Antigone, Odyssey Greek Value Systems Term Paper

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But her loyalty is not to her father or brother, but to her husband, thus it is viewed more charitably in the ancient Greek system of values. Also, her actions protect the state, as she prevents a wrongful king coming to power by refusing to remarry immediately, after her husband is suspected to be dead. Interestingly enough, Penelope manifests her supreme value of loyalty through her use of mendacity, as she unweaves her web every night. Penelope, at the beginning of the epic poem the "Odyssey," has promised the suitors demanding her hand in marriage and leadership over her husband's kingdom, that she will chose one of them only after she finishes weaving her piecework -- hence her nightly undoing of her weaving. Eventually, this ruse is discovered, but the cleverness that Penelope's lies demonstrate, as well as the lies her husband frequently tells to extricate himself from many an escapade over the course of the "Odyssey," that honesty for no purpose was not a value held high by the ancient Greeks. Cleverness was better than honesty.

Indeed, Antigone's honesty does not spare her life, and she is cruelly honest in public to her sister, who attempts to take credit for the illegal burial, even though the other girl had no part of it. Humility thus, in the face of the gods is valued, and to a lesser extent that of the state, but honesty was not. In the Greek system of values, there was great importance attached to valor even if it costs the individual his or her life. But valor must also supported by a real and lasting loyalty to an organization of family or military and political authority of legitimacy, thus valor alone or valor and honesty shown to an unbalanced system of values, as in "Antigone" brings death to he or she who would arrogantly brandish it in public as an individual virtue.

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To the Greeks, pride was the utmost evil. It was a manifestation of human arrogance, and philosophically it was at its greatest extreme a denial of fate and thus an act of atheism, a flouting of the existence of the gods themselves. In the case of Creon, one sees a king's refusal to bow in his judgment before the gods, and in the case of Odysseus he refused to be mindful of the dangers, when a sailor is vulnerable at sea, to show care towards the children of the gods like the Cyclops. However, wise and clever Odysseus was wise enough to accept Athena's patronage, unlike Creon -- and Antigone -- who hoped to stand alone, resting only on their own morals and sense of individual rightness......

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