In scene 441ff Sophocles stages two opposed portraits: Creon regal and authoritative in his kingly robe, staff in hand, a male standing against the background of the city, whilst Antigone bows her head, hair ripped and mourning dress torn, a woman surrounded by the home and family. It is this image of the Antigone that endures, partly on account of Hegel's famous dialectical reading of the Antigone's conflict between "the public law of the State and the instinctive family-love and duty towards a brother", or "between ethical law in its social universality and the family as the natural ground...
of the gods and of universal laws, the concern of that period with proper burial and the punishment of traitors, the strong duty of women to bury their kin, and much more. Nevertheless, I hope to have shown that critics who side with one character over another, whether Antigone like Segal and Knox or Creon like Sourvinou-Inwood and Andrew Brown, have to pick and choose and translate carefully in order to put forward their preference. And this picking and choosing says a lot more about the cultural politics of their reading than about the politics of the Antigone.