The myth of Antigone by Sophocles is well known: a woman against authority. Brecht places this myth in Berlin in 1945, limiting the divine element and burdening man with the full responsibility of his fate. The revolution and the martyrdom of the heroine come closer to us because they no longer obey the divine law but the law of the thinking free man.

[from the program of the performance at the Greek Stage of Anna Synodinou]

It was a snowy university under the Rocky Mountains. I had just finished a lecture on ancient Greek tragedy when a student raised her pencil. "Can you tell us what the message of Antigone is?" The "please," of course, was unknown to this synchronized representative of the studying youth, but her question more than redeemed her. Now I, as a loquacious Greek, not being used to the American mania for pithy recipes, was momentarily speechless. Surely, it would be easier for me to speak for half an hour than to condense the meaning of the Sophoclean work into a single phrase. So I said the first thing that came to my mind. "The individual's right to choose his freedom."

Alexis Soloimos