I continue to see resonances between our contemporary moment and the ancient Greeks these days. This could be because I’m gearing up to teach the first semester of a theater history class for the first time in more than three years. It could also be, as Mark Twain is reported to have said, that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
These last couple of weeks, I can’t get the “rhyming” of our contemporary moment with Sophocles’ great tragedy, Antigone, out of my mind. It’s one of the big ones, usually thought of right up there with Oedipus Rex. But in case you don’t recall, Antigone tells the story of one of Oedipus’ daughters, Antigone. Following Oedipus’ exile, Antigone’s two brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, launch into a war of succession against one another, which leads to Eteocles’ side winning. The two brothers kill each other, and Creon, who takes control of Thebes after the war, declares that Polynices should remain unburied. Antigone disobeys Creon’s orders, citing the “laws of the gods” and buries her brother only to be caught and condemned by the state. Antigone goes, willingly, to her death as well as her fiancee (and Creon’s son). The ancient Greeks really liked to keep it in the family.
It should be obvious what “rhyme” I’m seeing here.
On August 26, Donald Trump laid a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery to mark the third anniversary since of the US’s misbegotten withdrawal from Afghanistan. He was there at the behest of the families of service members who were killed in a bombing during those tumultuous days. During the visit, Trump's campaign took photos and videos, which were subsequently uploaded to social media sites, turning the event into a political opportunity. In the process of doing this, there was a physical altercation with an Arlington employee, whom the Trump campaign said was “suffering from a mental health episode.” In fact, the employee was attempting to stop the Trump team from taking photos in Section 60, a particularly sacred part of the cemetery, where federal law prohibits “political campaign or election related activities.” This is something that the Trump campaign seemed to clearly be doing by taking photos and videos of the former president in Section 60 on an anniversary of one of the most disastrous episodes of the Biden presidency.
In his usual fashion in the face of a crisis, Trump and his campaign have sought to minimize, attack, and misinform. But, even if Trump was wanted there, the fact that his campaign violated the rules is indisputable.
Not to do any of my own diminishing, but on the one hand, this seems like more of Trump-being-Trump. The guy doesn’t seem to have ever found any rules or norms that he won’t break.
The repurposing of Arlington National Cemetery as a backdrop to a political message, too, is more of the same. Whether it was the choice of Waco to relaunch his campaign, the piles of empty manilla folders at the press conference where he said he was “divesting” himself of his role in the Trump Organization, or the barricades outside the Manhattan courtroom, Trump knows how to turn a photo op to his advantage. Regardless of the venue, all the world’s the stage for his main character energy.
That said, there is something a bit more unnerving about this rule-breaking because it deals with our fallen dead. And, here’s where Antigone can shed a bit more light.
If you remember the play from a high school or college class, you might have the sense of remembering Antigone as a rule-breaker herself.Someone who looked at a clearly unfair law and openly defied it. A bit of civil disobedience or “good trouble” in the words of the immortal John Lewis. Antigone is often thought of as righteous, ideological. An ancient Greek proto-feminist badass. This is the way that our historical moment tilts the play, but in reality, it’s Creon, the tyrant and ruler who’s trying to put Thebes back together, who is the play’s hero.
Creon is left with a polis in pieces following the dual catastrophes of Oedipus’ unmasking and civil war. In an iconic translation by Robert Fitzgerald and Dudley Fitts, Creon compares Thebes to a ship that he has had to lead safely back to port after being struck by a storm. It’s a metaphor that David Cameron also used in his resignation speech after the Brexit vote. Creon is given the unenviable task of trying to please all sides in a city that’s tearing itself apart. Then, his son’s girlfriend turns up, unrepentantly, with dirt on her hands. You’ve gotta feel for the guy a bit.
Except you kind of don’t. Creon is a recalcitrant jerk. He makes the law against burying those on the other side and simply does not budge. The seer tells him he should budge. His son tells him he should budge. His wife tells him. And Creon puts his fingers in his ears and pretends he doesn’t hear until everyone around him is dead. That’s what makes him hard to root for. Oedipus may be an incestuous murderer, but at least he was trying to fix things!
Even worse is that Creon’s law is completely wrong. Not only is not burying someone objectionable on the level of basic humanity, it’s also against all kinds of health regulations, even back then. For the ancient Greeks, an unburied body wasn’t only macabre. It was a form of spiritual pollution. An unburied body was, in their words, a “miasma,” holding a noxious power that, unchecked, could overtake everything around it. Antigone’s unlawful burial, then, can also be seen as her own attempt to stop the disease from spreading.
In the introduction to his translation of Antigone, Paul Woodruff contextualizes the world of Athens at Sophocles’ time and why Antigone would have resonated with those audiences. Athens was made up of 10 tribes, and, as the democratic regime took hold, it often had to contend with the familial ties of those tribes and the ways in which people would choose their clan over their fellow citizens. Sophocles seems to have been reacting, in particular, to extravagant funerals in Antigone which went beyond honoring of the dead to the point of becoming show pieces for particular tribes. Part of the project of Antigone, then, was to bring the question of democracy to the fore. Throughout the play, Sophocles seems to be asking: How can we forge relations between ourselves in ways that go beyond blood?
Obviously, I’m not trying to make a direct comparison here, but what’s remarkable to me in following the incident at Arlington is how the question of who counts as a citizen remains as present for us at this time as it did at the time of Sophocles.
Antigone also reminds us of how deleterious the politics of the dead can be. Whether it’s a miasma or using a cemetery as your campaign’s latest foray into TikTok, part of the reason that the dead are so sacred is the spiritual meaning that they convey.