Is it better to be basic or pedantic?

(about Antigone, specifically, but also about everything else)

Nikiforos Lytras, “Antigone in front of the dead Polynices” (1865)

In the prologue of Helen Morales’ wonderful book Antigone Rising — which I highly recommend — Morales mentions the powerful resonance Antigone has for high school students:

The “girl against the world” scenario has a glamorous appeal; we like it when the underdog triumphs. Sophocles’s Antigone is frequently taught in high schools in the United States, and whenever I speak about the play in local schools, the students are clearly on the side of Antigone. She is a heroine, they say, and Creon is a total fascist who deserves everything he gets.

The first time I read this, in the summer of 2020, I thought, Well, shit. I guess High School Donna was basic as hell.

Fortunately, all of the essays I wrote in high school have been lost to the sands of time. Unfortunately, I recently found a manila folder full of fiction and fanfiction I wrote that I later printed out for some reason (!) and am too terrified to look at more closely. And even less fortunately, I’ve been cursed with a good memory, so I can remember with cringe-inducing accuracy the essay I wrote about this topic at age 15. For some reason I can’t fathom, I was way into rainbow gradients for my titles back then, so the cringe just doesn’t stop.

(I don’t think I used the phrase “a total fascist” in my high school essay, but this was early 2003. Fascism felt, like, so twentieth century, something to study the rise of in A.P. Euro. It was a more innocent time.)

I can practically picture all five paragraphs in my mind’s eye. I argued that character differences between Creon in Antigone and Creon in Oedipus the King suggest that monarchy inevitably leads to tyranny. This argument is… fine, I guess, for a fifteen-year-old, if a little tautological because the name of Oedipus the King in Greek is literally Oedipus Tyrannos, so saying the king in the play is tyrannical is hardly groundbreaking.

Incidentally, this is why you’re unlikely to hear a classicist refer to the play as Oedipus Rex. It’s something of a shibboleth for us. Classicists are too aware of the different historical baggage attached to the Greek tyrannos and the Roman rex to feel comfortable using the terms interchangeably. Whenever I hear someone call the play Oedipus Rex, my brain reacts as though they’d said “octopi” — this person wants to sound highly educated, so unless I want this interaction to turn awkward AF I should probably keep my mouth shut. (My success rate on that is… mixed.)

Classicists are also less likely to refer to the play just as Oedipus to avoid confusion with Oedipus at Colonus, a play that, as far as I can tell, non-classicists never talk about. They may be dimly aware that Sophocles wrote a “Theban trilogy,” which isn’t actually a trilogy at all. A true trilogy like Aeschylus’ Oresteia comprises three connected plays meant to be performed together that depict different chapters in the same overarching story. Sophocles’ Antigone, Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus are just three still-extant plays written decades apart about the same family. They definitely aren’t meant to be seen as a continuous narrative, so there’s no reason to see the Creon of Antigone as the same character as the Creon of Oedipus the King.

Oh! Also, in some ancient sources Antigone is CALLED Creon, because Creon is protagonist of the play in the technical sense — that is, the “first actor” (the definition of protagonist) would have played him, since he stays onstage almost the whole time while the second actor comes out in one role or another, yells at him about how wrong he is, exits, and returns wearing a different mask to yell at him again.

As you can see, these plays offer a never-ending fountain of stuff to be pedantic about. Maybe “basic bitch” and “pedantic asshole” are the only two categories of readers of Sophocles.

I’m going to return to Oedipus at Colonus for a moment, because it’s definitely the least-discussed of the three plays and as the mother of three kids I feel bad when I see that one is getting left out. Basically, it tells the story of the end of Oedipus’s life. You know how funerals really bring out the worst in some families? Well, Oedipus’s family are characteristically overachievers in this area, so his relatives start fighting over what’s going to happen to Oedipus’s dead body while he’s still alive. There’s a probably apocryphal, definitely depressing story that Sophocles’ son brought him to court and accused him of having dementia, and Sophocles recited passages from Oedipus at Colonus to prove that his mind was still sharp. There’s something so contemporary and American about that anecdote. I really hate it.

My parents are still very much compos mentis, thank goodness. But man did my eyes go wide with horror when I realized that when I first read Antigone in high school, it was easy to imagine myself as an Antigone (even though if I’m being honest I might have been more of an Ismene, the timid conformist sister), but now stage-of-life-wise I’m probably closer to Sophocles’ Litigious Dipshit Adult Son. Cool.

