The king gouged out his eyes for all to see. After killing his father and sleeping with his mother, Oedipus found his future was fated. In thinking he could escape his past, he ended up right where he began: his mother's bedroom. His sons, Polyneices and Eteocles, then fought each other for the throne. In an act of treason, Polyneices raised an Argive army against his native Thebes. The fratricide of civil war ended with both brothers dead. This is the memory that Athenian audiences likely took with them to the festival of Dionysia where they saw Sophocles's Antigone performed.

The play opens. The setting is postconflict Thebes, and its people desperately seek “forgetfulness of these wars” (166). Creon, the city's unproven king, has forbidden the burial of Polyneices—leaving his corpse to rot in flagrant defiance of the city's religious laws. Polyneices's sister Antigone defies the king's order by burying her brother anyway. This outrage sets the stage for a power struggle over whom, what, and how Thebes will remember.

Written around 441 BCE, the drama was staged in democratic Athens as a tragedy. As a public spectacle, tragedy was far more than a means of escapist entertainment; it was civic education.