Antigone contro il sofista

Aim of the paper is to show that a correct interpretation of Sophocles Antigones has to take into account also its polemical targets. More precisely, it is a comparison with Protagoras that may prove useful. Indeed, the main reason of disagreement between Antigones and Creon does not regard so much the opposition between family and the State as two different accounts of reality and of human being. Antigones, on the 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, which enables human beings to create a human world in which to live. This view is clearly dependent on Protagoras humanism and relativism, a philosophy well known in V century Athens. But the problem, for Sophocles, is that a world in which man is the only misure risks to become a world without measure, or, even worse, a world with strenght as the only measure, as the example of Creon will show in the second part of the tragedy.