Antigone

Daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, sister of Ismene, Polynices, and Eteocles. In Sophocles's *Oedipus at Colonus* she is the blind king's guide through the long years of wandering, leading him by the hand from Thebes to the grove of the Eumenides at Colonus where he is summoned into the earth. In *Antigone* — the earlier play, produced c. 441 BC but set in the chronologically later moment after the mutual fratricide of her brothers — she defies Creon's edict forbidding the burial of her attacking brother Polynices, is caught scattering dust over the corpse, is walled up alive in a rock-tomb by Creon's order, and hangs herself there before her fiancé Haemon, Creon's son, arrives to break her out. Her refusal of Creon's civic-law claim on behalf of the unwritten law of the gods is one of the founding scenes of the Western ethical imagination.

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