First Episode: Creon proclaims the edict

Creon enters and lays out his policy. He has been king for less than a day. He explains himself carefully — any ruler tongue-tied by fear of consequences is the basest of the base; any ruler who puts a friend above his country is no ruler at all. The state is the ship that holds all our fortunes; if she wrecks, everything wrecks with her. From this principle he derives the edict. Eteocles, who fell defending Thebes, will be buried with full rites. Polyneices, who came back to burn his father's city, will be left where he fell. None shall give him burial or mourn for him. The chorus accepts without enthusiasm.

Then a guard arrives. He is terrified, and the speech he gives is the play's only sustained moment of dark comedy: his conscience plied the spur and the bridle by turns, and he has at last forced himself to face the king with news he does not want to deliver. The corpse, he tells Creon, has been buried — covered with a thin scattering of dust, the proper rites performed, the burier vanished. No tracks, no scratch of pick or mattock. The guards spent the morning quarrelling and accusing each other. The lot fell to him to bring the news.

Creon hears it as a personal insult. The chorus murmurs that something more than natural may be at work; Creon turns on them — sheer folly, he says, to imagine the gods would honor a traitor. He decides instantly that someone has been bribed; the guards will hang for it if the culprit is not found. The pattern is now established. Disagreement is heard as betrayal. The guard, dismissed with threats, swears under his breath that he will never come back. He will, in two scenes, with Antigone bound between his colleagues.