All 11 scenes summarized — one decision, one day, the destruction of a house.
Greek tragedy alternates spoken episodes (the actors) with sung choral odes (the chorus). Antigone follows the standard form: prologue, parodos (entry-song), four episodes each followed by a stasimon (standing ode), and an exodos (exit-scene). The play's shape is unusually tight — every scene presses on the central confrontation, and the choral odes are not interludes but commentaries that the rest of the play tests against the action.
Antigone defies the decree; the burial is discovered; she is caught.
Antigone summons Ismene outside the palace before dawn. Their two brothers killed each other in the war; Creon has forbidden burial of one. Antigone says she will bury him anyway. Ismene refuses to help. The sisters part. The play's whole conflict is set up in one short scene.
The elders of Thebes sing the dawn after the battle. The Argive invaders have been driven back; the brothers killed each other; Victory has returned. The song breaks off when Creon appears — they have been summoned to hear the new king.
Creon's first speech of state. He proclaims the edict — Eteocles honored, Polyneices left for the dogs — and the chorus accepts it. Then a guard arrives with news the corpse has already been buried. Creon, furious, threatens torture and death. The chain that ends with everyone dead is now in motion.
Antigone before Creon, Ismene's plea, Haemon's warning.
The chorus sings the most famous ode in Greek tragedy. Man is wondrous in everything — sailing, plowing, hunting, building, speech. He has provision for everything except death. The ode ends as the guards drag Antigone onstage. The cleverness the ode celebrated has just met its limit.
Antigone is dragged before Creon. She admits the act and argues that the gods' unwritten laws preceded his decree. Creon condemns her. Ismene comes out trying to share the guilt; Antigone refuses to let her. Reminded that Antigone is engaged to his son, Creon shrugs — let Haemon find another field.
The chorus sings the curse on the house of Labdacus. Once a god curses a bloodline, the disease runs generation by generation. Cadmus through Oedipus to the brothers to the daughters. The song ends as Haemon, Creon's son, comes onstage in anger.
Haemon, Creon's son, comes to warn his father. The city sees Antigone as noble; no man is wise enough to stand alone; the trees that bend in a flood survive. Creon hears every line as treason. Father and son escalate. Haemon storms out, swearing his father will never see him again.
The cave, Tiresias, the late reversal, the dead.
A short bitter ode to Eros. Love has set Haemon against his father; even the wisest heart falls to the god's dart. Then Creon announces the sentence in detail. Antigone will be sealed alive in a rock cave with a few days' food — a slow death the city can call innocent.
Antigone gives her last speech — farewell to the sun, no marriage song will be sung for her, Death is the groom she weds — and is led to the cave. Then Tiresias arrives. The signs are bad; the gods are angry; yield. Creon accuses him of being bribed. Tiresias prophesies the death of Creon's son and leaves.
The chorus, for the first time, gives Creon direct counsel. Free the girl. Build the tomb. Now. Creon obeys, runs out himself with his henchmen. The chorus then sings to Dionysus, asking the god to heal the city. The reversal has come. By the time it reaches the cave it will be too late.
The messenger reports it all. Antigone hanged herself in the cave; Haemon, finding her body, lunged at his father with a sword, missed, and fell on the blade himself. Eurydice walks back into the palace and stabs herself at the altar, cursing Creon as she dies. Creon, carrying his son's body, begs to be killed. The chorus refuses him even that.