actually though, i was told in the past that greek tragedies are very interesting and it ends out the same way as shakespeare tragedies do: EVERYBODY DIES
but i feel like in antigone, there was some sort of moral to be told at the end of it. i haven’t quite grasped what it was yet, but i feel like it was along the lines of, ‘its too late to apologize and make up for your mistakes now look what you’ve done kreon your entire family is dead because you refused to give polyneices a proper funeral’
…like i said, i haven’t quite grasped it yet.
either way, i actually enjoyed the story, i thought it was sad and interesting all at once. i read summaries of the first two plays in the trilogy, and would want to read the first two plays as well! there are a lot of prophecies and morals that are being tossed about, and those types of stories are always interesting to me.
max told me that sophocles was pretty awesome, and he told me about the story of tiresias. the reason why hes a blind prophet was because he was walking around and he found this snake and he bopped it on the head and then it changed his sex to female. so he went living life for 10 years as a girl and then got kind of tired of it so he found the snake again and bopped it on the head again and it changed his sex back.
so this royal couple (i cant remember) was having an argument about who gets more pleasure from sex, the female or the male, and the lady was saying that the male was and the male was saying that the female was. so they asked tiresias because he has lived life as both and he said that the lady gets more pleasure from sex. the lady got angry for disagreeing with him and blinded him, or something like that.
the more you know! excited for the lecture tomorrow!
nicole
Yes, this story of Teiresias sounds about right–there is a brief summary of it in the appendix to our edition of Antigone. It is interesting to note that double-gender nature of the prophet when thinking about gender issues in the play, given how polarized the male (Kreon) and female (Antigone and Ismene) positions seem to be. I’m not quite sure what to do with that yet, but thanks for reminding us of how T lived as both. Gives me some further food for thought.