Antigone

The last of the Theban Plays tells the story of Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus. She defies the orders of her uncle, King Creon, who has declared her brother Polynices a traitor and forbids his burial after he dies in battle. Driven by her religious duty and love for her family, Antigone secretly buries him. Her actions lead to her arrest, and despite Creon's attempts to persuade her with threats and promises, Antigone remains steadfast in her beliefs. The tension between the laws of the state and divine law escalates as the story progresses, culminating in tragic consequences; in the end, Creon comes to a painful realization about the devastating cost of his pride and stubbornness. Antigone remains one of literature's most enduring explorations of conscience versus authority, a tragedy whose moral urgency has lost none of its power over twenty-five centuries. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)