Kirkpatrick - The Prudent Dissident

The Review of Politics 73 (2011), 401 –424.
# University of Notre Dame

doi:10.1017/S0034670511003421
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The Prudent Dissident: Unheroic Resistance

in Sophocles’ Antigone
Jennet Kirkpatrick
Abstract: Most contemporary political theorists who have interpreted Sophocles’

Antigone have focused on the fearsome clash between Antigone and Creon. The
relationship between Antigone and her weaker, more cautious sister Ismene has not
garnered similar attention. This essay addresses this gap by revisiting the
tantalizing possibility that Ismene played a more significant role in resisting Creon
than has often been assumed. The essay shifts the analysis of Antigone, first, by
illuminating the complex and fraught relationship between two women and
emphasizing the political and legal challenges that they face together as women.
Second, the essay shifts focus from vertical power relations—that is, between the
individual and government—to horizontal power relations between disempowered
outsiders. On this reading, Antigone reveals less about the downfall of a character
than it does about the political power of the weak and disadvantaged.
Introduction
Sophocles’ Antigone and its boldly defiant heroine have not wanted for atten-
tion. Calling the play one of the most sublime works of art known to man,
Hegel was unstinting in his admiration for “the heavenly Antigone, that
noblest of figures that ever appeared on earth.”1 To Virginia Woolf,
Antigone was an exemplar of “heroism itself . . . fidelity itself.”2 “You are
right about Antigone,” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to John Gisborn in 1821,
“how sublime a picture of a woman. . . . Some of us have in a prior existence
been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us find no full content in any
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670511003421
I am grateful to Lars Rensmann, Arlene Saxonhouse, Mariah Zeisberg, and Froma

Zeitlin for their comments. Arlene Saxonhouse also helped translate several key
passages of the play.
1
G. W. F. Hegel, The History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson
(New York: Humanities Press, 1892), 1:441.
2
Virginia Woolf, “On Not Knowing Greek,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed.
Andrew McNeillie, (London: Hogarth, 1994), 4:42.
401
402 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS
mortal tie.”3 Echoing this admiration, some commentators have drawn com-
parisons between Antigone and Jeanne-Marie Roland, Germaine de Staël,
Charlotte Corday, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
But what of Antigone’s weaker, more cautious kin, Ismene, who proclaims
the senselessness of openly disobeying Creon’s decree? For the most part,
Ismene has garnered comparatively little attention and scant professions of
admiration. Often staged as the pale, hollow counterpart to the dark and
intense figure of Antigone, Ismene has been eclipsed, even forgotten.
Kierkegaard’s reading omits Ismene altogether; she is absent in Euripides,
Seneca, and Racine.4 Even when attention has been paid to her, Ismene typi-
cally comes up short in comparison to her intrepid and valiant sister. For
instance, in Antigone and Creon, Ivan M. Linforth describes Ismene as “a piti-
able figure” that “cannot be called heroic.”5
Concentrating on Ismene affirms the long-standing depiction of her as a
guarded young woman who, in sharp contrast to Antigone, sees herself—
and the women of Thebes—as disempowered and assailable. Attentive to pol-
itical vulnerability, Ismene refuses Antigone’s request to publicly violate
Creon’s decree forbidding the mourning or burial of her brother Polyneices,
on pain of death. To use the word most commonly associated with her,
Ismene is weak. Orthodox interpretations tend to equate Ismene’s weakness
with compliance, passivity, and inaction. But does Ismene’s sense of vulner-
ability or her refusal to assist Antigone in overtly defying Creon necessarily
imply inaction or powerlessness? Or, to put the question more generally, is
political disempowerment always allied with obeisance or quietude? The
action of the Antigone itself seems to complicate this equation because
Ismene does not passively disappear after refusing Antigone’s request.
Rather, she publicly stands with Antigone, hoping to receive punishment
by her side.
The bond between weakness and inertia is further loosened if we reconsi-
der the idea that Ismene was responsible for the first burial of Polyneices.
3
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed.
Mrs. Shelley (London: Moxon, 1840), 2:335.
4
George Steiner, Antigones (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 144. Also see
Simon Goldhill, “Antigone and the Politics of Sisterhood,” in Laughing with Medusa:
Classical Myth and Feminist Thought, ed. Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard (Oxford:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670511003421
Oxford University Press, 2006), 141 –163.

