Examples Of Civil Disobedience In Antigone

Antigone is put in a devastating position when her two brothers have both died fighting against each other and one has recieved burial and the other has not. One brother is being portrayed as honorable and a hero and the other as a traitor who deserves to rot because of his actions. Antigone is justified in her act of disobedience when she decides to bury her “traitor” of a brother, Polynices. This is made clear in the play Antigone by Sophocles when divine laws are said to be important over everything and when Antigone's rights are being violated. From a critical source and standpoint it is also true because Creon’s authority is questionable from the start and dishonoring the dead is prohibited by rules of warfare. Finally, civil disobedience

Antigone, when talking to Creon, states, “I would never think your pronouncements have such strength that, being mortal, they could override the unwritten, ever-lasting prescriptions of the gods, for those aren’t something recently made, but live forever, and no one knows when they first appeared,” (Sophocles 29, 462-468). In Greek mythology the laws of the gods are followed by all, and no human being has authority over them. Creon, having made a law that says Polynices cannot be buried, has disrespected the importance of burial in Greek religion, which then disrespects the gods. Antigone also points out that Creon is just a mortal who will eventually be gone from the earth while the gods have and will be around forever further proving that what they pronounce must be followed. It is then able to be extrapolated, that Antigone is justified in her burying of Polynices because even if she broke Creon's rule, she was abiding by the rules of the gods, which reign

Bonnie Honig states, in her critical essay on Antigone, “Creon's authoritarianism is put in question from the beginning; he issues an important edict but he seems to lack the power to publicize or enforce it: news of it does not reach Ismene, until Antigone tells her about it, and the edict is violated, not once but twice.” She makes the point that since Creon's edict is almost immediately violated and not even widely known, does he have the right to make it in the first place? Leaders are supposed to be the foundation of their city and receive respect and acknowledgement from their citizens. Creon does not receive this acknowledgement and therefore his laws can be seen as invalid. Another point Honig makes is, “Creon too is immoderate. Dishonoring the dead is prohibited by conventional rules of warfare, themselves increasingly attenuated in this period and immediately after in the Peloponnesian Wars.” At the end of the Peloponnesian War the soldiers held a public funeral for all who had been killed. This demonstrates that burial is a basic human right and has been practiced in other wars similar to this one. She also says that Creon is immoderate meaning that his decisions can be seen as rash and not sensible. This correlates with the point that Creon’s rules are only that of a mortal and he is defying rules that have been around