Natural Law VS Man-made Law

Antigone is a bleak continuation of the previous plays, even though Antigone

had been written before Oedipus The King and Oedipus At Colonus. In this
play, the events take so a volatile sequence that the reader (at least for me)
cannot help anticipating the worst of the worst. In a word, it is genuine drama.

According to the play Oedipus At Colonus, Antigone and Ismene were

supposed to be in the care of the king of Colonus, Theseus. For the latter
promised Oedipus to protect and look after his two daughters. Yet,
unbeknownst to us, the play of Antigone starts off at Thebes with Antigone
trying to convince her incestuous sister, Ismene, of burying their unburied
brother, Polyneices, who has been killed in battle by his brother Eteocles.
Ismene refuses her sister out of fear. Unthwarted and courageous, Antigone
defies Creon’s order of letting Polyneices’ corpse unburied to the beasts and
sets out to bury him in complete secrecy. Unluckily, Antigone gets spotted just
after she finishes burying the corpse and is summoned before the king, Creon.
She gets imprisoned in a cave and is given little food, so as to slowly and
brutally dies of hunger. Fatuously, Creon changes his mind at last and goes to
set Antigone free but in vain, since she was already gone. Consequently,
Antigone’s fiancé, Haemon, unable to swallow the incident, kills himself. And
as one thing led to another, his mother, Eurydice, stabs herself with a sword as
she learns that her son and his betrothed, Antigone, have just commited
suicide. The play ends with Creon going crazy!

I do not know if Sophocles and Hippias of Elis, a sophist polymath, had been
acquainted with one another, though both of them were Greek and were born
and lived in the fifth century BC. Notwithstanding, their possible acquaintance
might not be of great importance. Alternatively, to my way of thinking, what is
crucial is their common opinion of Antigone. I thus will state Hippias’s
opinion, which is evident from his fragments that have reached us, and, then,
try to show that Sophocles’ opinion is in no way different from Hippias’s.
Like many sophists, Hippias of Elis used to claim that he has a say on any
subject and that one has only to pose good questions. Yet, while I was going
through his fragments, I found that he speaks of two types of Law: “a Natural
Law- unwritten law of Nature that describes what simply and unalterably is
the case- and Man-made Law- is prescriptive and states what Should be the
case-. As I went on, I found that Hippias of Elis was an enthusiastic upholder of
the natural Law and completely dismissive of Man-made law. To him, the
Natural Law is divine, eternal, unbreakable and unalterable. Therefore, people
should have to respect and abide by such a law. Otherwise, they would
jeopardize their peaceful lives as they disobey the laws of the gods. This is
hippias’ argument. And in fact, many an ancient Greek thinker, such as
Heraclitus of Ephesus and Antiphon the sophist, had said of such a natural or
divine law. Perhaps, such a belief in an eternal godly law was, but I am not
quite certain, embedded in the structure of the mythical Greek mind, for we
find something quite similar to what these ancient thinkers said in the play of
Antigone by Sophocles.

So remorseful and guilty, Creon’s words were the following:

The best way to live, I admit it at last,

Is in obedience to the customary laws.

It is my opinion that the play of Antigone in its entirety is a picture of this

Natural Law and Man-made Law. Creon is a symbol of Man-made law because
he is king. He has legislative, executive, and juridical powers, that is, he can
make laws, carry them out, and penalize those who disobey. By contrast,
Antigone is a devoted representative of the natural law. This is remarkably
evidenced by her disobedience and transgression of Creon’s laws (commands).
To understand it clearly, I think we should materialize it by an example.
According to the plays, Polyneices and Eteocles, incestuous sons of Oedipus,
have killed each other in battle. As result, Creon ascends to the Theban throne
and issues an order of leaving Polyneices’ Corpse unburied as a delicious meal
for monsters for raising an army against the city-state of Thebes. Conversely,
Creon orders his men to give an honorable burial to Eteocles’ corpse since he
died defending and protecting Thebes. But, nobody dared to disobey Creon’s
order, even though it is extremely hazardous to the city, for it risks the wrath
of the gods. The gods command people to give decent burials to their dead.
Fortunately and unfortunately, Antigone hearkened to the god’s command and
entombed her dead brother, Polyneices. And that costed her life.

Antigone is a fundamentalist theocratic. She is a firm believer that nations and

people must be governed by the laws of the gods, not by man- made laws.
These lines speak to the point:

Zeus did not command these things,

Nor did justice, who dwells with the gods below,

Ordain such laws for men.

Neither do I believe that your decrees,

Or those of any other mortal are strong enough to overrule

The ancient, unwritten, immutable laws of the gods

Which are not for the present alone, but have always

Been—and no one knows when they began

I would not risk the punishment of the gods

In fear of any man.

Such an argument is legally perilous since Antigone claims that she is obeying
a divinely superior law in breaking a man-made one. She declares and
applauds the permanence of the unwritten laws of the gods. That means that
she is justly disobeying Creon’s laws. Antigone is posing a very important as
well as profound question of the nature of justice and piety. To her, the just
and the pious is what the gods love and command, not what a monarch or
statesman might love or command. More than that, Antigone is model of
freedom and sublimation. In obeying the laws of gods and disobeying man-
made laws, she is free and sublime since she is governed by the Greatest and
The strongest, not by the weakest and most flawed. I would like to quote the
chorus in prize of Antigone:
Like father, like daughter—a wild girl.

She has not learned to bend before the storm.

Unlike Antigone, ismene is a down-to-earth girl. Though knowing it is false

inside, she champions man-made law (Creon’s law) over the natural law. She is
being pragmatic and realistic so that she can survive and avoid premature
death. I am afraid that she too has a point: why should we abide by the laws of
the gods when the gods seem far-off and careless and we are in the grips of
Creon, not of Zeus or Apollo. Would not it be unwise of us not to acknowledge
the hyena when the Woolf is nowhere to be found?

Lastly, Antigone is an insightful play that actualizes the abstract and the
mythical in a dramatic mould. Antigone meets her waterloo in an attempt to
prevail the god’s word and justice. Creon goes insane for daring to break the
unbreakable and to profane the sacred. At this juncture, the tragedy reaches its
zenith; the curse is like hellfire in Theban family. Everybody is appalled and
disillusioned. And the gods, I surmise, are feasting and drinking from curved
horns as Human drama is kicking off.