The Antigone of Sophocles and Athenian Democracy

The main purpose of this article is to find the relation between political implications of Sophocles’s Antigone and “Athenian Democracy”. To do so, we have used a structuralist approach the main feature of which is exploring binary oppositions in the text which in turn results in finding the oppositions within the political-social life that provides a ground for the creation of the text. From the point of view of political thought, the most prominent opposition in the tragedy of Antigone which creats a network of oppositions around itself, is the one drawn between “family”- with its values- and “political system” and the relationships among the citizenry. The importance of this opposition has been confirmed by Christian Meier, Jean Pierre Vernant, Charles Segal, and even Micheal Zelnak.It reveals a transition to the epoch of citizenry’s relations. It also caused the confrontation between “unwritten divine laws” and “man-made written laws”, the opposition that is the main focus of the present article.