Antigone
Greek mythology · heroine · conscience against the state
Daughter of Oedipus, who buried her outlaw brother in defiance of the king's decree, choosing divine law over human edict and death over obedience, the West's founding drama of conscience versus state.
Stories
Oedipus the King
Thebes rots under a plague, and its king vows to unmask the killer whose crime pollutes the city. The investigation leads through prophecy and denial to himself: the man who killed his father at a crossroads and married his mother. The queen hangs herself, and Oedipus puts out his own eyes.
Antigone's Defiance
The new king decrees that the rebel dead shall lie unburied. Antigone scatters dust over her brother's body anyway, answering that no royal edict outranks the unwritten laws of the gods, and goes to her death rather than unsay it.