5
Ivan M. Linforth, Antigone and Creon (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1961), 211. Linforth notes that spectators of the play may “feel more resentment
toward Ismene than Antigone herself expresses. Their sympathy for Ismene’s devotion
and sense of loss could not outweigh their settled admiration and sympathy
for Antigone” (ibid.). Also see Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Antigone’s Daughters
Reconsidered: Continuing Reflections on Women, Politics, and Power,” in Life-World
and Politics: Between Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Stephen K. White (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 222 –235.
THE PRUDENT DISSIDENT 403
This idea is not new; two classicists, Rouse and Harry, first raised it about a
hundred years ago.6 Though this interpretation is not uncontroversial, it is
worth revisiting.7 For, first, both Rouse and Harry composed brief sketches
that were aimed at identifying a novel line of research; there is much they
leave unexplored. And second, Rouse and Harry were unable to explain
why Sophocles would construct Ismene as a duplicitous character. Looking
at the play from a literary standpoint, motivation is a vexing question.
Motivation becomes less baffling, however, if we adopt a political perspec-
tive on the play that is attuned to power dynamics and sensitive to the asym-
metries of information that are fundamental to politics. Seen in this light,
Ismene’s possible resistance complements the political complexities of the
play. Ismene is an archetype of undaring defiance that is timorously
attuned to power, sensitive to the vicissitudes of context, watchful for the
tiniest fortuitous opportunity, and capable of cunning (so long as the risks
are calculably small). This characterization does not require a prodigious sus-
pension of disbelief. As James Scott illustrates in Weapons of the Weak, the
unheroic weak—those who are aware of their vincibility and act within its
constraints—have strong incentives to act furtively, to dissemble, to pretend
to be compliant, and above all, to avoid direct or symbolic confrontation
with those in authority.8 It may be that Ismene chooses this approach. Or it
6
J. E. Harry, Studies in Sophocles, University of Cincinnati Studies 2, vol. 7, no. 3
(Cincinnati, OH: University of Cincinnati, 1911), 20 –25; W. H. D. Rouse, “The Two
Burials in Antigone,” Classical Review 25, no. 2 (1911): 40–42. For a more recent exam-
ination of Ismene’s role in the first burial, see Bonnie Honig, “Ismene’s Forced Choice:
Sacrifice and Sorority in Sophocles’ Antigone,” Arethusa 44, no. 1 (2011): 29 –68. My
argument differs from Honig’s in that it focuses on the sisters as distinct exemplars
of resistance, while Honig examines their solidarity, arguing that the sisters represent
the Lacanian concept of the ethical as a “forced choice.”
7
A. T. von S. Bradshaw, “The Watchman Scenes in the Antigone,” Classical Quarterly
12, no. 2 (1962): 200 –11; Judith P. Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); George F. Held, “Antigone’s Dual
Motivation for the Double Burial,” Hermes 111, no. 2 (1983): 190–201; R. C. Jebb,
Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, vol. 3, The Antigone (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1897); H. D. F. Kitto, Form and Meaning in Drama (London:
Methuen, 1956); Hugh Macnaghten, The Antigone of Sophocles (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1926); Joseph S. Margon, “The First Burial of
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Polyneices,” Classical Journal 64, no. 7 (1969): 289– 295, and “The Second Burial of
Polyneices,” Classical Journal 68, no. 1 (1972): 39 –49; K. A. Rockwell, “Antigone: The
’Double Burial’ Again,” Mnemosyne 17, no. 2 (1964): 156–57; J. L. Rose, “The
Problem of the Second Burial in Sophocles’ Antigone,” Classical Journal 47, no. 6
(1952): 219 –51; Richard M. Rothaus, “The Single Burial of Polyneices,” Classical
Journal 85, no. 3 (1990): 209– 17; J. E. G. Whitehorne, “The Background to
Polyneices’ Disinterment and Reburial,” Greece & Rome 30, no. 2 (1983): 129–42.
8
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
may be that she bides her time, patiently waiting for an opportunity that does
not arise over the course of the play. Either way, Ismene as an exemplar of
resistance by the unheroic weak needs further exploration.
Focusing on Ismene as an agent of an unmanly resistance shifts the analysis
of Antigone, first, by placing emphasis on the political relationship between
women. Rather than concentrating on the relationship between Creon and
Antigone, Ismene’s story directs our attention to the sisters’ relationship
with each other, to their interactions, and to the power dynamics that exist
between them. With Ismene and Antigone, Sophocles imagines women as
subjects not objects, which is one reason that feminist political theorists
have been repeatedly drawn to the play.9 Moreover, Sophocles illuminates
a complex and fraught relationship between women. He writes
female-to-female dialogue, and he emphasizes the challenges that women
face as women. Within the Western canon of political theory, the Antigone is
exceptional in this regard.
Second, the play offers insight into weakness, into life lived in the shadow
of the political will of others. The weak have been somewhat overlooked in
political science in part because of the tendency to equate political power
with strength and force. As Robert Dahl would have it, power is a coercive
influence and, as such, it “is analogous to the concept of force in mechanics.
In mechanics object A exerts a force on object B if A produces a change in the
velocity of B.”10 If political power is the capacity to force the change one
desires, then the weak have little to tell us about politics. At best, they are
the pawns of the powerful—that is, individuals whose lives trace the persua-
sion, coercion, or brute force of those who possess power. At worst, they are
9
Butler, Antigone’s Claim; Mary G. Dietz, “Citizenship with a Feminist Face: The
Problem with Maternal Thinking,” Political Theory 13, no. 1 (1985): 19– 37; Jean
Bethke Elshtain, “Antigone’s Daughters,” Democracy: A Journal of Political Renewal
and Radical Change 2 (1982): 46 –59; Elshtain, “Antigone’s Daughters Reconsidered”;
J. Peter Euben, Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and Political
Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Catherine A. Holland, “After
Antigone: Women, the Past, and the Future of Feminist Political Thought,” American
Journal of Political Science 42, no. 4 (1998): 1108–32; Bonnie Honig, “Antigone’s
Laments, Creon’s Grief: Mourning, Membership, and the Politics of Exception,”
Political Theory 37, no. 1 (2009): 5– 43; Honig, “Ismene’s Forced Choice”; Patchen
Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Martha
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C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy, rev. ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Arlene W.
Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Linda M. G. Zerilli, “Machiavelli’s
Sisters: Women and ’the Conversation’ of Political Theory,” Political Theory 19, no. 2
(1991): 252 –76.
10
Robert Dahl, Modern Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963),
41. See 50 –51 for Dahl’s discussion of power as “the domain of coercive influence” that
alters the behavior of agents by severe penalty or deprivation.
insignificant. When the powerful direct their attention to others who, like
them, possess power, who cares about the weak? Equating power with
strength and force also narrows the study of politics to an analysis of the
success or failure of the powerful to effect change. Context, history, process,
deliberations, interactions, and relationships become secondary concerns.
A problem with equating power with strength and force is that it whittles
politics down too far. As Hannah Arendt observed, it “is only after one ceases
to reduce public affairs to the business of dominion that the original data in
the realm of human affairs will appear, or, rather, reappear, in their authentic
diversity.”11 Scott makes a related point, urging political scientists to look
beyond the extraordinary, heroic, and violent gestures of a Nat Turner or a
John Brown that seem foreordained to fail. The weak, he points out, are typi-
cally not eager to die. Thus, they protect themselves with “onstage” behavior
in public and power-laden contexts that is deferential and compliant, while
their “offstage” behavior is markedly less so.12 This form of resistance rep-
resents the safeguard of silence, the appeal of anonymity, and the possibility
of “‘working the system’ to . . . minimum disadvantage.”13
With the goal of becoming more attuned to Arendt’s “authentic diversity,”
the first section of this essay explores the perplexing character of Polyneices’
first burial and examines the possibility that Ismene is responsible for this act
of “offstage” subversion. The puzzling facts of the first burial do not, of
course, prove either that Ismene is responsible for this crime or that
Antigone is not (nor, for that matter, do they disprove that another party
altogether is to blame). It would be an error to conclude that Antigone is
blameless because there is little evidence that she is to blame, just as it
would be wrong to conclude that Ismene is to blame because there is little
proof that she is not. To borrow from the language of police procedurals,
there is no smoking gun. Setting the aim lower than proof and higher than
unfounded suspicion, there is still quite a bit left to work with, including
motive, opportunity, and admission of responsibility. The second section
explores Ismene’s and Antigone’s characters as representing two archetypes
of political action: heroic and unheroic resisters. Each possesses a distinct
approach to context, means, inwardness, and equality, as well as a different
understanding of the status of those formally excluded from politics.
The third section builds on this analysis by considering what this reading of
Sophocles’ Antigone reveals about the politically dispossessed and the
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11
Hannah Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1972), 142 –43. Also see Terence Ball, “New Faces of Power,” in Rethinking
Power, ed. Thomas E. Wartenberg (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 14– 31; Jeffrey C. Isaac,
“Beyond the Three Faces of Power: A Realist Critique,” in Rethinking Power, 32 –55.
12
Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 25, 41.
13
Eric Hobsbawm, “Peasants and Politics,” Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 1
(1965): 13.
subaltern more generally. Antigone extends and complicates current under-

standings by exposing the fact that weakness is plural. To put this in
Sophoclean terms, resistance to the ascendancy of nomos (law, convention)
can stand on the side of phusis (nature), as Antigone does, or it can stand
between nomos and phusis, as Ismene does. This multiplicity of dissent does
not alter the tragic outcome of the play, but it does reveal a latent possibility
under the rubble of despair. Each sister’s attempt to act in concert with the
other leads to an unintended result: pronounced estrangement. The heroic
approach leads to suicide, a radical and violent form of exile by a young
woman who is a law unto herself, while the unheroic approach results in a
desolate life filled with uncertainty and fear. Yet the final situation of each
sister differs from the other’s in one crucial respect: Ismene has life and all
of the possibilities that it presents. Unlike Antigone, she holds the potentiality
for a new beginning and represents the possibility of a novel form of nomos
that is more responsive to the demands of phusis. She carries the hope of
favorable circumstances in the future.
The Possibility of Unmanly Resistance: Ismene’s Cunning

The Antigone begins with the unburied corpse of Polyneices.14 After the death
of his father Oedipus, Polyneices fights his brother Eteocles for dominion over
Thebes and their mutual death leaves their uncle Creon to be king and to
decide on their burials. Creon decrees Eteocles a friend and defender of
Thebes, while he deems Polyneices a traitor who must be left as carrion for
the dogs and birds in the hills outside of Thebes. Burying Polyneices is a
crime punishable by death.
By the close of Antigone, Polyneices has been buried, three times in all. The
first burial is done hastily and covertly and is unobserved. The second burial
has a different flavor altogether: Antigone acts in broad daylight, she is
observed and arrested by Creon’s sentries, and she makes a more thorough
job of it, covering the body with dust and pouring a triple stream of libations.
With this second, open burial, the tragic plot unfolds. Antigone is sentenced
to a slow death by starvation in a nearby cavern. Ismene attempts to join her
sister in death by admitting that she too is responsible, but Antigone rebuffs
her. After a bruising dispute with the prophet Teiresias, a fearful Creon
decides that he has made an error of judgment and reverses course, ordering
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his men to bury (for what is the third time) and entomb Polyneices and to free
Antigone. Creon and his men are too late to save Antigone, who hanged
herself, and they are unable to stop Creon’s son, Haemon, from killing
14
Unless otherwise noted, I use Elizabeth Wyckoff’s translation of the Antigone in
Sophocles I, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond
Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954).
himself at Antigone’s side. The last to fall is Creon’s wife, Eurydice, who
commits suicide after hearing of her son’s death.
To reconsider the idea that Ismene was responsible for the first burial, it
makes sense to begin, as the play does, with the conversation between the
two sisters about the necessity of administering burial rites. Adamant that
Polyneices must be buried and stressing the absolutist nature of Ismene’s
familial obligation, Antigone attempts to convince her sister to join her.
Antigone orients herself in relation to the family, especially her dead family,
and the question of whether to bury Polyneices is not truly a question for
her. It must be done. Thus, the main problem Antigone confronts is not
whether but how. She turns to Ismene, meeting her outside the palace gates
and reminding her of their singular bond as sisters and of their common
tragic lineage.15
Ismene’s first reaction is to help Antigone, stating, “If things are as you say,
poor sister, how can I better them? how loose or tie the knot?” (39 – 40).16 But,
as becomes evident, Ismene is clearly of two minds. While she recognizes
Antigone’s desire to honor Polyneices, she refuses Antigone, emphasizing
that, as women, the sisters are forced to yield to the unjust commands of
men. What is more, she suggests that secrecy, silence, and deceit are the
instruments available to the sisters to resist injustice. She urges Antigone to
adopt a course of discretion and prudence that makes use of silence, anonym-
ity, and a vow to protect one another. “At least give no one warning of this
act,” she asks Antigone, “you keep it hidden, and I’ll do the same” (84 – 85).
It is important to note that Ismene not only suggests violating Creon’s
decree in secret, she also unhesitatingly offers to assist Antigone in this
duplicity. Ismene is willing to offer Antigone what she would not give her
before: her assistance. And a crucial change is in the method of the action.
Ismene’s desire for concealment may not just be a temporary preference
in the given situation but rather intrinsic to her character. Creon later
describes her in similar terms. Ismene, he says, is “lurking like a viper in
the house, who sucked me dry” (531 – 33); she “possesses sly intent” of
15
The role and significance of the minor characters is subject to debate. Rothaus
notes, for instance, that “such an important action cannot be attributed to a minor
character” like Ismene, while Benardete remarks, “Ismene stands next to Antigone
as the most important figure in the play” (Rothaus, “The Single Burial of
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Polyneices,” 209; Seth Benardete, Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophocles’

