A modern audience may find some aspects of Antigone’s tragic conclusion baffling, given that nearly every main character dies for reasons that could seem foolish today. But death, and particularly ensuring that death—as a concept and as a deity—receives the respect that it deserves, is one of Sophocles’s major concerns. The inciting incident of the play occurs when Polynices is denied his right of burial, which Tiresias describes as akin to Creon “killing the dead twice over” (line 1140). Leaving Polynices unburied is a punishment intended to harm him beyond the grave, ensuring that he will never be able to reach the afterlife in peace, and this disturbs the way in which death is naturally organized in ancient Greek society and religion. This injustice, not death itself, is the crime that Antigone is willing to die herself to rectify.

In the case of Antigone, some of her earliest lines with her sister Ismene concern the grief their family has suffered. Antigone’s life proves no different from those of her forebears. But Antigone’s role as a “lover of death” is not just simple morbidity. For the ancient Greeks, death is a proud force that is not to be reviled, but rather to be respected. Given the inevitability of death—the extent to which Antigone and everyone else is fated to die—it might make more sense to conceive of death as a necessary rite of passage.

For Antigone in particular, death offers the only opportunity for her to be among those she loved. It is not the case that Antigone desires death, however. When she is led to the tomb in which she takes her own life, she reveals her fear of death and admits that she does not want to die. It is not a desire for death that leads Antigone to action: it is a respect for death as a natural and good progression for all living things. Because of her respect, there is a sense in which Antigone’s death serves as a reward for the suffering she endured in life.

Creon, on the other hand, disrespects death by attempting to usurp its power for his own. His punishment ultimately involves all of his loved ones coming together in death, leaving him alone and miserable. As the chorus reminds him that he will have to wait for his time to die, there is a clear sense in which Creon’s continuing life is actually a punishment far worse than death. In this way, Sophocles shows death as something decidedly solemn, yet not entirely unwelcome.