Describe Antigone’s, Creon’s, and Pericles’ respective answers to these questions.

Describe Antigone’s, Creon’s, and Pericles’ respective answers to these questions.

Papers should be 4-5 pages in length, double-spaced, in twelve point Times New Roman font, with 1 inch margins. Do not write one sentence on page five and consider your work done. If your paper is 4 pages in length, then all four pages should be full. Please do not use external sources when crafting your answers. You are free to use any information from the assigned texts. Also, do not restate the prompt at the beginning of your paper. Simply note the number of the question you have selected to answer. Do not include a cover page.

Please answer ONE of the following questions:

Mourning is common theme that connects Sophocles’ Antigone, and Thucydides’ report of Pericles funeral oration. Disagreement about “who is mourned,” “who gets to mourn them,” and “how should this mourning occur,” are significant issues in these two texts. In an essay, describe Antigone’s, Creon’s, and Pericles’ respective answers to these questions. What is the value, according to each of them, of following their prescribed path? Finally, which position do you agree with the most, and why?

One might read Sophocles’s Antigone alongside Thucydides’ report of the negotiations between the Melians and the Athenians as meditations on power. Although there are clear differences between them, we might roughly class the variety of positions explored in these texts along two axes: Where Antigone and the Melians invoke a “higher” power to defend themselves and their actions, Creon and the Athenians provide a more brute – but also far more immediate – form of power. In an essay, explain how Antigone/Melians and Creon/Athenians understand power respectively. How do they defend their use of this power? What are the consequences of following their respective paths? Finally, which conception of power (and its uses) do you find more persuasive, and why?