Antigone [South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s, 1999], 11). Also see Jill Frank, “The
Antigone’s Law,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 2 (2006): 336–340; A. N. W.
Saunders, “Plot and Character in Sophocles,” Greece & Rome 4, no. 10 (1934): 13 –23;
Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity.
16
Translation by David Grene, in Sophocles I, ed. Grene and Lattimore, 2nd ed.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Wycoff translates lines 39 –40 “If
things have reached this stage, what can I do, poor sister, that will help to make or
mend it?”
“secret plotters” (493 – 94).17 As Creon presents it, Ismene shares Antigone’s
destructive desires, though she slithers through the dark, often undetected.
Antigone’s response to Ismene is unequivocal, assertive, and vociferous,
just like the form of resistance that she favors: “Dear God! Denounce me. I
shall hate you more if silent, not proclaiming this to all” (86 – 87). She wants
no part in subterfuge.
As she parts with Antigone, Ismene knows two things: Antigone is deter-
mined to administer the burial rites in an unambiguous, frank way, and
Creon will kill anyone found responsible. To borrow from Ismene’s own for-
mulation, she is confronted with a knot that must be either loosened or tied
differently. Antigone’s demands pull in one direction, while Creon’s yank in
the other, straining the discord between them and making the knot of their
conflict seem insoluble. As the daughter of Oedipus, Ismene is perhaps
better equipped than most to solve this riddle. Is it possible to do the see-
mingly impossible—to honor her dead brother, to obey Creon’s decree, and
to thwart Antigone’s seemingly suicidal mission?
If we assume that Ismene attempts to solve this puzzle, her answer lies in
easing up on the demands of each of these components: honoring the dead
does not require a full burial but an adequate one; obeying Creon requires
only the appearance of compliance, not true obedience; and stopping
Antigone only requires administering burial rites with greater speed and
stealth.18 Ismene could have accomplished these more modest demands by
burying Polyneices in secret and informing Antigone that their shared
burden had been fulfilled.19 Ismene has the opportunity to commit the
17
It is possible that Ismene does not see herself as deceitful even if she is. On the intri-
guing relationship between cunning, appearance, and self-deception, see Don Herzog,
Cunning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 71–121.
18
More orthodox interpretations argue that responsibility for the first burial lies with
Antigone or the gods. For the first argument, see Rose, “The Problem of the Second
Burial”; Bradshaw, “The Watchman Scenes in the Antigone”; Held, “Antigone’s Dual
Motivation”; Rockwell, “Antigone: The ’Double Burial’ Again”; Rothaus, “The Single
Burial of Polyneices”; Whitehorne, “The Background to Polyneices’ Disinterment
and Reburial.” For the second argument, see S. M. Adams, “The Antigone of
Sophocles,” Phoenix 9, no. 2 (1955): 47–62; H. D. F. Kitto, Sophocles, Dramatist and
Philosopher (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 56 –57; Charles Segal, Tragedy
and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
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Press, 1981), 159 –61.

