Antigone and Oedipus Sophocles' Plays Term Paper

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Ismene would later be pardoned, but Antigone's decision to include her sister in the plot denotes further criminality on Antigone's part.

In any case, the crime that Antigone commits is relatively minor: she is not harming anyone and is actually following the law of custom, tradition, and religion, a law which Antigone places before any law of the mundane world. Ironically, her suicide can be interpreted as a further violation of divine law, but Antigone had already been sentenced to death. Antigone's crime also leads to the unfortunate deaths of those around her, including Antigone's fiance and Creon's son Haemon, and then Creon's wife Eurydice.

Similarly, Oedipus's unjust actions directly cause the suicides of several other characters in Oedipus the King. His beloved wife and mother Jocasta kills herself at the end of the play, causing Creon to poke his eyes out. Like Creon in Antigone, Oedipus also violates divine and moral law. However, he does so unwittingly. Oedipus never knew that one of the travelers he killed that fateful day was his biological father; there was no way he would have known and thus Oedipus remains innocent of the initial crime of murder. However, Tiresias offers Oedipus a chance to not only redeem himself but save his city Thebes from destruction. If Oedipus can solve the riddle of his own life, he would suffer some psychological damage but would save Thebes from the plague. Oedipus, however, refuses to heed the words of the prophet, instead claiming that Tiresias and Creon are both conspiring against him.

Unlike Antigone, Oedipus is both criminal and administrator of justice.

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In Antigone, the main administrator of justice is Creon the King. Justice is meted out primarily by the state. Divine justice is meted out at the end of the play, when Creon finally admits to his faults too late to save Antigone. On the other hand, Oedipus is both criminal and administrator of justice. He has committed crimes without knowing, and he is in charge of punishing the murderer of Laius. Ironically, the man he seeks in his death warrant is himself.

In some ways, Creon and Oedipus both act as criminals and prosecutors. Creon commits a crime against divine justice first by forbidding the proper burial of Polynices and then by harshly persecuting Antigone for wanting to bury her brother in the proper manner. One of the central messages of Antigone is therefore that divine justice trumps mundane law. Oedipus breaks a divine law not necessarily by killing his father and marrying his mother, acts he committed without knowing, but by refusing to acknowledge the truth to the detriment of himself and those around him. In the end, justice is served by the gods through the death of his wife and the continuation of the plague. The final word of Oedipus the King, therefore, has more to do with the detriments of pride than with the supremacy of divine justice......

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