The Epikleros: Further ironies in Antigone

The new king of Thebes puts forth his claim to the throne:

ἐγὼ κράτη δὴ πάντα καὶ θρόνους ἔχω 
γένους κατ᾽ ἀγχιστεῖα τῶν ὀλωλότων.

I now possess all the power and the throne according to my nearness to the race of the killed. (Antigone 173-74)

Through his ἀγχιστεῖα, his nearness by blood, Creon proclaims himself the legitimate successor to the rule of Thebes.

If one were inclined to take a critical view of Creon's assumption of power, an interesting and unusual Athenian law in effect at the time of the Antigone (c. 461 BC) offers some ammunition.

It was called the law of the epikleros:

epikleros (fem. adj. acting as noun), epiklerote (abstract noun) · An epikleros was the daughter of a man who died leaving no male heir; she was not his heiress, but possession of his estate went together with her hand in marriage. This system of inheritance is described as the epiklerate: for further details, see sv. inheritance; and for comparison, see sv. engue and sv. ekdosis. (The etymology of epikleros is unclear: it may possibly mean “one to whom the property pertains,” but more likely is “one who pertains to the property.”)

The above definition is found on Demos, a site about Classical Athenian Democracy. More about the epiklerate is found in an article on Demos entitled Women and Family in Athenian Law under the section entitled "Women and Property."

According to Wikipedia's article on epikleros, "the entire system of the epiklerate was unique to Ancient Greece, and mainly an Athenian institution."

The German poet and translator Friedrich Hölderlin might have been the first to note the consequential legal relevance of epikleros to the Antigone. As the elder daughter of Oedipus, Antigone would necessarily be betrothed to her closest male relation. As her uncle Creon was already married, she was betrothed to Haemon.

Under the rules of the epiklerate, the daughter's marriage to the nearest male relation carries forward the house (and property) of the bloodline of her father. Were the epiklerate in force, the union of Antigone and Haemon would continue the line of Laius and Oedipus, as if Creon and his blood did not exist. How might Athenians have viewed Creon in this legal context? Would it have put Creon's actions into a different legal, and perhaps moral, light, for Sophocles' audience?

Let's remember that Creon's other son, Megareus, had sacrificed himself to save the city. Under this law, with the union of Antigone and Haemon, Creon and Eurydice's grandsons would be descendants of Oedipus.

This is quite remarkable: the moment he married Antigone, Haemon would no longer be Creon's son. The marriage would cancel Creon's bloodline in Haemon, and, since Haemon is his last living son, it would eliminate the oikos of Creon from the world -- that house would vanish, and be as if it had never existed.

So we can see in this the mirror image of Creon's assumption of power. Creon claimed his nearness ("ἀγχιστεῖα") in blood to Oedipus legitimated his accession to power, which in turn gave him the authority to negate the blood of Polyneices even as he purported to honor that of Eteocles. His decree imposed a law as radical in its own way as the epiklerate.

But if we entertain Holderlin's interesting suggestion, the play has another fateful layer. The one person who violates Creon's decree is the child of Oedipus who, according to the epiklerate, would effectively annihilate Creon.

This could put the relationship of the king to the girl in a different light. When he says, for example,

in no way can we let a woman defeat us. It is better to fall from power, if it is fated, by a man's hand, [680] than that we be called weaker than women - 

the irony deepens as we consider that the epiklerate had performative power: it produced a legal sex change. Antigone would be the "man" in her marriage with Haemon. The couple would assume her oikos, obliterating his.

When the new king says, "In truth, then, I am no man, but she is, if this victory rests with her and brings no penalty" (485-86), his words would resonate with a truth he is far from conceiving, but which would be properly true in Athens. The irony of Sophocles tends to have a sledgehammer inside its glove.

When sons of an epikleros came of age, they gained the ownership of the inheritance.^[31] In Athens, this age was given in an extant law, and was two years past the age of puberty of the son.^[32] In Solon's laws, it appears that the eldest son of the epikleros was considered the heir of his maternal grandfather, with any further sons being considered part of their father's household.... And the son of an epikleros did not inherit anything from his father, and was named after his grandfather. 

When Antigone says,

οὐδὲ σθένειν τοσοῦτον ᾠόμην τὰ σὰ 
κηρύγμαθ᾽, ὥστ᾽ ἄγραπτα κἀσφαλῆ θεῶν 
455νόμιμα δύνασθαι θνητὸν ὄνθ᾽ ὑπερδραμεῖν. 