19
Honig, Macnaghten, and Rouse believe Antigone is unaware of Ismene’s role in
the first burial, a situation that adds dramatic tension to their second exchange
(Honig, “Ismene’s Forced Choice,” 22; Rouse, “The Two Burials in Antigone,” 41 –42;
Macnaghten, The Antigone of Sophocles, xiv). On this reading, it is difficult to make
sense of the guard’s description of Antigone in lines 423–28. Why would Antigone
curse those who had stripped the body if she did not know that Ismene acted? If,
however, Ismene informed Antigone of the burial, then line 556—“At least I was not
silent. You were warned”—may refer to this exchange.
deed; there is nothing in the sequence of events that obstructs her. She has no
alibi and no witnesses to place her elsewhere. If we read the text this way,
Antigone goes to Polyneices’s corpse in broad daylight for the first time to
do the deed as it should be done. Thus, her dramatic, breathtaking burial is
not only an overt act of defiance to Creon’s authority; it is also a disavowal
of Ismene’s compromising and (in Antigone’s view) compromised actions.
Though her motives to refrain from acting are certainly strong, Ismene also
has several inducements for acting, the first of which is protecting her sister
and directing suspicion elsewhere.20 Ismene also may have been impelled
to act out of piety.21 According to Athenian custom, two actions were required
for the successful transition of the soul to the netherworld: the administration
of burial rites and the fulfillment of the eniausia, the annual commemorative
visits to the tomb. Without these actions by the living, the deceased would
remain ataphoi, the unburied dead, who, Euripides explained in the
Suppliants, were denied entrance to Hades and doomed to remain tethered
to the earth.22 In the Antigone, the requirements of eniausia are especially note-
worthy because they demand something that, if both sisters act recklessly,
Polyneices may lack: a living relative. As Antigone reveals in the opening dia-
logue of the play, she fully expects to die. “For me, the doer, death is best”
(72). And, yet, if Polyneices’s soul is to remain at rest in the tomb that is con-
structed for him by the play’s end (1200 –1205), it may be that one of his sisters
needs to decide that death is not best.
20
The pool of suspects is sizable. It is possible, for instance, that a non-Theban pas-
serby buried the body without knowledge of Creon’s decree. See Agathias, The
Histories, trans. Joseph D. Frendo (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1975), 13;
Benardete, Sacred Transgressions, 33 –34, 62. On this practice, also see E. L. Harrison,
“Three Notes on Sophocles,” Classical Review 12, no. 1 (1962): 13.
21
The requirements of Greek burial in the play are subject to much debate, as is the
question whether the first two burials are actual or symbolic. See Harrison, “Three
Notes on Sophocles”; Margon, “The Second Burial of Polyneices”; Whitehorne, “The
Background to Polyneices’ Disinterment and Reburial.”
22
In Euripides’ Suppliants, Theseus describes burial rites as “a Panhellenic law”
(526). While much is unknown about the eniausia, it is clear that Athenians understood
this duty to the dead to be of great importance. Eniausiai were so significant that a
childless Athenian man could adopt an heir for the sole purpose of ensuring that
annual visits were conducted. And, in the case of a legal dispute over inheritance,
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failure to visit the tomb by an heir could be used to contest the kinship claim. The
eniausia also played a role in the political process. Before appointment to a political
office, an Athenian citizen had to prove that he had regularly fulfilled the requirements
of eniausia. See Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2001), 104–20; S. C. Humphreys, The Family, Women and Death:
Comparative Studies, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 85–88.
The significance of tomb visits is also emphasized in Sophocles’ Electra, in which
much of the action unfolds around separate visits by Orestes and Chrysothemis to
Agamemnon’s tomb.
There may be good reason to take Ismene at her word: “I did the deed”
(536 – 37). After Antigone is caught, this is, of course, what Ismene says—“I
did the deed.”23 It may be that Ismene speaks the truth; her declaration is
an admission of blame. But what are we to make of the oddly deferential
addendum of Ismene’s statement: “I did the deed, if she agrees I did. I am
accessory and share the blame”? Ismene’s addendum has been read as an
indication of her timorous, compliant, and prevaricating nature: she confesses
out of affection and respect, but lacks the fortitude to carry it through to the
end. But this reading overlooks the significance of Ismene’s entrance in which
she, weeping like a sister, “mourns, with clouded brow and bloodied cheeks,
tears on her lovely face” (528 – 30). In the Greek it is unclear if Ismene mourns
for her brother, for her sister, or for both of her siblings. If she mourns for
her sister, then she does so in advance of her death.24 If Ismene mourns her
brother, she is openly violating the second element of Creon’s decree that
none may weep for or bewail the death of Polyneices (while she is on the
verge of admitting that she violated the first element that none may bury
or entomb him). Either way, these are not the actions of a compliant or inde-
cisive young woman. From the moment she steps into Creon’s presence,
Ismene makes it perfectly plain where her loyalties lie and, given the political
significance of her wordless gesture, it is less surprising that she attempts to
share in the blame for the crime. If Ismene is responsible for the first burial,
her entrance effectively unites her “offstage” and “onstage” personas; she
appears to us here fully for the first time.
In contrast to the wrath that she incites in Creon (531 – 35), Ismene is defer-
ential and solicitous to Antigone. Taking into account Ismene’s second
entrance and her admission of responsibility, Ismene’s addendum may refer
to the sisters’ initial disagreement over the tactics of the disempowered.
Will Antigone now agree to the legitimacy or efficacy of a subterranean
form of resistance and will she now admit to a plurality of opposition?
Read in this way, Ismene’s addendum broaches this issue again, giving
Antigone one more chance to see that covert resistance is resistance nonethe-
less. In making her case to Antigone, Ismene stresses their commonality,
begging Antigone, “don’t fence me out from honor, from death with you,
23
Of Antigone’s confession (433–34), Adams notes that it “seems necessary to point
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out that this Greek does not and can not mean that she confessed to both burials”
(Adams, “The Antigone of Sophocles,” 53). Segal points out that Antigone’s “confession
to ‘both acts,’ ambiguous in any case, makes as good sense as part of her defiant spirit
as a statement of what really happened. Note the similar ambiguity in her defiant con-
fession of 443 and her possessive reaction to the deed at Ismene’s confession in 536–9”
(Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, 443). Also see Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 7 –9; Honig,
“Ismene’s Forced Choice,” 12–13.
24
The chorus supplies the description of Ismene’s entrance, and it seems odd that
they would take her lament to be for a still-living Antigone.
and honor done the dead” (544 – 45). Though they adopted divergent
approaches, Ismene defends her weaker action, noting that her decision
was not made in silence and that “the blame is equal for us both” (558).
Antigone rejects Ismene, and this refusal is even harsher than her dismis-
sive words at the close of the first scene (93 – 97). But here again, the possibility
of Ismene’s secret action adds an intriguing and unexpected layer of meaning
to their exchange—that is, of cruelty in the name of kindness.25 When Creon
suspects Ismene (489 – 96), Antigone directs his attention immediately back to
her and the imminent prospect of punishment: “Do you want more than my
arrest and death?” she asks, indicating that her crime and death are enough
(497). More explicit still, she urges Creon to kill her immediately and incites
his wrath toward her by once again making the implicit claim that she is
his equal and his enemy (499 –507).
In addition to affirming a valorous standard of resistance, it may be that
Antigone is heroic in another sense, one that can be missed if we overlook
the prospect of Ismene’s shared responsibility. Antigone may sacrifice
herself not only for her dead brother but also for her living sister. From
Antigone’s capture until her death sentence, Creon assumes that both
sisters are responsible, but Antigone successfully convinces him that this is
not the case. Thus, if we understand that Ismene attempts to save Antigone
by administering the burial rites before her sister does, this action is mirrored
by Antigone’s efforts to preserve Ismene. Though fiercely at odds and
seemingly unable to act in concert, neither sister seems to want the other to
die.
The possibility of Ismene’s secret burial makes sense of two incongruities in
Antigone, one concerning character and the second concerning plot.26
Everything that is revealed about Antigone’s character in the first scene
25
Honig, “Ismene’s Forced Choice”; Jebb, Sophocles, 3:xxix; A. W. Simpson and C. M.
H. Millar, “A Note on Sophocles’ Antigone, Lines 531– 81,” Greece & Rome 17, no. 50
(1948): 78 –81; Adams, “The Antigone of Sophocles”; J. T. Sheppard, The Wisdom of
Sophocles (London: Allen and Unwin, 1947). Among scholars focused on the relation-
ship between Ismene and Antigone, there is no agreement on whether they act as
enemies, as friends, or as both. See Honig, “Ismene’s Forced Choice”; Simpson and
Millar, “A Note on Sophocles’ Antigone, Lines 531– 81”; W. Blake Tyrell and Larry J.
Bennett, “Sophocles’ Enemy Sisters,” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and
Culture 15/16 (2009): 1–18.
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26
These inconsistencies may help explain why literary reinterpretations of Antigone
have been more generous to Ismene, both by narrating events from her perspective (as
Yannis Ritsos does in her poem Ismene) and by depicting Ismene as a figure of resist-
ance. In his 1944 version, Jean Anouilh portrays her as a late-blooming resister, while
in Satoh Makoto’s Ismene, Ismene defies and deceives Creon by switching her brothers’
sheet-covered bodies. Jean Anouilh, Antigone, in Five Plays (London: Methuen, 1987);
Yannos Ritsos, “Ismene,” in The Fourth Dimension: Selected Poems of Yannos Ritsos
(Boston: Godine, 1977); Satoh Makoto, Ismene, in Alternative Japanese Drama, ed.
Robert T. Rolf and John K. Gillespie (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992).
suggests that, at her core, Antigone is antithetically disposed to dissembling

or perfunctory efforts. Antigone possesses a clear, absolutist, and disciplinary
notion of how her opposition must take place, an ideal revealed in full when,
after being spared an immediate death for her crimes, she takes her own
life. And yet, the first burial of the corpse reveals none of this perfection,
control, and discipline. It is haphazard, and, though technically complete, it
is devoid of the pomp and spectacle of the second burial. It appears to be
the work of a compromiser rather than an absolutist.27 If Antigone is respon-
sible for the first burial, why does she vary her approach so radically the
second time?28
In terms of plot, there are questions as well. If Antigone conducts the first
burial, it is unclear why she returns to the corpse.29 The first burial fulfilled
the necessary requirements. The “ritual [was] complete” (247). Given this,
what compels Antigone to act to excess, to rebury the buried?30 There is a
similarly nagging question why Sophocles brings Ismene back into the
action of the play a second time (531 – 581). In their first dialogue Sophocles
masterfully establishes that the two sisters are like “two swords whose sharp-
ness, gleam, and power we must experience in order to apprehend something
27
Harry calls the first burial “the work of the erstwhile shrinking Ismene” rather
“than of the fearless Antigone” (Harry, “Studies in Sophocles,” 22). Honig notes that
the first burial is “Ismene-like, subtle, sub-rosa, quiet, under cover of darkness, per-
formed exactly . . . as Ismene herself counseled Antigone” (Honig, “Ismene’s Forced
Choice,” 15).
28
Harry, “Studies in Sophocles”; Honig, “Ismene’s Forced Choice”; Macnaghten,
Antigone of Sophocles; Rouse, “The Two Burials in Antigone.”
29
Charles Segal comments, “Why Antigone returns for this second burial is one of
the most puzzling details of the plot” (Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, 159). Honig
points out that burying Polyneices twice is excessive (Honig, “Antigone’s Laments,
Creon’s Grief,” 37). Jebb’s initial explanation—Antigone returns to pour the libations
on the body—is controversial. Rouse asks “how the Antigone of the rest of the play
could be so foolish” to forget the libations on her first visit and “so reckless to
haunt the spot where her deed was done: so strong to plan, so weak to do” (Rouse,
“The Two Burials in Antigone,” 41). Also see Margon, “The Second Burial of
Polyneices,” 40, 48 –49.
30
It may be that Antigone returns to the body because she knows that the guards
have uncovered it, and thus she cries out like a “bitter bird” when she sees the
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body stripped of earth. While certainly credible in terms of her character, this interpret-
ation does not explain how Antigone knew that the guards had swept away the dirt on
the corpse. As Whitehorne notes, “the trap (if it is a trap) is never set by making any
announcement that they have exhumed Polyneices, nor does the text give us any
reason to suppose that Antigone’s return to the body is motivated by anything she
may have heard or suspected to this effect” (Whitehorne, “Background to
Polyneices’ Disinterment,” 139). If, instead, Antigone knows of Ismene’s perfunctory
efforts and goes to correct them, her cry may signify anguish over the exposure of
her brother’s body and distress at her sister’s perfunctory burial.
of the lightening that flashes when they strike,” as Heidegger poetically

