But, a few lines earlier,[95] she implies that there is something hideously novel and unorthodox about the edict of Kreon:

Nor thought I thy commandment of such weight

That one who is mortal thus could overbear

The infallible unwritten laws of Heaven.

Haemon, too, implies[96] that there is something very arbitrary in Kreon’s proclamation. All the citizens of Thebes, he says, repudiate the guilt of Antigone:

She perishes for a most glorious deed,

Who when her own true brother on the earth

Lay weltering after combat in his gore,

Left him not graveless for the carrion fowl

And raw-devouring field-dogs to consume—