is death by stoning.

Creon does not sentence Antigone to death by stoning, however. He orders her entombed alive, so as to avoid the public spectacle of her death. The sentence is still death, but it is a death away from the eyes of the public. Further, it is neither a swift nor a merciful death, but rather one from the prolonged suffering of deprivation.

Antigone accepts her death sentence as the price for doing what she knew to be the right thing, but she does not submit to despair or to the cruel death Creon attempted to impose on her. Rather, she takes her life by her own hand, hanging herself within the tomb:

[I]n the furthest part of the tomb we descried her hanging by the neck, slung by a thread-wrought halter of fine linen….

In this way, Antigone defies Creon even in her death, for she chose both the time and manner of it.

In Antigone by Sophocles, Haemon is the son of Creon and engaged to marry Antigone. Creon has issued a proclamation that any person caught burying Polyneices will be stoned to death, as he considers Polyneices a traitor to Thebes. 

Antigone, however, is the sister of Polyneices (and daughter of Oedipus). Within Greek religion, women had a strict obligation to conduct certain female-specific burial rituals for their male relatives. Thus Antigone feels that she has an inescapable religious duty to conduct a burial, by sprinkling dirt on the corpse and singing lamentations. To shirk this duty, as she says, would bring down the wrath of the chthonic (underworld deities) upon her. When she is caught, Creon confronts her and she defies him. After she is condemned by Creon, Haemon speaks to Creon attempting to defend her, but Creon is obdurate and threatens to kill Antigone in front of Haemon. Haemon responds by saying:

She’ll not die with me just standing there.

And as for you— your eyes will never see my face again.

After this speech, Haemon exits and kills himself offstage. The chorus and then Creon receive this news by means of a messenger. 

In Antigone, Creon decided that Antigone, as punishment for burying her brother, Polynices, would be entombed alive. Creon ordered that Antigone be sealed in a cave with food, as he claimed was the custom. After sentencing Antigone, Creon told the guards:

You know your orders: take her to the vault and leave her alone there. And if she lives or dies, that’s her affair, not ours: our hands are clean.

His intention was to remove Antigone from Theban society and condemn her to certain death by sealing her in a cave with a limited amount of food; however, he believed that by not ordering Antigone’s direct execution, he would avoid a stain on the reputation of Thebes, and, by extension, on himself as king of Thebes.

Antigone, once entombed alive, took action to decide her own fate. The messenger, recounting the events at Antigone’s place of imprisonment, told the Chorus and Euridice, Creon’s wife, that Antigone had hung herself in the cave. Instead of trying to subsist for however long possible on the limited amount of food provided to her, she took her own life shortly after being sealed in the cave.

In one sense, the play Antigone involves a battle of wills between Antigone and Creon. It is Antigone's choice to defy Creon's statute that forbids the burial of her deceased brother, even as she knows that death is the punishment proclaimed. Likewise, it is Creon's choice to pursue the execution of Antigone, even when his actions are widely condemned. In this sense, both sides have agency in the events that transpire. Neither was coerced to do anything against their will.

All the same, I think the far greater share of blame should rest with Creon, given that the statute itself was unjust to begin with. Remember, one of the critical components of the play is that Antigone is morally in the right. Seen from the perspective of Ancient Greek religion, she had a sacred obligation to see her brother's burial rites fulfilled, and (in the viewpoint of such a culture) obligations to the gods always trump the laws of any temporal authority.

In this sense, Creon also has the ability to turn back from his path at any time (and eventually, he does so, albeit at too late a point in time). He made the law and declared the punishment of death against Antigone. Thus, even if both Creon and Antigone did have some shared agency and did make their own contributions to Antigone's eventual death, far greater blame should be set with Creon. Antigone was acting in proper piety. Creon's actions were unjust.

The Greek tragedies are based on parts of mythological cycles that would have been known to their audiences. In the case of Sophocles' Antigone, the story of the curse on the Theban house was a familiar one, as was both the outcome of the play and the back story.

In another play by Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, we learn of the events immediately preceding those described in Antigone. Because Laius heard his son was to kill his father, when Jocasta, his wife bore a child the baby was sent away to be exposed on a hillside. Instead, the child, Oedipus, survived, and not knowing his own identity returned to Thebes and accidentally killed his father and married his mother Jocasta. When it is discovered that Jocasta is indeed the mother of Oedipus, she kills herself. Oedipus blinds himself leaves Thebes. All this occurs before the dramatic time of the play Antigone.

Creon is Jocasta's brother and Antigone and Ismene are her daughters.