Turning now from Part I's focus on the politics of lamentation to look in detail in Part II at the politics of lamentation, I begin by setting Sophocles’ Antigone in the context of fifth-century burial politics in Athens. Approaching the play in this context we find not a mortalist humanist Antigone but rather a partisan political actor. I read Antigone's burial of her brother, Polynices, (but also other actions of hers) as a performance of elite objections to the classical city's emergent democracy. Creon, on this reading, represents not sovereignty or the rule of law run amok, or not just that, but also and more pointedly a different elite tactic: he conspires with the new democracy and adopts many of its causes as his own. He is one of “the newer breed of elites who,” Mark Griffith argues, “are willing to work within the democratic system and to shape their own claims and choices to conform with what is ‘good for the city’” (2010: 123).