カロス・タナトス,アンティゴネの目指したもの

The long silence about Antigone in the last part of Sophokles' Antigone has attracted the attention of many critics, and it has been a common view to find glory on her side in the catastrophe of Kreon described at the end But is it right to find her glorified at her death ? The curtness of the report of her suicide seems significant in the reverse sense if we remember that in the beginning she was confident that she could attain a kalos thanatos, in the hope of which she attempted to bury her brother knowing that she would be punished with death (72, 97) What is the meaning of her actual death in this play, then? One answer can be found if we ask whether she eventually attained a kalos thanatos Kalos was a special word, if used in a description of death, to glorify a soldier's death in battle In applying this idea to her own death as the penalty for her action of burial, she is comparing her expected death to that of a soldier She is manifesting her intention to give up her own life for that action and not to abandon that life till she is killed She asks Kreon to kill her, expecting that her life will be consumed as the price for her action So, if she had been stoned to death as the original edict had declared, her death would undoubtedly have been estimated as a kalos thanatos But Kreon changes the mode of the punishment into imprisonment, by allowing her a certain amount of food As a result, she loses the chance of a prompt death There still remains a possibility that, if she starves to death, that death will make a kalos thanatos Faced with this possibility, however, she kills herself before starvation As this death is not what was prescribed for her as a penalty and nothing but the throwing away of her own life, her death can hardly be estimated as kalos thanatos Her failure to attain a kalos thanatos, however, does not necessarily come from her suicide, but rather from the nature of her imprisonment, the essence of which is only to postpone death, as well as from the fact that, having no intention of fighting like a man, she had no chance of being killed on the spot before being arrested That is, when she was arrested, it depended upon Kreon's discretion when and how she would die unless she would kill herself In short, she had been fatally deprived of the chance of a kalos thanatos already when she began her action having no intention of fighting with a weapon as was natural for a woman, -irrespective of the meritorious act which she had performed by truly devoting her life to a righteous cause The painfulness of the failure of her resolute and confident attempt to attain a kalos thanatos is suggested by the blunt description of her death at the end of the play