puts it.31 If Ismene is primarily a foil to Antigone, this relationship is estab-
lished in their first exchange; there is no obvious reason why it needs to be
reestablished. Odder still, their final exchange undercuts Ismene’s role as a
contrasting character and instead reveals that the relationship between the
sisters is more complex and multifaceted. Why, then, does Ismene reappear?
What is at stake for Sophocles in adding this complexity to Ismene’s
character?
There is, of course, another possibility raised in the play that is worth con-
sidering: a god is responsible. The guard hints at the idea of divine interven-
tion when he describes the first burial as a supernatural accomplishment
(249 –59) and his intimation is picked up on by the chorus, who address the
issue directly to Creon and identify a path of honorable retreat for him
(279). If a god is protecting the body, then for Creon to alter his decree may
be sensible and pious as opposed to inconsistent and fearful.32 But Creon
rejects the notion of miraculous burial in no uncertain terms.
While Creon’s certitude is not dispositive evidence—over the course of the
play he proves to be wrong about much—there is good reason to be suspi-
cious of the guard’s account. A comic, sly figure that readily bickers with
the king, the guard is, by his own admission, intent on extricating himself
from the charge of complicity or dereliction of duty (238– 40, 264 – 68).
When Creon calls him a “quibbling rascal through and through,” he
doesn’t disagree, perhaps because he knows that his banter provides fertile
ground for self-preserving intimations, evasions, half-truths, and exagger-
ations (320).33 Indeed, looked at carefully, the guard’s narrative suggests pro-
blems with the idea of divine intervention. By his own account, none of the
other guards believed that a god was responsible, but rather they lay blame
squarely in the human realm (they accuse each other, 260– 64). The guard
also says that the burial was “enough to turn the curse,” an odd statement
to make if a deity were responsible (255). Humans need to avoid the curse
of the unburied dead, not gods.34 Another question is raised later in the
play when Antigone, on the way to her tomb, asks, “Why, in my misery,
look to the gods for help? Can I call any of them my ally?” (921 – 22). Bereft
of any indication from the gods and doubtful about their intent, Antigone
longs for a sign of approval. If a god buried and protected her brother’s
corpse, it seems strange that Antigone would want for divine allies or
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wonder at the absence of divine intervention.
31
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia
Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 98.
32
Bernard M. W. Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1964), 69.
33
Margon, “The First Burial of Polyneices,” 293.
34
Ibid., 293 –94.
Two Archetypes of Weakness

The issue of the first burial cannot, it seems to me, be answered definitively. It
may be that Ismene, with viperlike stealth (531), attempts to solve her own
sphinxless riddle by hurriedly casting a few handfuls of dirt over her brother’s
corpse, an act she admits to only after her sister is caught (536– 37). If so, this
Ismene bears resemblance to Sophocles’ later depiction of her in Oedipus at
Colonus where she is a politically savvy young woman devoted to her
family. As her magnificent entrance on horseback suggests, the Ismene of
the Coloneus is a figure of action (312 – 321). Ismene decides to leave Thebes,
alone, on an arduous journey in search of her father and sister in order to
bring them crucial political, familial, and religious news (361 – 85, 389 – 90).
This exploit is followed by another. After Oedipus unwittingly trespasses
on the Furies’ domain, he requests the help of one of his daughters to make
the necessary expiation. While Antigone is silent, Ismene steps forward
without hesitation and declares: “I’ll go and do it” (502).
The Ismene of the Antigone may well not possess the same pluck. It is
entirely possible that this time she hangs back. In this case, Creon’s descrip-
tion of her as a viper fits in another sense: she is like a viper that waits too
long to strike and is preempted by another. Exploring the possibility of
Ismene’s covert resistance—without arriving at a conclusive answer—is valu-
able nonetheless. Though not decisive, the argument is useful because it
engenders a shift in perspective on the play and on Ismene. It throws
often-overlooked portions of the action into high relief, such as Ismene’s
second entrance, mourning as a sister in front of Creon (528 –30). It focuses
attention on the Ismene-Antigone dyad. It also suggests a view of Ismene
as an intriguing, layered character, which provides insight into a general
type of political subjectivity: the unheroic weak.
The first insight that Ismene’s character points to is a comparative sensi-
tivity to political context and power dynamics. For Ismene, the political spe-
cifics of the situation matter. Ismene speaks of the war between Polyneices
and Eteocles from the first (11 –16). Concerned with political consequences,
Ismene also stresses that to bury Polyneices is to violate a prohibition of the
city and to risk death (59, 78– 79). Ever aware of the implications of the
context for herself and others, Ismene says she is apprehensive for her
sister (82), and she reveals that Antigone and Haemon are betrothed (568).
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Antigone, in contrast, is comparatively blind to context and her awareness

of power relations seems muted. Antigone makes no mention of the war
throughout the play. Indeed, if we had only Antigone’s lines, three crucial
facts about the context would be unclear: we would not know why
Polyneices died, nor that he was killed while attacking Thebes, nor that he
and Eteocles killed each other. Ismene reveals these facts. Because the
unheroic resister is more like a fox than a lion, she or he must be a consequen-
tialist who is both keenly attuned to surroundings and, of course, the pre-
sence of traps. Thus, unheroic resistance involves waiting and watching.
It necessitates a willingness to sit patiently on the cusp of action, as well as the

fortitude to bear the consequences (and perhaps the guilt) of inaction. It is a
disposition that can translate into action, but need not.
The contextual fact at the forefront of Ismene’s mind—and, one suspects,
that of unheroic disobedients more generally—is the political inequality of
the larger group of which she is a part. In the prologue Ismene encourages
Antigone to step back and take a more expansive view of the situation and
the lot of women. In a statement that has troubled feminists, Ismene draws
attention to one pertinent contextual fact that Antigone has seemingly
neglected:
We must remember that we two are women

so not to fight with men.
And that since we are subject to strong power
we must hear these orders, or any that may be worse.
So I shall ask of them beneath the earth
forgiveness, for in these things I am forced,
and shall obey the men in power. I know
that wild and futile action makes no sense.35
(61–68)
Ismene reminds Antigone that women are forced, by violence, to yield to the
unjust commands of men, and she draws a sharp distinction between the situ-
ation of men and that of women, suggesting that, because women are
unequal, their lot is distinct. Prudent action for women must work within
the constraints of their position, recognizing, first, that the male authorities
possess formal power; second, that they wield violence; and, third, that
they demand displays of obedience from women. To do otherwise, she
says, is to “hunt the impossible” (107, Grene translation).
This passage highlights a second general characteristic of the unheroic
weak: they are attentive to the inequality of the disempowered. Consider
how Ismene implicitly contrasts the lot of women with that of Theban men,
and in particular with the merciless and cruel war between Polyneices and
Eteocles. This war and the long, cold shadow it casts over the sisters under-
score Ismene’s point that, as women, their lives are governed by the violence
of men. Moreover, the war reinforces her argument that, as members of an
accursed family, the sisters are the recipients of misfortunes that they did
not create (49– 60).36 But there is another aspect of the war that is especially
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pertinent to Ismene’s argument that the lot of women is distinct from that
35
Hugh Lloyd-Jones translates the final line of Ismene’s speech “for there is no sense
in actions that exceed our powers” (Hugh Lloyd-Jones, ed., Sophocles: Antigone, the
Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus [Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1994], 11).
36
As Goldhill observes, these questions about gender difference extend to sibling
relations as well (“Antigone and the Politics of Sisterhood,” 156).
of men. Polyneices battled Eteocles as a man—that is, frankly and aggres-

