The concept of Death lurks through Antigone. It not only drives the plot—the deaths of Polynices and Eteocles, brothers by birth, enemies in life, and made brothers once again in death, are what begins the rapidly escalating chain of events—but also seeps into the margins of the play, especially evident in the advice of the chorus of Theban elders and the prophesies of Teiresias.

The rites and honors given to the dead are of utmost importance to Antigone. Rather than obey the laws and wills of the living, the country, the ruler, Antigone only sees the laws of the gods, the heavens, the dead.

Polynices, the exiled son of Oedipus, brother of Antigone, Ismene, and Eteocles, marched upon the city of Thebes with intent to destroy it. However, when the fall of the city seemed imminent, he was frightened by Zeus’ thunderbolts and retreated. His brother, Eteocles, was fighting on the side of the city, and the brothers engaged in a symbolic fight in which they slew each other. King Creon allowed the burial rites to be performed on only Eteocles. To bury Polynices, he reasons, would be traitorous to Thebes, and that to consider the concerns of his friends would be in direct conflict with his appointment as king. He must serve his country above all.

The lack of burial strikes Antigone immediately as unjust according to the laws of the gods. Though he has turned against his homeland, he is her brother nonetheless, and has shared with her the curse wrought onto her family by the sins of her father, Oedipus. She loves him still, and though Creon has ordered that to disobey and to attempt to bury Polynices would be a capital offense, she vows to see him buried at the cost of her life.

In fact, she buries him twice. The first time she is unseen, but when the king’s guards exhume him and place his decomposing, bird-pecked, and dog-eaten body on the hillside under close watch, Antigone returns to complete the rites, and is thus captured and taken to Creon.

Creon is outraged and orders her to be walled up alive with a small amount of food—this makes the state guiltless of her death, as her life is then put into the hands of the gods. It is in this chamber that Antigone hangs herself with her wedding garments, and Haemon, Creon’s son who is betrothed to Antigone, kills himself from the grief of finding his bride dead.

Death is the action shared by nearly all of the characters in Antigone. Polynices’ and Eteocles’ deaths quickly give way to a landslide of others’—Antigone, Haemon, the king’s wife Eurydice, and eventually Creon himself. All of these deaths are suicides.

But Death also creeps in the corners of the play. The Chorus of Theban elders, offering advice to Creon throughout the play, recites a verse extolling the powers of man to conquer the world, the seas, the animals, the plants. The Chorus lists language and law as well. However, they note,

“for ever ill he hath found its remedy,

Save only death.”

The Chorus makes no mistake about the eventuality of Death and its immense, awesome power. They proclaim

There is no tower
So high, no armory so great,
No ship so swift, as is the power
Of man’s inexorable fate.

The prophesies of Teiresias are also soaked with blood. He warns Creon again and again to change his mind, bury Polynices, and unentomb Antigone, but Creon does not believe him, and asserts that Teiresias has financial motivations—until Teiresias tells him of his fate.

Ere the chariot of the sun
Had rounded once or twice his wheeling way,
You shall have given a son of your own loins
To death, in payment for death — two debts to pay:
One for the life that you have sent to death,
The life you have abominably entombed,
One for the dead still lying above ground
Unburied, unhonored, unblest by the gods below.
You cannot alter this. The gods themselves
Cannot undo it. It follows the necessity
From what you have done.

Creon, in a desperate bid to save himself from this prophecy, attempts to undo his wrongs. He buries Polynices himself, and opens Antigone’s tomb. But so follows in life what Teiresias has seen, as he asserted, what was necessary to pay for Creon’s wrongdoings and prideful decisions. But despite his attempts, Death and heavenly justice had already made judgement and passed punishment. Haemon, married in death to Antigone. Eurydice, fallen by her grief.

And Creon, wracked by guilt, cannot live.