The Boundary Situation: an account of a tragic hero in 'Octavia' and 'Antigone'

An account of tragedy on the basis of the courage with which the hero confronts his boundary situation:

Don Draper accounts that a tragic hero, who as an individual with the quality of soul that can conquer death, has the courage to face the cruel destiny and situation which stands in his way.

                In the context of the Fabula Praetexta, plays on Roman historical topics, which very often seem to have treated an act of heroism by a recently deceased personage; Seneca’s Octavia and Sophocles’ Antigone survive the whole. In the former, the play focuses on the person and history of Octavia, the rejected and persecuted wife of the emperor Nero. And in the later, Antigone, a well established character, in pursuit of the tragic cycle and ‘tragic courage' as revealed in her stubbornness, sees her right as a heroic individual to reject society’s infringement on her freedom to perform a personal obligation, obvious in her refusal to let Creon dictate what she is allowed to do with her family members. She says to Ismene about Creon’s edict, ‘He has no right to stay me.’

                Asserted by Draper, the tragic events in a Fabula Praetexta plays seem to be created and aggravated by the courage of the tragic hero. In Octavia, Octavia states to her Nurse:

Although I may patiently suffer these things,

And appear to tolerate them, my misfortunes

Can never be brought to an end, but by the

Sad alternative means of death!

She dares to be the character through whose hand shall come the fall of the tyrant ruler, Nero, who was her brother and now her husband. In the explanatory question by the Chorus in Octavia, they ask: ‘But where is the ancient courage of the Roman populace, which often caused the most illustrious of men to fly for their lives?’ The idea of this is that the ancient historical plays plug into the fact that a hero is supposed to emerge with absolute and extreme courage to face the unlikely situation of the populace or what he, the hero, rejects to be a part of the society, even if he stands unsupported.

                Antigone’s solely unsupported second burial of her brother is in the stubbornness that the law is not absolute, and that it can be broken in civil disobedience in extreme cases, such as honouring the gods, whose rule and authority outweighs Creon’s. In the issue of this second burial; when Antigone poured dust over her brother’s corpse, she completed the burial ritual and thus fulfilled her duty to him – the dead. Having been properly buried, Polyneices’ soul could proceed to the underworld whether or not the dust was removed from his body. However, Antigone went back after his body was uncovered and performed the ritual again, an act that seems to be completely unmotivated by anything other than a plot necessity so that she could be caught in the act of disobedience, leaving no doubt of her guilt.

                J. L. Rose, in analyzing Antigone’s courage to bury her brother the second time maintains that the solution to the problem of the second burial is solved by Antigone as a tragic character. Being a tragic character, she is completely obsessed by one idea, and for her this is giving her brother his due respect in death and demonstrating her love for him and for what is right. When she sees her brother’s body uncovered, she is overcome by emotion and acts impulsively to cover him again, with no regards to the necessity of the action or its consequences for her safety.