Silvia mundula

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Antigone and the Space of Nomos Thinking about architecture as the discipline that designs the relationships between humans and between humans and space, Antigone can be taken as the example of a peculiar way of contemplating the architectural space. Consequently, since the relationship between people and space and between event and space is governed by some rules, which can be written (politics) or unwritten (ethics), in Antigone, the image of space corresponds to the image of these rules or the right. The tragedy, thus, is determined by the conflict between the two systems, which is visualised throughout the displacement of certain events.

Context It should be reminded that the tragedy of Sophocles belongs to the tradition of the ancient Greek narrative, which itself develops a particular notion of space. The relationship between the invisible and visible, divine and terrain, natural and human in the world of the antiques is profound and there is no real boundary between the two spheres. Natural phenomena are manifestations of divine forces. The distinction is not between real and unreal but between visible and invisible. The invocation of the sun and the gods, made by the Chorus before introducing Creon, who is described as the new king of the land (Sophocles 1998, 19), on the one hand, appears as a link between the two worlds, that of gods and that of human, on the other hand, it underlines a difference. The link is given by the proximity of the two subjects inside the text while the distance by the insistence of the term ‘land’. The connection to the natural world is also emphasised in the description of the burying, which lasts until the bright circle of the sun took its place in the sky (Sophocles 1998, 41), and that allows the chorus to imagine that the action has been prompted by the gods (Sophocles 1998). Antigone, who belongs to the natural sphere, is, finally, compared to a bird when she sees her empty nest robbed of her young (Sophocles 1998) by the chorus, and to a viper hiding in the house (Sophocles 1998) by Creon. In addition to the distinction between natural and human, there is the division between known and unknown. The knowledge, according to the etymological meaning, passes throughout the act of seeing, in fact, the two word ‘see’ (eidon – I saw) and ‘know’ (oida – I have seen, then I know) come from the same root. In the light of this assumption, the outside, which is the unknown, is the space of the enemy, while the inside, is the space of the civilised world, and then of the nomos. The nomos, which is the law of the polis, should be in harmony with the law of the gods. There are other grades of distinction between inside and outside, which are often ambiguous and include the boundary between private and public, female and male, oikos and polis. The tragedy overturns these conventions. The text is written to be performed in a theatre, however, in view of the architecture of the ancient Greek theatre, which does not demand a real scenography, the environment of the play is realised in the dialogs of the actors and the chorus. The

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