Emma Ianni (Columbia University)
Antigone in Magnesia: Plato’s Revision of the Sophoclean Tragedy in the Laws
Plato’s Laws offers a treatment of the civic role of performance that radically departs from his previous views. Whereas much scholarly discussion on the Laws’ engagement with tragedy has centered on Book VII, I argue that, throughout Book VIII, Plato engages in a revisionist rewriting of Sophocles’s Antigone. This intertextual engagement, which encompasses issues of both gender and genre, allows Plato to articulate a normative theory of natural, unwritten law.
Scholars agree that the discussion of tragedy is a special inter-generic moment in the Laws, in which philosophy as a genre crafts itself in relation to tragedy as a genre (Morrow: 1960; Mouze: 2005; Murray: 2013; Folch: 2015). However, often downplayed in this discussion are the intertextual (as opposed to strictly intergeneric) moments. Moreover, even though Plato’s revised treatment of women’s aesthetic as well as political lives has been much discussed (Saunders: 1995; Folch: 2015; Budelmann and Power: 2015), it has not been looked at in conjunction with Plato’s engagement with tragedy. In my presentation, I will examine three moments in Book VIII, whose apparent lack of cohesion is to be revised in light of this intertextuality with the Antigone. First, Book VIII opens with the prescription that rituals for the Olympians be separated from those for the nether gods (828c-d). Sophocles’ Antigone is a liminal figure between the world of the living and that of the dead; notably, her death is configured as a moment that blurs the boundaries between marriage rituals and funerary ones (810-15). In both Plato and Sophocles, the treatment of religion, weddings and funerals has important gendered implications, and civic repercussions.
Second, Book VIII envisions mock civil wars, and establishes that songs of praise be the prize for the winner (829c). On the one hand, the staged battles work as a philosophically acceptable alternative to the civil war between Eteocles and Polyneices in the tragedy. On the other, the lack of clarity as to who is allowed to compose these songs of praise echoes the concerns with legal authorship and authority that precipitate Sophocles’ plot. For the Laws hints at an equivalency between songs and laws (nomoi) which problematizes the division between civic and aesthetic agency, and its gendered implications.
Third, the Laws’ discussion of sexual regulations (838a-b) indirectly comments on both the Antigone and the Theban saga. This discussion dovetails into a broader reflection on unwritten laws (838d), which in turn recalls Antigone’s defense of her unwritten legal code as unquestionable (453-55). Aristotle’s mention of the Antigone in his discussion of natural law (Rh.1373b, 6-11) bears witness to the centrality of this tragic figure within the contemporary legal debate. This reference, I argue, further substantiate my claim about the Laws’ engagement with the play.
By tracing a subtle engagement with Sophocles’ Antigone throughout Book VIII, not only can we make sense of the seemingly incoherent structure of the book, but we also gain a more nuanced insight on how the Laws intervened in current philosophical debates at the intersection of law, gender, and performance.