Antigone the Metic

In Sophocles’ Antigone, as Antigone moves toward her tomb, she describes herself as metoikos twice (850-53; 867-68). A few lines later, Kreon, incensed that Antigone continues to lament, exclaims that she will be stripped of her rights as metic in the land above (890). It is curious that Antigone, a member of the royal family who is able to trace her ancestry back to Kadmos, the founder of Thebes, chooses to call herself a resident foreigner and that Kreon elaborates the theme further. Although some recent scholarship explores the use of the term metic in tragedy (for example, Bakewell, G. 1997, CA 16:209-28 and 1999, Syllecta Classica 10: 43-64), the fact that Sophocles’ Antigone chooses to call herself a metic has received little attention. This paper explores the use of the word metoikos in Antigone with attention to the contemporary Athenian institution, arguing that the status of metic is an effective way of capturing Antigone’s ambiguous, equivocal status. Antigone’s position as metic highlights the ways in which she does not quite belong (as child of an incestuous union; as woman barred from her traditional role in the funeral and denied marriage and children; as outspoken and intransigent figure isolated from the chorus of male elders; as recipient of a singular punishment, confinement alive in a tomb; and as tragic hero in one of Sophocles’ plays). In this paper, I (briefly) survey the tendency for female figures elsewhere in tragedy to be described as metaphorical metics or foreigners. As they moved from their natal family to their husband’s house, new brides could be considered resident foreigners in their new homes. In her “marriage to death” (Rehm 1994), Antigone moves from the world of the living to her tomb-home, as she immigrates to the Underworld, rejoining her natal family, and bringing Haimon and Eurydike along with her. In a convincing article, Geoffrey Bakewell (1999) isolates the semantic cluster, metic-as-savior in Greek tragedy. He argues that characters like Eurystheus in Euripides’ Children of Heracles, the Furies at the end of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, and Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus – all figured as metics – die and provide benefits to the polis, receiving cult after death. These are city-saving metics, who are well-disposed toward the polis. But Antigone is a young woman who calls herself a metic. And unlike the metic figures Bakewell discusses, Antigone is not honored with cult after her death. Instead, because of her devotion to the unwritten laws that compel her to bury her brother and her blatant disregard for Kreon’s edict, Antigone represents a worrisome sort of metic, a metic who does not know her place.