Sophocles Antigone: A True Tragic Hero

Every book, play, tv show, and movie has a hero of some sort. This could be a super hero, an epic hero, or a tragic hero. Aristotle defined a tragic hero as "a character in literature who makes a judgement error that inevitably leads to his or her own destruction". It has been argued for years who the tragic hero is in Sophocles' play Antigone, but the true tragic hero is Antigone because she is loyal to her family and she has suffered much more than she deserved.

Antigone also suffers more than she deserves, which is a common trait for tragic heros. Her parents, Jocasta and Oedipus, killed themselves because of the humility of their fate. Polyneices and Eteocles killed each other during battle when they ran each other through with spears. Since Creon deemed Polyneices a traitor, he left his body on the battlefield and made it against the law for anyone to bury him. This is ultimately the reason of Antigone’s death. She suffers greatly from this incident because not only did she lose her two brothers, but she also lost her sister Ismene. Ismene did not want to go along with Antigone to bury Polyneices, so that drove a wedge between the sisters’ relationship. Antigone has lots of family issues, and that could be a contributing factor to the reason why she killed herself rather than have her uncle Creon kill her.

She knew somebody needed to bury Polyneices, because it is the gods unwritten rights to bury the dead. Antigone makes it clear that the only laws she will follow are the gods’ laws when she says, “Power to trample the gods’ unfailing, / Unwritten laws. These weren’t made now / Or yesterday. They live for all time, / And no one knows when they came into the light. / No man could frighten me into taking on / The gods’ penalty for penalty for breaking such a law”