ABSTRACT
Lines 904–20 of Sophocles’ Antigone form one of the most vexed and controversial passages in classical literature. In her final speech, Antigone is groping for a way to reconcile herself to the renunciation of marriage that she has already made without at the time really focusing on its consequences. For Antigone to stress the institutional character of marriage and to dissociate herself from it is furthermore consistent with her gender. In her effort to justify her sacrifice of marriage by making it consistent with her willingness to dismiss the political meaning of her action of burying Polyneices, she adopts the same limited perspective of which Creon is guilty, seeing marriage only as an impersonal institution and neglecting its personal dimension. The Antigone dramatizes the consequences of rifts between entities that ought ideally to overlap and support each other: the family and the city, political policies and religious traditions.