sively on the battlefield, as an equal. Faced with what he understood to be
an unjust decree, Polyneices gathered his forces, declared war, and forth-
rightly marched across the hills to attack Thebes. Eteocles defended Thebes
in much the same way, with the plain and unambiguous methods of brute
force. They fought as equals and as men and died that way as well. Much
in the same way as her brothers, Antigone acts in response to an unjust
decree, girds herself for battle, and prepares for death. Antigone does not
directly respond to Ismene’s statement on the lot of women, and what her
character says about gender is subject to much debate.37 Antigone’s actions
are less ambiguous; she fights as if she were a man and as if she were an
equal of men.38 In so doing, Antigone transgresses the foundational bound-
aries of gender and politics and calls these limits into question.39 More
firmly rooted in the power dynamics of her situation, Ismene accuses
Antigone of making a category mistake, of seeing unalike things as alike.
A third general insight concerns intent. For the heroic weak, the intent of
the political actor all but disappears on the bloody battlefield of conflict, as
action, wounds, and a tallying up of victories take precedence. But to the
unheroic disobedient the purpose, will, or inclination of the actor are
crucial, both as a basis of judgment and as a mechanism of identification. It
is by her intent that we know the unheroic disobedient. Inwardness and indi-
vidual conscience—as best as they can be identified and observed—are para-
mount. Here again, the sisters articulate this fundamental disagreement. As
Antigone sees it, so long as Ismene’s internal disposition remains internal,
that is, unmanifested in action, it is immaterial. Ismene faced a choice: she
could either honor the dead by joining Antigone or she could honor Creon.
Locked into the binary logic of obedience and resistance, Antigone does not
37
Benardete notes that although the word for woman (gunē) occurs eighteen times
over the course of the play, Antigone never uses the word. Antigone is “anti-
generation, the true offspring of an incestuous marriage” (Benardete, Sacred
Transgressions, 10, 61). According to Saxonhouse, “Antigone neuters herself; she is
neither male nor female. Her name captures her stand: anti-gone, against birth,
against generation” (Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity, 69). Butler writes that when
Antigone speaks to Creon, she “becomes manly; in being spoken to, he is unmanned,
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and so neither maintains their position within gender and the disturbance of kinship
appears to destabilize gender throughout the play” (Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 10).
38
Saxonhouse observes that Antigone becomes a “warrior whose glory can be
achieved only at the moment of death” (Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity, 70). Benardete
notes that “Antigone borrows the language appropriate to the patriot soldier whose
dying on behalf of his country coincides with his fighting” (Benardete, Sacred
Transgressions, 11–12) .
39
Butler, Antigone’s Claim; Euben, Corrupting Youth; Markell, Bound by Recognition,
73– 74, 80 –82.
think it possible to do both.40 For Antigone, the appearance of honoring

Creon is honoring Creon and a façade of obedience is obedience. There is
no difference between the visible and the actual; they are one and the same.
And speech alone—that is, the voicing of one’s intent, future purpose, or suf-
fering—does not suffice for action. To put this in religious terms, Ismene
could choose to ally herself wholly with the dead and the gods of the under-
world or she could choose to honor the city and preserve the living. There is
no middle ground. And for Antigone, an outward show of honoring life—no
matter how complicated the truth or complex the intentions—is tantamount
to honoring life only. Thus, she tells Ismene, “you chose to live when I chose
death” (55) and “you live. My life died long ago. And that has made me fit to
help the dead” (559 –60). The action—preservation of life or forfeiture of it—is
what matters to Antigone.
In directing his punishment wholly at Antigone, Creon sanctions her binary
logic of obedience and resistance, of friends and enemies, and of piety and
irreverence. This is an unexpected point of concurrence, to be sure. The
scene ends with Creon, urged on by the chorus, issuing Antigone’s death sen-
tence. All the violence that Creon can muster is arrayed against Antigone; the
antagonism between them is palpable. Yet, for all their antipathy, Creon’s
punishment of Antigone—and his concurrent lack of interest in the shades
of complicity represented by Ismene—reaffirms Antigone’s twofold notion
of resistance and obligation. For both Creon and Antigone, the landscape
between friends and enemies is barren. What is crucial is the poles them-
selves: obedience, duty, responsibility, and honor, on one hand, and opposi-
tion, traitorousness, and irreverence, on the other. What gets coded as
obligation or resistance depends on how the objects of duty are defined.41
Despite this crucial difference, their understanding of the way that obligation
and resistance operate oddly mirrors one another. Obligation exists or it does
not; resistance is either present or absent. There is no middle ground, no point
in between.
Ismene’s resourcefulness, her flexibility, and her opportunistic disposition
also suggest a fourth, more ubiquitous characteristic of unheroic disobedients
who, lacking access to normal political channels, must improvise with what is
available. Recall Ismene’s initial response to Antigone: “If things are as you
say, poor sister, how can I better them? how loose or tie the knot?”
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40
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–
1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 256–57; Saba Mahmood,
Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005). Also see Jennet Kirkpatrick, Uncivil Disobedience: Studies in
Violence and Democratic Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
41
Phillipe Nonet writes that Antigone’s law “is never capable of being written: it is
strictly speaking unsayable. Because it is unsayable, Sophocles must leave it unsaid. . . .
Antigone’s living law is Antigone” (Nonet, “Antigone’s Law,” Law, Culture and the
Humanities 2 [2006]: 324).
Ismene’s approach is conciliatory, and she sees multiple avenues of action: a

conflict can be eased by loosening the constraints, or it can be changed by con-
structing a new arrangement altogether. Though she may be aware of another
alternative—that is, directly cutting the “knot” of the conflict—she does not
mention it.
This resourcefulness is underscored in Ismene’s second entrance, in which
she mourns like a sister with tears and scored cheeks. Though speechless,
Ismene communicates her fidelity to her family and symbolically challenges
Creon’s power. In this entrance, Ismene manipulates traditional feminine
roles—what Linda Zerilli has referred to as “proper femininity”—into a
weapon.42 Appearing before Creon, Ismene uses what she has at hand: the
long-standing role of women in mourning and burial, and the traditional
Homeric mourning practices in which the bereaved, often women, expressed
their sorrow through self-laceration and wailing.43 Ismene performs this tra-
ditional Homeric role. Her bloodied cheeks and tears are silent signs that she
is an obedient and compliant woman who knows her proper place in her
social and political world. Her silence may also imply traditional or conven-
tional femininity.44 Yet because this form of Homeric mourning is illegal and
opposes Creon’s power, Ismene’s mourning is also not at all obedient, compli-
ant, traditional, or indicative of proper femininity.45 Her actions threaten the
social and political order; she exceeds her role as a woman. The meaning of
Ismene’s troubled demeanor, her weeping, and her scored cheeks is
doubled, revealing that she is docile and defiant, pious and irreverent, and
a figure of proper femininity and chaotic femininity.46 Ismene’s entrance
directs attention to the terrain between each of these binary poles, rather
42
Linda M. G. Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and
Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
43
On the contextual significance of the transition from Homeric funerary practices
and those of fifth-century democratic Athens and women’s role in administering tra-
ditional burial rites, see Honig, “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief”; Larry J.
Bennett and W. Blake Tyrrell, “Sophocles’ Antigone and Funeral Oratory,” American
Journal of Philology 111, no. 4 (1990): 441 –56.
44
Mark Griffith observes that “one of the most distinctive signs of ‘femininity’ on the
tragic stage is a failure to speak at all (Sophocles’ Iole, Aeschylus’ Iphigenia or Helen,
Euripides’ veiled Alcestis), or an inability to keep on speaking—whether this silence is
brought about by intimidation, by rhetorical convention, or by physical removal
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(Sophocles’ Chrysothemis or Tecmessa, Euripides’ Phaedra or Alcestis, Aeschylus’

