"A quote from The Ancient World: Justice, Heroism, and Responsibility: "these itinerant teachers called Sophists...were all the rage with the brilliant youth, but suspect to the older generation. Their contrast of the 'conventional' and 'natural' morality, justice, and theology appeared corrosive of established values." So was Creon the one with the old established values, or young Antigone?"
From the reading I've done, it seems that Creon is *in general* the one most in keeping with the old established values. Here's why:
Ancient Greece was not a unified country, but a collection of city-states. The inhabitants of these city-states considered themselves Greeks, but their first loyalty was to the city-state. The city-states were often at war with one another, and often the only peace was when they were banding together to go make war with someone else. Greece is short on arable land; a nice fertile spot of it was worth fighting for, either to keep or to gain.
Peace was a fragile, rarely-lasting state of being. A city-state might be besieged, and when that happened, its people had to stick together to defend it.
So the rights of the individual were not valued over the rights of the state by most Greeks the way they are by many modern Westerners. I would venture to say that the distinction between the rights of the individual and the rights of the state were fuzzier than they seem to us now. How could an individual have any rights worth speaking of if his individual decision, say, not to fight on a particular day resulted in the defeat of his people at the hands of a foreign enemy? That enemy would promptly annihilate or enslave the population, and where were the rights of the individual now?
This was not propaganda for ancient Greeks. The enslaved defeated were all around them. A well-off Greek didn't have to look any farther than the kitchen or the nursery to see what the defeat of the current government -- the state -- might mean to its individual members.
So *in general*, Creon is the voice of the old ways. In general, sympathy would be with him and his cause.
The reason for that conditional is that I think the Greeks would have also seen him as going too far. He encroached on territory belonging to the gods. Antigone's cause could be seen as therefore the older and more traditional in this light. She honors both the gods, who existed before mere mortals, and the oldest idea of valuing the group over the individual. She is willing to sacrifice her own individual life for what is best for the family, the clan: the predecessor of the tribe and the city-state.
Again, I'm not a scholar -- just an enthusiastic civilian. This is what I've culled from the reading I've done so far. Your mileage may vary.
