Martyrdom and conflict: the fate of Antigone in tragic drama

Abstract

Acts of martyrdom occur at points in the history of societies when they are riven by fundamental conflicts – not only between competing political authorities, but between divergent fundamental conceptions of just where authority in a society and culture should lie. For many commentators, Ancient Greece provides us with an example of just such a society, one which was riven by a conflict between sacred and secular visions of foundational authority. This latter found expression in fifth-century BC Athens in the development of tragedy, a dramatic form which although it had its origins in sacred ritual was at the same time preoccupied with a continuing debate between the legitimacy of the claims upon human conduct and ethics of temporal and transcendent powers. Perhaps chief amongst the classical tragedies to address this issue is Sophocles’ Antigone, which presents to its audience the spectacle of the daughter of Oedipus sacrificing herself for the sake of eternal laws in the face of the imperatives of laws more explicitly temporally constrained.

Keywords:

• Antigone
• conflict
• martyrdom
• Sophocles
• tragedy

Notes

1 For Victor Turner, root paradigms ‘go beyond the cognitive and even the moral to the existential domain … Paradigms of this sort reach down to the irreducible life stances of individuals, passing beneath conscious prehension to a fiduciary hold on what they sense to be axiomatic values, matters literally of life or death’ (Turner, 1974, p. 64). Such paradigms, as ‘cultural transliterations of genetic codes’, signify and enforce ‘the ultimate predominance of group survival over individual survival’ (ibid., pp. 67–68), thus making martyrdom only a particularly vivid and forceful instance of a wider, more prosaic socio-cultural phenomenon.

2 According to Edith Hall, Sophocles may well be reflecting in Antigone ‘a major concern in ancient Greek life’ with the breaking down ‘in the protocol that after battle the dead should be returned to their own side and treated with respect’ (Hall, 2010, p. 73).