Plato
The prologue sets up the play by informing the audience that Antigone’s brothers, Eteocles and Polyneices, have killed each other in battle. Although the chorus traditionally speaks the lines of the prologue, Antigone and Ismene speak the opening lines in Sophocles’s play.
Fate comes into play when Ismene and Antigone speak about their tainted blood and blame the incestuous nature of their family for all their hardships.
The element of fate is also made explicit when Haemon and Eurydice, Creon’s son and wife, kill themselves. Haemon can’t bear to be separated from his fiancée, Antigone, and after she commits suicide, he does the same. Eurydice can’t bear the fact that Haemon has taken his own life, so she stabs herself in grief. By denying Polyneices an honorable funeral, it is Creon’s fate to lose his entire family.
We also see fate at play when Haemon utters the following line: “So she shall die, but one will die with her.” In a way, his speech foreshadows his own death.
Hubris comes into play in the first two scenes, when Creon claims to know the gods’ wishes. He takes matters of life and death into his own hands by denying Polyneices an honorable funeral. He views Polyneices as a traitor and believes granting a traitor a funeral is going against the will of the gods.
Creon’s hubris is also shown when he accuses the prophet Teiresias of wanting money. Creon does not heed Teiresias's warning that he is defying divine laws by denying a dead person proper burial rites.
Hamartia is demonstrated through Antigone, a noble heroine whose stubbornness becomes her tragic flaw. Her sister, Ismene, repeatedly pleads with Antigone to be cautious and show respect for civil laws. However, Antigone remains adamant that she must give her brother an honorable burial, even though it means defying the king’s authority and risking her life.
Hamartia is also seen in Creon. His obsession with maintaining law and order makes him blind to the will of the gods and leads to the doom of his entire family.
Peripeteia occurs when Creon loses his entire family after sentencing Antigone to death; he goes from being a proud and prosperous king to a lonely, decrepit old man.
Anagnorisis occurs at the end of the play when Creon realizes that his actions and decisions regarding Polyneices’s burial and Antigone’s entombing caused the deaths of his wife and son.
Catastrophe occurs when Antigone hangs herself and when Haemon and then Eurydice commit suicide. These catastrophes near the end of the play help Creon realize the folly of his ways.
