Content area
Full text
Antigone's defiance of Creon's interdiction against burying Polyneices activates a form of public discourse in Thebes that corresponds to some of the informal discursive processes of Athenian democracy. The structure of the text, which allows Antigone to articulate the edict before Creon repeats it to the Elders, emphasizes her powerful intervention in public talk.
The citizens of fifth century BCE Athens who wrote, produced, performed, watched, and judged Greek tragedy accepted certain anachronisms in the depiction of a mythological past that focused on the catastrophic lives of a few royal families. Among the most striking of these anachronisms is how democratic law making processes familiar to the Athenian audience (and a relatively recent political system) are retrojected into the monarchies of myth and legend. In Aeschylus's Suppliant Women, King Pelasgus, responding to the Danaids's petition for sanctuary, insists on seeking the approval of the assembly of Argive citizens, whose voting practices are pointedly emphasized in the text (607). Of course, King Theseus, the archetype of democratic principles, emphasizes the judicial processes of Athens (Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1051-53), and consults the Athenian populace when he decides to champion the cause of Argive mothers (Euripides, Suppliant Women 404-408). Less benign is the Argive assembly who vote to stone their prince Orestes for matricide (Euripides, Orestes 440-42), or the Greek army at Troy,whose motion to sacrifice the captive Trojan princess Polyxena, reproduces the enactment formula that preceded the decrees passed by the Athenian democratic assembly of the fifth century (Euripides, Hecuba 107-108).
When tragedy mirrors the legislative processes of Athenian democracy, it makes the heroic world of mythology more familiar and accessible to the fifth century citizen audience (Easterling 2-3), but it is important to note that the legal practices of Athens are not embedded in its drama in any simplistic or merely self-congratulatory manner. Law is represented as a complicated and sometimes precarious power. Tragedy gives careful consideration to how the language of law can create the social world: the decrees engendered by the legislative bodies represented in drama are all examples of what philosophers of language such as J.L. Austin and John Searle have identified as speech acts or illocutions. In classical Athens, some of the most authoritative speech acts were collectively voiced by...