Examples Of Civil Disobedience In Antigone

Tracy Webb 11 December 2012 In the play Antigone by Sophocles, Antigone is a young girl who decides to dishonor an edict that the king, her uncle has set in place. That edict is that no one is to bury her brother Polyneices, who had died fighting his brother for the right to be in the City again. Eteocles was king at the time and had decided to band his brother from the city so that he would not have to give up the thrown the next year. Their father had left the thrown to them to share, so every-other year they would get to rule over Thebes the City they are in. Antigone knows that by the law of the gods leaving a body uncovered is morally unjust. Martin Luther King addresses this very issue in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Although it was written 2,000 years later, it speaks to a similar topic, which civil disobedience. “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law” (King 3). Antigone’s actions follow along with King’s four steps towards civil disobedience although there are differences because of the eras. Antigone responds to Creon’s edict with civil disobedience as King…show more content…
Antigone has demonstrated all four steps of Martian Luther King Jrs nonviolent campaign toward a unjust circumstance, if someone were to read through both the play and the letter it may not be clear that she has. But once the time frames have been taken into consideration, and where a woman’s place was in 141 BC it will open the mind to a understanding of how strong and brave she had to be in order to perform the acts of disobedience.

Works Cited King, Martin L, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The Atlantic Monthly 212.2 (1963): 78-88. Print.
Sophocles. "Antigone." The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed. Knox and Mack.
New York: Norton, 1995: