Hath she not merited a golden praise?
Hence we think that the conflict in this drama lies rather between human nature and human reason on the one hand and the arbitrary tyranny of civic governments in political legislation and administration on the other. Antigone protests against the decree which declared her brother at once a traitor and a fratricide of full guilt.[97] If Polyneices had slain Eteocles and had become in his stead the ruler of Thebes, how different would Kreon’s appreciation of the facts have been! It is obvious that sedition, faction, and civil war, whether in ancient Greece or in modern Ireland, produce a contempt for civic law because of the despotic dogmatism which regards the same individual as now a patriot and now a traitor, now a hero and now a villain, according to the momentary swing of a political pendulum or the varying strength of political parties.
Finally, we may point out that in this play there is a veritable epidemic of suicide. But it is not suicide of the ordinary ignoble kind. There is a clear distinction, in the mind of the dramatist, and in the facts, which makes such self-slaughter more akin to sacrifice. Haemon, Eurydice, and Antigone one by one put off ‘this mortal coil.’ It is only when it is too late that Kreon is brought to see the selfish obstinacy of his point of view. The play ends with a warning against impious pride. But the gods have punished the humble with the proud! The legal analysis of suicide of this kind is rather difficult and unsatisfactory, but we shall offer some further remarks upon the subject in connexion with the following play, the Ajax, in which suicide forms a prominent feature of the plot.
The ‘Ajax’
When the council of the Achaean chieftains on the plains of Troy decided to bestow upon Odysseus the arms of Achilles as the prize of martial valour, Ajax, the rival claimant for the prize, was overwhelmed with jealousy and wounded pride, and he resolved to slay Odysseus and, with him, other Achaean chieftains. This resolution he fortunately failed to execute, not through any fear of the consequences of his act, nor yet through moral or legal scruples, but simply as a result of the intervention of Athene, who directed his murderous hand against a herd of cattle and ‘mesmerised’ him into believing that those cattle were his human enemies. This fictitious imaginary slaying of men cannot easily be classified from the standpoint of historical law. Are we to regard Ajax as a plotter of murder or a contriver of murder or as guilty of ‘attempted murder’?
We have already seen that in historical Greek law[98] the contriver of murder and the actual murderer were more or less identical, and were tried by the same Areopagus court. Now, plotting to kill which did not succeed but which merely resulted in wounding would have been regarded as ‘malicious wounding’ (τραῦμα ἐκ προνοίας), whereas such plotting without wounding was ‘attempted murder’ (βούλευσις). From the probable fact[99] that the Palladium court tried cases of βούλευσις in the time of Aristotle, we have inferred that this offence was punished by temporary banishment; for the connexion of βούλευσις with the Palladium implies that the degree of guilt was regarded as more or less identical with that of manslaughter, even though the nature of these offences is very different. Now we have seen that amongst the Achaeans of the Homeric age there was no discrimination in regard to the penalties for murder and for manslaughter: but are we also to assume that there was no distinction between murder and plotting-without-wounding (βούλευσις)? The act of Ajax, as it is described in this Sophoclean drama, was, according to our definition of the words, an instance of βούλευσις. Now it is possible to maintain that in this play Ajax is regarded as a murderer, and that he would have been punished as a murderer if his act of suicide had not rendered it impossible to carry out such punishment. The fact that he slew some herdmen, with the cattle, is not, we think, of any legal importance, though the Chorus happen to mention it, for these herdmen were either slaves or inferior serfs whose death was not regarded as murder. In the King Oedipus we are told[100] that Oedipus slew all the attendants of Laius at the famous Phocian cross-roads, but their death was unavenged and for their death the Delphic oracle demanded no punishment. In the Ajax the Chorus proclaim the death penalty for Ajax[101]:
The man will die, disgraced in open day,
Whose dark-eyed steel hath dared through mad-brained error,
The mounted herdmen with their herds to slay.
Again it is possible to maintain that the attempt of Ajax was also, in a certain sense, treasonable, for it was an insult and a danger to the whole Achaean army. Now, the penalty for treason, we have seen,[102] was ‘collective,’ that is, it applied to the family of the traitor, not merely to himself, until the fourth century B.C. It is thus perhaps that we must explain the attempt which was made by the Achaean army to slay Teucer, the half-brother of Ajax, as the messenger records[103]: