アンティゴネの死再考 : 吉武純夫「カロス・タナトス、アンティゴネの目指したもの」をめぐって

type:P(論文)

Yoshitake's article can be summarized as follows. In the beginning Antigone was confident that she could attain kalos thanatos (beautiful death), and in this hope she attempted to bury her brother, knowing that she would be punished with death. What is the meaning of her actual death in this play, then? The answer can be found if one considers whether she eventually attained kalos thanatos. Kalos thanatos was a special word used to glorify a soldier's death in battle. In applying this idea to her own death to be incurred as penalty for her act of burying her brother, she compares her own death to that of a soldier. When arrested, she asks Kreon to kill her, expecting that her life will be forfeited as the price for her action. If she had been stoned to death as the original edict had declared, her death would undoubtedly have been seen as kalos thanatos. But Kreon changes the punishment to imprisonment. As a result, she loses the chance of attaining what she aimed at, and thus she kills herself. Her failure to attain kalos thanatos comes essentially from the fact that it depended upon Kreon's discretion when and how she would die. In short, from the beginning it was fated that she would be deprived of kalos thanatos , since as a woman there was no chance of dying while fighting with a weapon in hand. This was irrespective of the meritorious deed of devoting her life to a righteous cause. The painful failure of her resolute and confident attempt to attain kalos thanatos is believed to have been intended by the playwright to afford the spectators (mostly male citizens) a chance to reconfirm the meaning of kalos thanatos, the male citizen's ideal of life in democratic 5th century B.C. Athens. The sympathy and pain we are led to feel at the end of this tragedy, however, seems to imply something quite different from what Yoshitake asserts in his article. The failure of Antigone to attain kalos thanatos must have given the spectators another perspective on their daily life acted out against the background of city-state ideology. Yoshitake ignores Antigone's unforgettable speech (vv.450-462) in which she invokes the divine unwritten law against Kreon's edict. Yoshitake also underestimates the role of the prophet Teiresias, who appears just after Antigone has been taken to the cave-tomb, and confirms for Kreon and the spectators the significance of what she stands for. It is true that Antigone has failed to die the kind of kalos thanatos she wanted and she deplores it as if she were forsaken by the gods in the very act of honouring the divine order. Her suffering is so complete that she feels deprived of even the sense of honour she hoped to gain by her action. The spectators learn that she was righteous in what she did, in spite of her own negative estimation of it. Teiresias declares the divine sanction of her act, the meaning of which she herself was not allowed to recognize. Thus the role of Teiresias in revealing what is hidden behind Antigone's despair may be comparable to that of the Roman centurion of Mark 15:39 in responding, Truly this man was the son of God" to Jesus' last words on the Cross, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"