Social Context of Antigone

• What do we mean by the social context?
The term “social context” is referring to the physical environment that people in Greece lived in. It also refers to culture, people’s social beliefs and how they view and interpret situations.

• How did people live at the time Antigone was created?
People lived in a men dominated society were men had almost all the power. Women had very few rights and were expected to stay at home to look after their children. Houses were usually quite small and people spent most of their time outdoors.

• Who was the target audience for the piece?
Contemporary Athens who were young men and also people of higher class.

• What were the needs, values and beliefs of the target audience? • How did this influence the themes and characters of Antigone?
They believed it was very important to respect the dead as they followed religion strongly.this was shown when Antigone really wanted to follow her heart and bury her brother to pay him respect. Also they followed the and took much importance of the hierarchy so this influenced the themes and characters of Antigone. this is shown in the play when Creon says Polyneices should not be buried and Ismene believes she should follow even if it means not paying that respect to bury her brother. 

• What have you found out about the social context of Antigone? Think about what was going on at the time that Sophocles wrote the play. 
Some things that were included when finding out about the social context of Antigone, was that in terms of people's beliefs, many strongly thought that men were much more important to women which effected much on the equality of both sexes. This meant that when Antigone decided to stand up against Creon, it was very much looked down upon and out of the norm as firstly, women never had the right to go against men as they didn't have the right and secondly, no one had the right to go against someone who stood in a position of hierarchy.

• Who went to the theatre?
Only men were able to go to the theatre but in terms of the types of people that went, this included priests and officials.

• What was the relationship between theatre, politics and religion?
In terms of the relationship between the three, Greek theatre blended these together as for example in usually began with religion and they would incorporate the myths and gods along with that. In conclusion then the problems would later be resolved in law court which then involved politics.