Abstract

This article considers Sophocles’s Antigone as a potential resource for contemporary scholarship on democratic citizenship and the politics of public deliberation by exploring the play’s themes of speaking and listening. In so doing, it finds that the political implications of the play can be better understood with attention to the character of Haemon. Haemon endorses a conception of practical wisdom in which learning is achieved by speaking with and listening to others. A crucial step in Haemon’s education is his sympathetic identification with Antigone. The sympathetic portrayal of Antigone and the dramatization of Haemon’s moral coming-of-age together constitute a potential model of engagement in public conversation supported by sympathetic identification with political outsiders.