Examples Of Power In Antigone

Power. The world is yours to use. You can bend to your will, or break it like a toothpick. It’s your choice; after all, who’s there to stop you? The only thing limiting you is your own morality, and even that’s not a problem. Most people will never get the chance to feel the rush that comes with this much power, but many leaders who were given that chance were swayed by the lust for dominance. Rare is that the quality of selflessness in a leader. Power is too strong of a seducer for people not to gain at least somewhat of a hunger for control. And this obviously doesn’t just affect those in power. The people who are at the mercy of a ruler will always react negatively, whether they have a good ruler or a bad one. There will always be those

Take Abraham Lincoln for example; he is arguably one of America’s best presidents (he’s the one who freed the slaves), and yet he was assassinated for it. In Antigone, she herself breaks Creon’s law, questioning his authority over that of the gods. She even goes as saying that his strength is “weakness itself against the immortal unrecorded laws of [the] God[s]” (Scene 2, Line 68). This shows that where there are rules, there are those who break them; where there is light, there is darkness, one cannot exist without the other. The way that Antigone references the gods also shows us that this isn’t a binary subject, that it was never just Creon and Antigone; Ismene, Polynices, and the gods all played a factor in the story. The same goes for rulers in real life too, there are always other contributing factors that complicates things. If everybody agreed on everything, we wouldn’t have things like war. But sadly, we live in an imperfect world where people always disagree on thing; sometimes one of those people is a