Cassandra, Io, or—ultimately—Clytemnestra)” (Griffith, “Antigone and Her
Sister(s): Embodying Women in Greek Tragedy,” in Making Silence Speak: Women’s
Voices in Greek Literature and Society, ed. Andre Lardinois and Laura McClure
[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 123 –24).
45
Honig, “Antigone’s Laments, Creon’s Grief.”
46
As Griffith notes, there is no authentic or unified voice of a woman that emerges
from the play; the duties, expectations, and roles do not cohere tidily (Griffith,
“Antigone and Her Sister(s)").
than at the extremities of the poles themselves. It also points to the inventive-
ness of the unheroic weak and the capacity to spontaneously use the available
materials to stitch together something novel and unexpected.
The fifth and final general characteristic suggested by the Antigone is that
the weak tend to long for something that they cannot have: perfect and absol-
ute unity in collective action. Sophocles introduces this theme from the start,
using Antigone’s first lines to express her wish for an extreme form of cohe-
sion with Ismene. As the play opens, Antigone addresses Ismene with a
highly unusual phrase, koinon autadelphon Ismenēs kara—literally, “my very
own sister’s common head of Ismene.”47 Koinon, “common,” emphasizes
what is shared with others, what unifies a group, or what is not private.48
In the context of Antigone’s opening lines, koinon identifies what is shared
between the sisters and what unites them in partnership—that is, the fact
that they are siblings, autadelphon. To be more specific, they are the same
(autos), sisters who come from one womb (adelphos is related to delphus,
“womb”).49 The last word of Antigone’s opening greeting, kara, “head,” is
the most formal mode of address in Greek tragedy, and it can be translated
more fully as a metaphorical head or top. For instance, kara is used to
address Oedipus as king.50
At first glance, this opening greeting suggests an admirable hope for soli-
darity and sorority. But given the incestuous history of the royal line of
Thebes, there is reason to suspect an ominous side to Antigone’s longing
for unity. Ismene and Antigone are the daughters and half-sisters of
Oedipus, the daughters and granddaughters of Jocasta, and the sisters and
nieces of Polyneices. They are sisters and nieces to one another.51 The incest
of their family tree implies a tendency toward too much sharing and an
unhealthy or unnatural closeness. As Seth Benardete notes, Antigone
47
Arlene W. Saxonhouse, “Another Antigone: The Emergence of the Female Political
Actor in Euripides’ Phoenician Women,” Political Theory 33, no. 4 (2005): 474; Steiner,
Antigones, 85, 209 –11; Benardete, Sacred Transgressions, 1 –2; Goldhill, “Antigone and
the Politics of Sisterhood,” 145 –46, 52 –56.
48
Saxonhouse, Fear of Diversity, 9 –15, 198–200. In Book II of the Politics, for instance,
Aristotle asks what citizens should share together (koinon) in the city, and in particular
if they should share children, women, and property as Plato’s Republic seems to
suggest. For Aristotle, inquiring into the koinon of the city means exploring what
draws citizens together, what unites them in common purpose or, as Carnes Lord
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670511003421
translates koinon, what joins them in partnership (Aristotle, The Politics, trans.
Carnes Lord [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], 55).
49
Perhaps to emphasize their familial connection even further, Antigone mentions
Oedipus in the following line (2) and reminds Ismene that they share both a mother
and a father.
50
Eva Brann, “Welcome to Colonus,” Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2007, 55–56.
51
In explicating koinon autadelphon kara, Eva Brann observes that Antigone and
Ismene “are even, as it were, their own children by being in two generations at
once” (ibid., 56).
asserts that Ismene’s head is “nothing but a sister’s” and thus reveals her
“virtual identification” with Ismene.52 George Steiner echoes this point,
observing that Antigone’s “prolusion strives to compact, to ‘ingest,’ Ismene
into herself.” With koinon autadelphon kara, Antigone demands “a ‘single-
headed’ unison.”53
Thinking more generally about this desire for oneness, it is not difficult to
understand its appeal to those who are excluded from full participation in
public life or who are in some way “outside” of politics. Recall Locke circling
back to the phrase “one body politic” and its various iterations—a “commu-
nity [of] one body,” “the power to act as one body,” and “the act of the
whole”—in the Two Treatises. Echoing the homogeneity at the heart of
Rousseau’s general will, American Whigs on the verge of the Revolution
assumed that the people were a divinely ordained, single, organic unit: “for
God hath so tempered the body that there should be no Schism in the
body, but that the Members should have the same care for one another.”54
Thomas Paine characteristically put the motivation plainly in Common
Sense—“It is not in numbers, but in unity that our great strength lies”—and
clarified the potency of this wish when the enemy was represented by the
single body of a monarch.
But Antigone ultimately raises questions about an ideal that implicitly
suggests a phalanx of undifferentiated hoplites or oarsmen at sea (541).
Antigone’s vision of an undivided sisterhood of resistance proves illusory;
it is followed by harsh words, heated clashes, and an inability to act in
concert. Through the conflict between Antigone and Ismene, the play
suggests that collective action among the weak is not a naturalized or uncom-
plicated process that can either be merely assumed or wished for. Moreover, it
implies that the politically dispossessed are a pluralistic and varied lot. It may
also point to the poisonous nature of the ideal of unity and oneness among
resisters. This standard has the paradoxical effect of tearing Ismene and
Antigone apart in the name of bringing them together.
Insights into Weakness: Antigone’s Offering
With their motivational cocktail of fear, conflict avoidance, and pragmatism,

their internalized vulnerability, and their penchant for subterfuge, the weak
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670511003421
52
Benardete, Sacred Transgressions, 2.
53
Steiner, Antigones, 209. Also see Nicole Loraux, “La main d’Antigone,” Métis 1, no.
2 (1986): 165 –96. In this respect, Antigone’s opening line is reminiscent of her inability
(or unwillingness) to draw a distinction between Polyneices, who attacked Thebes,
and Eteocles, who died defending the city. To Antigone, her brothers are the same:
“Death yearns for equal law for all the dead” (520).
54
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 58.
evoke a range of reactions. Sounding a common theme of disparagement,

