Problem (in both Antigone and Medea):  What happens when the two crucial poles of human existence are divided--within a person, within a family, within a society?

 Comedy: the plot form that ends in marriage, in unity, in a dance.

 Tragedy: the plot form that ends in divorce, in separation, in death. 

The two poles of experience (as defined by Friedrich Nietzsche, following Euripides in The Bacchae):

 Apollonian                                                                  Dionysian
"masculine"                                                                  "feminine"
rational                                                                         emotional
dichotomizing (given to analysis)                                    binding (given to synthesis)       
reductive                                                                      expansive
sees steadily.                                                               sees whole.
values state and social, contractual bonds.                      values individual, family, "natural" bonds.
defines justice as an ethic of consistency.                       defines justice as an "ethic of care."
 Sophocles:

             Fortunate they whose lives have no taste of pain.
            For those whose house is shaken by the gods
            escape no kind of doom. . . .

             What madness of man, O Zeus, can bind your power?
            Not sleep can destroy it who ages all,
            nor the weariless months the gods have set.  Unaged in time
            monarch you rule of Olympus' gleaming light.
            Near time, far future, and the past,
            one law controls them all:
            any greatness in human life brings doom.
                                                            (Antigone, Wycoff, ll. 582-85; 602-13)

Euripides:
            Zeus in Olympus is the overseer
            Of many doings.  Many things the gods
            Achieve beyond our judgment.  What we thought
            Is not confirmed and what we thought not god
            Contrives.  And so it happens in this story.
                                                           (Medea, ll. 1415-19)