Nor did I think that your decrees were of such force, that a mortal could override the unwritten [455] and unfailing statutes given us by the gods.

the  audience would have reason to see that the unwritten statutes of the gods in fact underwrote the laws of men.

Dark wedding: Allusion in Antigone

It was a mere 2,455 years ago (or more) that Antigone had its premier. It's a testament to the formidable problem Sophocles has posed that the other day we consumed nearly our entire time in a lively discussion centering on the question of the political wisdom of Creon.

What's especially curious is that the question of state authority came up as we happened to be reading this famous, strange exchange between Antigone and the chorus that begins with the daughter of Oedipus comparing herself to Niobe:

[823] I have heard with my own ears how our Phrygian guest, the daughter of Tantalus, perished [825] in so much suffering on steep Sipylus—how, like clinging ivy, the sprouting stone subdued her. And the rains, as men tell, do not leave her melting form, nor does the snow, [830] but beneath her weeping brow she dampens her collar. Most like hers is the god-sent fate that leads me to my rest.

The chorus offers the consolation of fame:

[834] Yet she [Niobe] was a goddess, as you know, and the offspring of gods, [835] while we are mortals and mortal-born. Still it is a great thing for a woman who has died to have it said of her that she shared the lot of the godlike in her life, and afterwards, in death.

This provokes Antigone:

[839] Ah, you mock me! In the name of our fathers' gods, [840] why do you not wait to abuse me until after I have gone, and not to my face, O my city, and you, her wealthy citizens? Ah, spring of Dirce, and you holy ground of Thebes whose chariots are many, [845] you, at least, will bear me witness how unwept by loved ones, and by what laws I go to the rock-closed prison of my unheard-of tomb! Ah, misery! [850] I have no home among men or with the shades, no home with the living or with the dead.

The passage has left commentators scratching their heads, and there isn't time now to examine it in detail. Let's note that this is a rare case of a character in tragedy making a literary allusion. Usually the great names of myth are found in the choral odes, where one expects a certain elevated speech. It's not often that a character likens herself to a mythic being.

What's more, the allusion falls on deaf ears. The chorus dwells on the unlikeness, on the fact that Niobe was a demigod, the daughter of Tantalus, then offers Antigone the promise of fame. Antigone, however, apparently sees an utterly different point of congruence between herself and Niobe -- the homelessness of their fates.

Ovid's memorable tale of Niobe depicts a fecund woman who ends orphaning herself, living on as one who is neither dead nor alive, neither tomb nor entombed, an anomaly outside of the binaries of death/life, external/internal.

In Niobe, myth captures an extraordinary fate. The bearer of the seed of Oedipus likens her fate to Niobe's, and apparently the chorus misunderstands the ground of likeness. Of course the very notion of "seed" is a vexed matter in Thebes. Creon himself is a descendant of the original spartoi.

What's clear is that Antigone was destined to be the bearer of the seed of the royal house, but instead, her marriage to the son of Creon turns into a tomb.

At stake, in part, is the weight of this allusion, and perhaps of all allusions in Sophocles. How are they to be read? Antigone calls herself the new Niobe, but what happens is extraordinary: her marriage bed reverses nature. The embrace of bride and groom yields no children, but strangely gives birth to an altered Creon - bereft of children, and therefore of hope of grandchildren, he is rejected by his last son, abandoned to life by Eurydice, and ends in a petrified state that can truly be characterized as a living tomb.

If the chorus fails to "read" Antigone's allusion correctly, it's worth asking how well we manage to read allusions to other myths woven into the odes. The next choral ode will bring three dark tales to light, posing interpretive questions that have bothered commentators for 2455 years.

Sophocles' language seems basic, yet it works at the dark foundations of order, where terror is found, and a profound apprehension that conjoins simplicity and enormity. At this crucial moment in the play, the chorus's inability to read Antigone is foregrounded, and our reading must grapple with doubts as to the capacity of their witness.

No wonder our discussions are lively.

Violent dust: Creon's state

εἷς γάρ τις ἦν ἕκαστος οὑξειργασμένος, 
κοὐδεὶς ἐναργής, ἀλλ᾽ ἔφευγε μὴ εἰδέναι. (261-2)

every man was the culprit, none manifested it, but denied knowing.

