become a rarity in Greece long before the rise of tragedy. It has assemblies, and they matter but they don't have power. And the epic world is always ruled by kings. The heroes are members of a superior elite.

For Greeks at any period, the world of the heroes meant the world which they met in epic poetry, and especially Homer, the ultimate Greek classic.īecause we are so used to Greek tragedy, we don't usually stop to notice how strange all this is. With very few exceptions, tragedy was about heroes. Historical tragedy (the staple of theatre from Shakespeare to the present) again was very rare. Invented plots with fictitious people and events were very few (and not found before the late fifth century). Like virtually all Greek poetry at all periods in antiquity, its subject matter was heroic myth. The Athenian theatre was far more limited than this. We are used to a theatre which can embrace past and present, fictitious and historical, bizarre fantasy and mundane reality. Greek tragedy is a remarkable fictional creation. Sophocles' Antigone in Context by Professor Chris Carey The following three essays explore the play's themes and context. Seven complete plays of his survive, of which Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus are the most well-known and frequently performed.

He won at least twenty victories in the tragic competitions, and never came third (last), a feat which suggests that he was the most successful of the three. 497/6- 406/5 BC) is, along with Aeschylus and Euripides, one of the three ancient Greek tragic playwrights by whom complete plays survive.

Sophocles play antigone