Once Upon a Greek Stage: Places
Thebes (theebz)
Ancient Greek city located in Boeotia, a district northwest of Athens,
Thebes was famous in the ancient world for its tragic royal family and the
seven-gated wall surrounding the city. The long-standing enemy of Athens,
Thebes was the setting of several Greek tragedies. Despotic Thebes seems to
have served Athenian playwrights of the fifth century b.c.e. as a kind of
inverted mirror image of democratic Athens, providing them with a context
within which to discuss social and political issues that might prove too
disturbing if dramatized within a contemporary Athenian setting. By setting
Antigone in Thebes, in the remote, mythical past, Sophocles freed himself to
explore the tensions between personal freedom and legal restraint, household
and city, male and female—all tensions of keen interest to contemporary
Athenians, whose radically democratic system of government involved a constant
program of public discussion and debate.
Royal palace
Represented, probably with no attempt at physical “realism,” by a two-story
wooden building at the rear of the stage. Athenian audiences would have been
well versed in the tragic history of the royal house of Thebes, a history of
internecine conflict, incest, and treachery, and may well have recognized the
palace as a place where the two meanings of the word “house” mingle in
interesting and problematic ways. The palace, as the royal residence, is
Antigone’s home.
Cave
Place in which Creon entombs Antigone. It is an axiom of the Greek
tragic theater that particularly unpleasant events, especially those involving
violence and death, occur offstage but are described on stage, after the fact,
by various characters. In the play, the most interesting offstage place is the
cave in which Creon entombs Antigone. This “bridal-cave of Hades,” where
Antigone hangs herself, is one of the play’s more important symbols,
representing death but also, in its symbol of the womb and thus the female,
ironically commenting on Creon’s stridently masculine rhetoric and political
stance.
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