АНТИГОНА

A young woman decides to bury her brother against the direct order of the king — and the argument that follows has never been resolved, which is why it is still being performed two and a half thousand years later. Creon has just saved Thebes. His decree is reasonable, politically necessary, and entirely within his authority as king: the traitor Polynices, who led a foreign army against his own city, will not be buried — his body left to the birds and dogs as a public lesson in the cost of treason. Antigone is Polynices' sister. She buries him anyway. Not because she does not understand Creon's argument — she understands it perfectly — but because she recognizes a law older and higher than any king's decree, the unwritten divine law that requires the dead to be honored by their kin regardless of what they did in life. Two authorities. Two forms of justice. Two people of absolute conviction. And Sophocles, with the most devastating fairness in the history of drama, refuses to let either of them be simply wrong. Written in approximately 441 BCE and the most performed of all Greek tragedies, Antigone is the play that every generation finds waiting for it with its most urgent question already fully formed — about conscience and the state, about the individual and authority, about what we owe the dead and what we owe the living and what happens when those obligations conflict absolutely. F. Storr's authoritative translation renders Sophocles' verse with scholarly fidelity and genuine dramatic force — preserving the architectural economy of the original and the full weight of every exchange between two people who are both right and both wrong and both going to be destroyed by it. The oldest political drama in the Western tradition — and still the most alive.