to the city. In fact, he died fightingAntigone's other brother Eteocles who was honoured for defending the city. Antigone has already buried her parents and Eteocles, and now she wishes to do the same for Polynices, despite Creon's edict. She willingly takes on Creon and refuses absolutely to back down.

Antigone at times also intimates that she is so determined to bury Polynices because it is an offence against the gods, against morality, to leave any corpse unburied. 'Death longs for the same rites for all,' she informs Creon. Actually, she does appear much obsessed by death; she invokes the gods and the dead many times. She seems to have more of a connection with the dead than with the living. This no doubt has much to do with the fact that her own family is so doomed - her father Oedipus committed incest with her mother, who committed suicide when finding out the truth, her two brothers killed each other, and so on. She is obsessed by the peculiarly grim fate of her family and seems to be lured down a similar path.

We should also remember that mourning the dead, performing funeral rites, was the province of the women in ancient Greece (and in many other cultures, both in the past and present). Antigone, as a woman, therefore would feel a greater obligation to perform the last rites for her brother, and she is scornful of her sister Ismene for refusing to do the same.

Interestingly, when being led off to her entombment, Antigone observes that she never would have defied Creon to bury a husband or children, only a brother - her reasoning being, apparently, that if her husband or children died, she could get another husband, or bear more children to another man, but, because her parents are both dead, it's impossible for her to get another brother. This admission underlines the feeling that she is so determined to bury Polynices not in the interests of upholding morality in general but because she really cares about her own family alone, and particularly about her own dead.

In Sophocles' play Antigone, the titular Antigone has lost two brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, to the fighting in Thebes' civil war. Creon, the new ruler of Thebes, has made an edict that Eteocles will be honored with an appropriate military burial, while Polyneices, the rebellious one, will be shamed by being left on the battlefield for carrion to pick at and will be denied the sanctity of holy rites.

When Antigone summons her sister, Ismene, to her side to ask for help in secretly burying Polyneices, Ismene recoils at the danger, protesting that the "new law" forbids doing so. Antigone simply responds, "He is my brother. And he is your brother, too." Antigone believes that she is honoring her family and, in doing so, honoring the law of the gods rather than the law of man. 

In the context of Greek society, Antigone is justified in burying Polyneices. Her symbolic "burial," sprinkling dirt over his corpse, fulfills the will of the gods, the most important duty to consider in ancient Greece. Not to bury Polyneices would mean he could not get a safe and peaceful passage to the underworld. This is a fundamental denial of his rights that Sophocles characterizes as “killing the dead twice over.”

Although Antigone is violating Greek law in not obeying Creon, the chorus, which is the voice of conscience in the play, supports her act as a fitting tribute to the will of the gods. Antigone herself states that now she will be able to enter Hades after death with:

my head held high.

The gods will be proud of me.

As we see, to Antigone, the larger justice of following the gods is more important than obeying Creon. She also states that there is no "disgrace" in being sentenced to death by Creon: to Antigone the disgrace would be to refuse to do the right thing out of fear of death.

Antigone is justified, too, in Greek eyes because she doesn't try to have it both ways. She doesn't want to die, but she is willing to pay the price of her disobedience.

We remember that the context of this play is Antigone's father's attempt to thwart fate by trying to elude his destiny as the man who would kill his father and marry his mother. Antigone does not repeat the mistake of opposing the gods.