Sophocles’s play Antigone asks many questions about our relationship to the law, to the state, to our families, and to the dead. The new king in town, Creon, wants his nephew Polynices’s body to go unburied, as he died an enemy of the state. Polynices’s sister Antigone says she will bury the body herself, because that is the right and necessary thing to do. Things escalate.

Chris and Suzanne revisit this work and its world—how it depicts the gods and the dead, and how we might read the struggles of a king trying to rule and a young woman trying to do right by her brother. They also explore two different translations by the poet and classicist Anne Carson.