Antigone: Sophocles' Art, Hölderlin's Insight

The art of Sophocles has parallels with modern outlooks, although fifth-century Athens was very different from our world. Rosenfield's point of departure is a close reading of Friederich Hölderlin's translation that makes these parallels plausible. She shows that poetic intelligence can be as useful a critical tool as historical or philological knowledge. Following Hölderlin, she reveals a historical detail so far unnoticed, the epiclerate, a point of Greek law that gives Antigone political importance and gives the play a fully-rounded tragic plot, ambiguous and paradoxical. Antigone is not an innocent virgin sacrificed by a power-thirsty villain. She is a fierce and unsettling heroine in an almost hitchcockian drama. Building on Hölderlin, Rosenfield brings out what is 'modern' in classical Greek drama: the conscience of permanent unsettling shifts in human actions, intentions and feelings, the gripping, unspoken secrets hidden in the ironies of the Greek text. Her scholarly argument shows that Hölderlin may have come closer to the spirit of Sophocles, Themistocles and Pericles than later, more scholarly, translators and critics.