Morales does suggest that the original audience of Antigone might have found it easier than high school girls do to identify with Creon, an adult citizen male, than with Antigone:

“It is unlikely that the play’s original audience would have been so one-sided in their sympathies. The Greeks would likely have been more critical of Antigone, a girl who spoke and acted out of turn, even as many would have also recognized the failings of the king, Creon.”

This feels, in a way, like the inevitable progression that happens to Jane Austen fans. I’ve noticed a phenomenon where a girl discovers Austen in middle or high school — my 11th grade English class read Antigone and Pride & Prejudice just a few months apart, but I had definitely read it a good three or four times already by then. I’d already read all of Austen’s novels and was very comfortable identifying as an Elinor Dashwood who wishes she were an Elizabeth Bennet. Pride & Prejudice was my favorite, obviously. Until it wasn’t. One day in my early thirties I suddenly realized that Persuasion had become my favorite Austen novel by a wide margin, a clear sign that I was approaching middle age. (I do not recommend the heinous Netflix Persuasion adaptation, although Brandon Taylor’s analysis almost makes it worthwhile. I think a lot about the line about how Dakota Johnson has a “face that knows what a cell phone is.”)

Yes, I was a high school girl who was into Austen. Not once in this piece have I claimed to be anything other than a complete cliché.

But maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on my high school self for writing the exact same essay about Antigone that every other nerdy alternative girl who read the play was writing. It’s hard to have truly original and creative ideas about 2500-year-old plays as a teenager. Although at some point, if you want to be a classical scholar who gets to be pedantic about the Theban non-trilogy trilogy, you do have to make that leap.

Just four years after my cliché Antigone paper, I was a senior in college applying to Classics graduate programs. I had learned a lot about Greek tragedy in the intervening few years, enough to plausibly trick people into seeing me as a potential future expert on the subject even though in actuality I was a 20 year-old child. At one of my interviews, an eminent Hellenist asked me what other graduate programs I was looking at. I told her I had just visited Princeton, and she rolled her eyes and told me that Princeton was far too “pre-professional” and the Classics department there pushed its students to publish far too early. (Note: in hindsight, this did not at all reflect my experience.) She told me, “I almost want to tell them, ‘You’re a graduate student! You don’t have anything original to say about the Oresteia!’”

I remember being at a complete loss for how to respond to this. Wasn’t the entire point of graduate school to learn how to produce original research? To create a tiny pimple on the circle containing all of human knowledge, as it were?

I wasn’t wrong, exactly, although my disagreement with her on that point was a symptom of a larger issue. I would argue that the same qualities that make people in their 20s look naive and cringe to us tired Olds — the bright-eyed enthusiasm, the Dunning-Kruger, the conviction that they can change the world and make a difference — are also a gift. Sometimes the only way to create something really cool is to not know any better. If I’d had any idea what I was doing, neither Eidolon nor Not All Dead White Men would exist.

Maybe part of the point of this newsletter is to try to wind back the clock on how I think about classics. To try and bring some of the knowledge and context I now have, but to read things with the bright-eyed solipsism of a teenager. To find a balance between the sense of a scholar and the teenage sensibility of how can I make Antigone completely about me and how brilliant I am and how I feel things more deeply than anyone ever has?

Of course, there are some things that are challenge level: impossible to not be pedantic about. Like this absolute banger:

Fun game for classics enthusiasts: imagine how your life would have been different if Jennifer Lopez’s character in this movie was the first person to teach you about ancient Greek literature. I dare you.

I can just picture how excited she would have been to receive my rainbow gradient-titled essays about the Iliad.

Thanks for reading! Before you go: today is the release day for Glorious Exploits, a book about two Syracusans who put on a production of Medea using Athenian POWs during the Peloponnesian War, and I’m SO excited for it. And between that and the response to this piece about feminist myth retellings a few weeks back, I’m wondering: would anyone be interested in a book club/discussion group for classics-related novels? I’m picturing one book a quarter and a mix of retellings, loose adaptations (a la Fruit of the Dead), and novels with a classics-related hook like Glorious Exploits or The Maidens (a thriller from 2022 about a charismatic Greek tragedy professor who also maybe is a murderer).