Vocab
What word names the cancelling or postponing of a sentence already handed down? Ismene begs for it when she asks to die beside her sister, and Antigone refuses her.
reprieve
What is the opening speech that establishes the situation before the main action begins, here spoken by one sister to the other?
prologue
Who offers to share the burial, then within the same scene retreats to the claim that she must yield to those in authority?
Ismene
The city where the play takes place, ruled by Creon after the two brothers kill each other in a civil war.
Thebes
Who does Antigone bring outside the palace at the start of the play to tell her plan to?
ismene
Antigone's insistence on burying Polynices whatever the cost is the play's clearest display of what word, meaning courage in the face of danger?
valour
What is the raised structure at the rear of the acting space, standing for the palace and later the mouth of the tomb?
skene
Who has lost both brothers and must decide, in a single act, which one she will honour?
Antigone
Name the three plays by Sophocles about Oedipus's family that survive today, of which this is the last-written.
Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King), Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone
Who is Antigone's father?
Oedipus
What word names a claim to rule resting on right rather than force — precisely what Creon lacks after the brothers fall?
legitimacy
What term names the chorus's entrance song, performed as it marches into the orchestra for the first time?
parados
Whose job is to carry the ruler's words out to the people and the people's fears back in — and who reports a burial nobody witnessed?
sentry
This Greek term names the surplus of pride that drives a tragic figure to overstep the limits set by gods and custom
Hubris
Who is Haemon
Creon's son and Antigone's fiancé
A line that is true in two incompatible ways at once, so the audience hears both meanings, is an example of what kind of speech?
equivocation
What word names the final scene in which the chorus exits — here a scene of wreckage rather than triumph?
exodos
Who has read the birds for Thebes his whole life, and is accused of taking bribes to lie when he says the gods are angry?
Teiresias
The festival held in Athens each spring, where tragedies competed before an audience of thousands.
the City Dionysia
When the guard first reports the burial, what is on the body — and what has not touched it?
a thin layer of dust, with no animal or bird having torn at the corpse
Teiresias warns that leaving a body exposed spreads what kind of influence — something that sickens an entire city rather than one man?
pernicious
Who are the two masked performers, identical in dress, who could each take several roles — the convention that let a handful of actors populate a whole city?
protagonist and deuteragonist
Whose loyalty expresses itself as a request to die alongside the condemned — a request refused, because a shared death would grant a shared glory?
Ismene
Roughly when was the play first performed, and what was going on in Athens at the time?
c. 441 BCE, during the rise of Athenian empire and shortly after the Persian Wars — a period of intense debate about law, citizenship, and the state versus the family
Besides Antigone, which two characters die before the play ends?
Haemon and Eurydice