The guard is describing the state of affairs after the discovery that the body of Polyneices has been ἠφάνιστο - hidden, veiled, sprinkled with a light veil of dust. The guard says this struck them - it was θαῦμα δυσχερὲς - a discomforting amazement, or more literally, a wonder hard to handle.

They immediately assume it had to be one of their number. Not knowing who, all fall under suspicion, but hard evidence is lacking. After nearly coming to blows, they resolve to report the event, but with great reluctance, because as the voluble guard says,

τὰ δεινὰ γάρ τοι προστίθησ᾽ ὄκνον πολύν
terrible news imposes great hesitation.

Creon invites him to free himself:

οὔκουν ἐρεῖς ποτ᾽, εἶτ᾽ ἀπαλλαχθεὶς ἄπει;
Then tell it, will you, and so unburdened go away?

Of course as soon as he tells the news, the guard is anything but "unburdened." Creon, with Nixonic paranoia, fixes on him, assumes a city-wide conspiracy, chalks it up to bribery, and demands that the culprit(s) be found and stoned to death. If not found, the guard will be hung alive:

ὅρκιος δέ σοι λέγω: 
εἰ μὴ τὸν αὐτόχειρα τοῦδε τοῦ τάφου 
εὑρόντες ἐκφανεῖτ᾽ ἐς ὀφθαλμοὺς ἐμούς, 
οὐχ ὑμὶν Ἅιδης μοῦνος ἀρκέσει, πρὶν ἂν 
ζῶντες κρεμαστοὶ τήνδε δηλώσηθ᾽ ὕβριν

I tell you on my oath: 

If you do not find the very hand (αὐτόχειρα) that made this burial, 

and reveal (ἐκφανεῖτ᾽) him before my eyes, 

mere death shall not suffice for you, not before, 

hung up alive, you have made this outrage plain.

An enemy of the state has been honored by dust in direct violation of decree. The absence of reliable knowledge is intolerable, as is the suggestion that the dust somehow involved the gods. The need to fill that emptiness turns to paranoia and threats of torture. The omma deina -- "terrible eyes" of Creon will use violence to force speech to occur. And when the messenger does reveal (ἐκφανεῖτ᾽) the doer, the violence doesn't evaporate; rather, it is displaced to the accused.

The passage turns on the ability to see, as in the play of ἠφάνιστο and ἐκφανεῖτ᾽, veiled and unveiled. To have intelligence of who did the veiling and why, one must search and if need be torture those connected with the act, however randomly. And this guard is randomly connected:

someone spoke up and made us all bend our faces [270] in fear towards the earth. For we did not know how we could argue with him, nor yet prosper, if we did what he said. His argument was that the deed must be reported to you and not hidden. This view won out, and so it was that [275] the lot doomed miserable me to win this prize.

Mere chance links this guard with the act of veiling the enemy, but Creon will torture him anyway if the doer is not found. This is the way of intelligence.

The guards are reluctant to tell Creon, but they do, and it's the right thing to do. Creon hears the guard's story and could see in it, if he looked, a perfect analog of his own situation. He will now suspect everyone, nearly come to blows, before finding the miscreant. What he will not do is take the whole matter to a higher authority - to Tiresias, who's been advising him, or to Delphi. As far as Creon is concerned, the buck stops here. He's the buckstopper, the one and only. And that's the problem: the question of whether what Antigone has done is in fact a crime disappears, replaced by the fact that she disobeyed Creon. To the extent Creon substitutes himself for dialectical inquiry and claims absolute authority, the entire matter shifts from a dialog regarding eternal vs. civil laws to an entombed monologue about obedience to the ruler.

By seeking to halt dialogue, a dialectical search for what's true and good in this matter, Creon has proven to be exactly what Haemon will call him: a childish fool who listens to no one but himself. This stony solipsism is empty, Haemon notes. It's also madness, a substitution of violence for speech, arbitrary accusation for exchange of understanding. Neither the ruler nor the state knows all. It can protect its interests, but to punish those no longer capable of harming those interests defines the opposite of intelligence.

In the tightly woven web of Sophocles' words, this putting out of light, φάος, the root of both hiding and revealing, ἠφάνιστο and ἐκφανεῖτ᾽, is not just a sprinkling of dust. As the chorus will sing in the 3rd choral ode, this dust cuts, and is stained with blood and madness.

νῦν γὰρ ἐσχάτας ὕπερ 
600ῥίζας ὃ τέτατο φάος ἐν Οἰδίπου δόμοις, 
κατ᾽ αὖ νιν φοινία θεῶν τῶν νερτέρων 
ἀμᾷ κόνις λόγου τ᾽ ἄνοια καὶ φρενῶν ἐρινύς.