Beelzebub observes in Paradise Lost, “To be weak is miserable, doing or suffer-
ing.” Christianity has argued most forcefully for the redemptive quality of
weakness, urging that it is better to receive a wrong than to do one and prom-
ising that the weak will triumph. “Strength is made perfect in weakness,” as
Corinthians has it. As vivid as these assessments are, they reveal little about
the role of the weak in politics. What do the politically weak look like?
How do they behave? With his ethnographic study of Malaysian peasants
facing the destruction of their livelihood through a so-called green revolution
in the 1970s, James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak directs attention to these
questions and develops a portrait of political weakness in a particular
context. Tipping his hat to Balzac’s pillaging Tossards in Les Paysans and
Brecht’s opportunistic and delusory Schweyk (Schweyk in the Second World
War), Scott illuminates a banal form of peasant resistance based on steady,
low-profile actions that are ad hoc, involve little coordination, and shun
open confrontations with authority.
Ismene provides another portrait of weakness, one that allows us, by focus-
ing on her character, to open up interpretive space both inside the play and
outside of it to examine the politics of the vulnerable and the dispossessed.
Though certainly no peasant, Ismene is aligned with the weak because, as a
woman, she is formally excluded from politics, and, lacking membership or
representation through a kurios, a male guardian, she is the object of a govern-
ment power from which there is no redress. Moreover, Ismene identifies with
the weak, seeing herself as living in the shadow of unjust decrees and brute
force, and she gestures to the depths of such an existence when she notes
that greater injustices than Creon’s decree may very well await them. We
“must hear these orders,” she tells Antigone, “or any that may be worse”
(64). While Antigone seems unable to comprehend an injustice more
painful than Creon’s decree, Ismene is clearheaded about the multitude of suf-
ferings of political exiles. She loves life despite its cruelties and thus tends
toward the survival mechanisms that Scott evocatively describes in Weapons
of the Weak.
And Ismene reveals a survival skill of the weak that Scott does not
mention—forgiveness—when she states, “I shall ask of them beneath the
earth forgiveness, for in these things I am forced” (65 – 66). Given her less
exacting nature, Ismene willingly requests forgiveness for choices in which
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670511003421
she lacks meaningful choice and, one suspects, she extends forgiveness to
others in a similar situation (witness her equanimity toward Antigone).
Moreover, she affords forgiveness to herself, foremost by giving up any
claim to the unreasonable and impossible standards that her sister willingly
embraces (90).
Antigone extends and complicates our understanding of weakness by
revealing a complex, rich, and dynamic relationship between those who lack
formal political power. The play depicts one character that fully accepts her
weakness and works within its limitations as well as a character that rejects
powerlessness and refuses the weapons of the weak. Illuminating the desires
and psychology of both kinds of weakness, the play provides an understand-
ing of the impulses that propel both the unheroic weak and the heroic weak to
pursue their distinct courses of action. Moreover, the play brings these two
forms of opposition into dialogue, or, more accurately, into a splintering
and sputtering exchange that is marked as much by what is left unsaid as
by what is spoken.
The tragedy to this reading is that collective action among the weak is a
fraught affair and unlikely to succeed. Offering a disheartening assessment
of the possibility of collective action by outsiders to politics, the play
evinces skepticism that the unheroic weak and the heroic weak will be able
to see past their differences long enough to join forces. By their final exchange,
Ismene and Antigone’s relationship is in tatters, destroyed by hurled insults,
charges of mockery, and declarations of hatred. Though they are similarly
situated, the sisters do not act in concert or accomplish anything together
throughout the play because divergent tactics, principles, values, and world-
views are wedged between them. While the invocation of koinon autadelphon
kara at the beginning of the play raises the hope that they will join forces, this
optimism is dashed over the course of the play. At Antigone’s end, Ismene and
Antigone are separated by a boundary that, as the play itself underscores, is of
the utmost importance: the border between life and death. The ever-widening
chasm that opens up between Ismene and Antigone suggests, first, that a
compromise between the disempowered about means is as crucial to collec-
tive action among the politically dispossessed as a general agreement about
ends. Shared objectives, sisterly affection, and a common royal lineage are
not enough to bridge the divide between the unheroic weak and the heroic
weak. A discussion of means, which Ismene and Antigone never have,
seems necessary to concerted action.
The breach between the sisters at the play’s close emphasizes, second, the
folly of the standard of absolute unity and cohesion contained in koinon auta-
delphon kara. By virtue of their vulnerability and lack of resources, the weak
are prone to see the virtue of collective action and implicitly understand
strength in numbers. The goal of acting in concert is, however, a distinct
aim from the ideal of cohesion. Antigone exposes the gap between these
two conceptions of collective action and illuminates the devastating conse-
quences of an aspiration of self-sameness, homogeneity, and lockstep unity.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670511003421
As Ismene herself might put it, to seek oneness among the weak is to hunt
the impossible.
Placed in the context of the failure of collective action between the sisters,
the virtues and vices of both heroic and unheroic resistance are thrown into
sharp relief. The heroic resistant has a righteous spirit, charisma and dyna-
mism, a sharp tongue, and a love of spectacle that invariably draws the eye
to them. It is impossible not to watch the heroic resister, who seems too
perfect for this world and thus doomed to be expelled from it. And it is impor-
tant to note the virtues of plain, unequivocal confrontations with authority
that attempt to undermine the power or the legitimacy of unjust political

leaders or their policies symbolically. Heroic resistance functions like a histori-
cal marker of dissent that can be seen and observed throughout time. Heroic
acts of resistance may also make a public claim of equality for an excluded
group that can be especially meaningful to future generations struggling
for inclusion, membership, and legal rights. Heroic, “onstage” resistance
leaves still another kind of historical marker: it denotes a point in history in
which piety, principles, morality, and honor supplanted self-preservation, uti-
litarian calculations, and pragmatism.
And yet the costs of foredoomed failure can be high. The would-be martyr
must sever ties with her community in order to make a claim for that commu-
nity.55 The Antigone clarifies this counterintuitive proposition through
Antigone’s strange and contradictory approach to her family. Antigone’s
public and vocal adherence to her familial commitment to Polyneices—and
the courting of death that it implies—means that she must cleave ties with
her current family, Ismene, and her future family that would be created by
her union with Haemon. In one of the cruelest lines of the play, Antigone pro-
claims on the way to her death chamber, “Look, leaders of Thebes, I am the
last of your royal line” (940 – 41).56 Though technically untrue, the line
reveals a chilly truth that Antigone is alone and has been alone since deciding
on public, confrontational tactics. Her death makes her metaphysical solitude
manifest. This sundering of communal ties is particularly painful because it is
Antigone’s surviving family, in particular Ismene, who will bear the long-
term consequences of her dramatic disobedience. In broadcasting her opposi-
tion, Antigone exposes what was hidden and encourages antagonism toward
this once shrouded foe, Ismene. Though certainly harrowing and grievous,
Antigone’s suicide exempts her from the unpleasant fate of living under a con-
stant gaze of suspicion and surveillance and it relieves her of the unceasing
fear of a life lived on borrowed time. This is Ismene’s fate.
Ismene’s future distress underscores another proclivity of overt defiance: it
tends to be followed by violence and suffering. Sophocles underscores this
point in the bold and broad strokes of tragedy in which death is piled
55
Jill Frank asks, “Where might we look for the Antigone’s law, grounded in the
human practice of justice, that is a combination of human art and activity, respectful
of what is, and appropriate to the world of plurality that is the polis? The answer, I
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670511003421
think, lies in a figure in the poem who, despite her age, seems to know how to pay
attention to human matters and ‘wait’: Ismene” (Frank, “The Antigone’s Law,” 339).
Also see George Eliot, “The Antigone and Its Moral,” in Essays of George Eliot, ed.
Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 265.
56
Goldhill ties this line to Ismene’s erasure, observing, “Ismene is treated as if she
were indeed no longer alive or no longer kin, no longer of the common blood.
Ismene is written—spoken—out of the family line. This silencing is all too often
repeated, rather than analyzed by the critics” (Goldhill, “Antigone and the Politics
of Sisterhood,” 157).
upon death and mourning is compounded by suffering and wretchedness.

Though it offers an extreme example of this suffering, Antigone touches on
an actuality of the heroic resistance of the martyr. Valuing principle over
life, the martyr risks death and pain (both her own and the suffering of
others). Ismene’s approach of underhanded resistance and false compliance,
in contrast, might well have mitigated the use of brute force and curbed the
scope of distress. Antigone gives Creon a target for his ire and violence.
But Ismene occludes this target. To put this point somewhat differently,
Ismene’s underhanded tactics are more in line with a commitment to nonvio-
lence because they attempt to dodge government violence altogether. Though
not responsible for the brute force that Creon directs at her, Antigone does not
attempt to avoid violence, death, or suffering. Ismene, who possesses a prag-
matic love for life and an instinctual avoidance of pain, does.
How might Sophocles’ Antigone have ended if Ismene’s approach had suc-
ceeded? One can only speculate. But it seems plausible that Sophocles’ play
would be slightly less brimming with woe, destruction, and violence. Its
emphasis might instead be on the power of the powerless, cunning, and on
silent acts that take place when no one is looking.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034670511003421

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The Review of Politics 73 (2011), 401 –424.

# University of Notre Dame

The Prudent Dissident: Unheroic Resistance

Abstract: Most contemporary political theorists who have interpreted Sophocles’

I am grateful to Lars Rensmann, Arlene Saxonhouse, Mariah Zeisberg, and Froma

Oxford University Press, 2006), 141 –163.

subaltern more generally. Antigone extends and complicates current under-

The Possibility of Unmanly Resistance: Ismene’s Cunning

Polyneices,” 209; Seth Benardete, Sacred Transgressions: A Reading of Sophocles’

Press, 1981), 159 –61.

suggests that, at her core, Antigone is antithetically disposed to dissembling

of the lightening that ﬂashes when they strike,” as Heidegger poetically

wonder at the absence of divine intervention.

Two Archetypes of Weakness

Antigone, in contrast, is comparatively blind to context and her awareness

It necessitates a willingness to sit patiently on the cusp of action, as well as the

We must remember that we two are women

of men. Polyneices battled Eteocles as a man—that is, frankly and aggres-

think it possible to do both.40 For Antigone, the appearance of honoring

Ismene’s approach is conciliatory, and she sees multiple avenues of action: a

(Sophocles’ Chrysothemis or Tecmessa, Euripides’ Phaedra or Alcestis, Aeschylus’

Insights into Weakness: Antigone’s Offering

With their motivational cocktail of fear, conﬂict avoidance, and pragmatism,

evoke a range of reactions. Sounding a common theme of disparagement,

that attempt to undermine the power or the legitimacy of unjust political

upon death and mourning is compounded by suffering and wretchedness.

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