In Ancient Greece, there was no separation of church and state, which made sense because everybody was of the same religious persuasion. As an interesting tidbit, the Greek word for a gathering-together of equals as in the Athenian assembly was ekklesia, which would later be used in Christian circles as the name of a book in the Old Testament (Ecclesiastes) and an adjective (ecclesiastical). The Greeks were firm believers in social hierarchy - slaves, the poor, the wealthy, the gods. However, as Greek, particularly Athenian, democracy flourished, the people began to develop an awareness of the conflict between man-made laws and religious codes.
This theme - church vs state - is the central conflict in Antigone. The titular character's appeal to a higher law, the law of the gods, gave her a license to violate the laws of man, Creon's decree that Polynices was not to be buried. This is the reason Antigone is still relevant today - we daily confront the same problem that Sophocles wrote about, particularly in America. One high-profile struggle was the decision made by her husband to remove Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, effectively killing her. Clergy and government officials sided with Mrs Schiavo's family and against her husband, claiming that God did not give man the power to delegate death.
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