Here the light stretched
over the final roots of Oedipus' house,
and the bloody dust due to the gods below
has cut it down—that and the folly of speech
and Fury of mind.

Enter the Guard: Voice and polis in Antigone

A motif that comes up again and again in Sophocles' Antigone is a tension between one voice and more than one. It surfaces stylistically as well as thematically. Take for example, the first entrance of the Guard, a study in characterization. Many have noted his similarity to some of the lower characters in Shakespeare, how their language seems to run at one thing, then another.

Upon the guard's first entrance, he narrates the circus within himself:

My king, I will not say that I arrive breathless because of speed, or from the action of a swift foot. [225] For often I brought myself to a stop because of my thoughts, and wheeled round in my path to return. My mind was telling me many things: “Fool, why do you go to where your arrival will mean your punishment?” “Idiot, are you dallying again? If Creon learns it from another, must you not suffer for it?” [230] So debating, I made my way unhurriedly, slow, and thus a short road was made long.

The divided consciousness, at the beck of multiple voices, going round in a circle, trying to adjudicate the case at hand, insulting itself on both sides of the aisle, a mini-political assembly all in one. The guard narrates this internal scene to Creon, then more or less pulls himself together and speaks in a more composed voice:

At last, however, the view prevailed that I should come here—to you. Even if my report brings no good, still will I tell you, [235] since I come with a good grip on one hope, that I can suffer nothing except what is my fate.

In the space of a few sentences, Sophocles has both given dimension to the guard and offered a glimpse into the inner imbroglio of an undecided mind, moving from the realm of "fool" and "idiot" to the officiousness of, "the view prevailed." The guard goes on to describe the scene at the grave, shifting to a lyrical power that provides a most memorable simile of Antigone in action, a bird bewailing its empty nest.

But it's what the guard says upon his return after arresting Antigone, that, within the full text of the play, will haunt Creon:

ἄναξ, βροτοῖσιν οὐδέν ἔστ᾽ ἀπώμοτον. 
ψεύδει γὰρ ἡ 'πίνοια τὴν γνώμην:

Guard
My king, there is nothing that a man can rightly swear he will not do. For second thought belies one's first intent. [390]

Moreso than many others, this play cannot be read, only re-read. Only after we have seen Creon change his mind, reversing his order on the question of Antigone and the burial of Polyneices, does the guard's seemingly commonplace remark reverberate with the somber ironies of Sophocles' art.

The theme runs throughout -- from the Ode to Man which resists single definition to the motif of coerced political silence to the increasingly heated exchange between Haemon and Creon: To rule is to subject multiplicity to one mind, to speak with one voice. But the creature that seeks to subject itself to one voice is itself a creature of many voices, many attributes, many parts. It is deinos. The heterogeneity of man, as exemplified in the guard's distinctive patchwork of sentences might lead us to consider the insights of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who wrote about what he called heteroglossia, and the hybrid utterance:

The hybrid utterance, as defined by Bakhtin, is a passage that employs only a single speaker—the author, for example—but one or more kinds of speech. The juxtaposition of the two different speeches brings with it a contradiction and conflict in belief systems.

Bakhtin was interested in the open-endedness of the novel in contrast to what he saw as the closed, finalized world of epic. Perhaps in Sophocles we see a dramatist using a heteroglossic speaker in a play that is, at least in part, about the complications and dangers of trying to silence all but one tongue.

As Creon will find out. A telling exchange comes later, line 736 ff:

Creon:

Am I to rule this land by the will of another than myself?         

ἄλλῳ γὰρ ἢ ᾽μοὶ χρή με τῆσδ᾽ ἄρχειν χθονός;

Haemon:

That is no city, which belongs to one man. 

πόλις γὰρ οὐκ ἔσθ᾽ ἥτις ἀνδρός ἐσθ᾽ ἑνός.

Creon uses the word ἄρχειν for "to rule" - the idea of arche as "first" -- of all the many, this one, the first. Creon will call the guard a "babbler" (λάλημα) and claim that the man's voice sickens him (ἀνιαρῶς, 316). But Creon's firstness slides into onlyness, and the dialogic -- an open political order in which differences coexist and self-organize via a coherent discourse -- collapses into empty monologue. At the extremes you get either a cacophany of babblers, or one big tongue.