Antigone contra o sofista

The aim of this paper is to show that a correct interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigona has to take into account also its polemical targets. More precisely, a comparison with Protagoras may prove useful. Indeed, the main reason of disagreement between Antigona and Creon does not regard so much the opposition between the family and the state as two different accounts of reality and of human being. Antigona, on one hand, advocates for a world ruled by divine laws, whose meaning can escape human understanding, but which men must nevertheless respect. Creon, on the other hand, emphasizes the political capacity that enables human beings to create a human world in which to live. This view clearly reminds Protagoras’ humanism and relativism, a philosophy well known in V century b.C. Athens. But the problem for Sophocles is that a world in which man is the only measure risks to become a world without measure, or, even worse, a world with strength as the only measure, as the example of Creon will show in the second part of the tragedy.