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Antigone

  (ăn-tĭg'ə-nē) pronunciation
Antigone

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n. Greek Mythology.

The daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta. She performed funeral rites over her brother's body in defiance of her uncle Creon.


 
 

In Greek legend, the daughter born of the incestuous relationship between Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. After Oedipus had blinded himself in self-punishment, Antigone and her sister Ismene served as his guides, following him into exile. When he died, Antigone returned to Thebes, where her brothers Eteocles and Polyneices were at war. Both were killed, and Creon, the new king, declared that because Polyneices was a traitor, his corpse should remain unburied. Unwilling to let the body be defiled, Antigone buried him; when Creon condemned her to death, she hanged herself. Her story was dramatized by Sophocles and Euripides (in Euripides' version she escapes and joins her beloved, Haemon).

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In the version of the myth of Oedipus most familiar to us from Greek literature, Antigone is one of the four children (two daughters and two sons) of Oedipus by his union with his mother Jocasta. Antigone's part in the myth seems to have originated largely in fifth-century Attica. She accompanied the blind Oedipus after his banishment from Thebes, and they eventually arrived at Colonus, near Athens. When Oedipus' sons Polyneices and Eteocles died by each other's hand as they fought for the kingdom of Thebes, Jocasta's brother Creon, now king of Thebes, forbade the burial of Polyneices as being the aggressor. Antigone refused to accept this decree, gave the body a token burial, was discovered, and by Creon's order walled up alive in a tomb although she was betrothed to his son Haemon. She hanged herself and Haemon stabbed himself beside her body. This is the version of Sophocles' Antigone (see below). Euripides in his (lost) play Antigone told a modified version.

 
(ăntĭg'ənē) , in Greek mythology, daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta. In Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, she and her sister Ismene follow their father into exile at Colonus. When her brothers Eteocles and Polynices killed each other in the war of the Seven against Thebes, Creon, King of Thebes, forbade the burial of the rebel Polynices. Antigone defied him and performed the funeral service. She hanged herself in the cave where Creon ordered her buried alive. In addition to Sophocles' Antigone, plays and operas that rework her legend have been written by Anouilh, Brecht, Cocteau, Honegger, and Orff.


 
(an-tig-uh-nee)

In classical mythology, a daughter of King Oedipus. Her two brothers killed each other in single combat over the kingship of their city. Although burial or cremation of the dead was a religious obligation among the Greeks, the king forbade the burial of one of the brothers, for he was considered a traitor. Antigone, torn between her religious and legal obligations, disobeyed the king's order and buried her brother. She was then condemned to death for her crime.

  • The Greek playwright Sophocles tells her story in Antigone, a play that deals with the conflict between human laws and the laws of the gods.

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    Wikipedia: Antigone
    Antigone by Frederic Leighton, 1882
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    Antigone by Frederic Leighton, 1882

    Antigone (Pronunciation: /æn'tɪɡəni/ Greek: Αντιγόνη) is the name of two different women in Greek mythology. The name means "unbending", for "anti-" (against) and "gon" ("bend" as in "polygon"). It also means "anti-generation", i.e., "the opposite of her ancestors".

    Daughter of Oedipus

    Antigone is daughter of the accidentally incestuous marriage between King Oedipus of Thebes, and his mother Jocasta (thus, Antigone is also her father Oedipus's half-sister and, through her father, her mother Jocasta's granddaughter). She is the subject of a popular story in which she attempts to secure a respectable burial for her brother Polynices, even though he was a traitor to Thebes.

    In the oldest version of the story, the funeral of Polynices takes place during Oedipus's reign in Thebes. However, in the best-known versions, Sophocles's tragedies Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, it occurs in the years after Oedipus's banishment and death, and Antigone has to struggle against Creon. Sophocles's Antigone ends in disaster as Antigone commits suicide, not realizing that Creon has been persuaded to allow Polynices a funeral, and Creon's son Haemon, who loved Antigone, kills himself.

    The dramatist Euripides also wrote a play called Antigone, which is lost, but some of the text was preserved by later writers and in passages in his Phoenissae. In Euripides, the calamity is averted by the intercession of Dionysus and is followed by the marriage of Antigone and Haemon.

    Different elements of the legend appear in other places. A description of an ancient painting by Philostratus (Imag. ii. 29) refers to Antigone placing the body of Polynices on the funeral pyre, and this is also depicted on a sarcophagus in the Villa Pamfili in Rome. And in Hyginus's version of the legend, founded apparently on a tragedy by some follower of Euripides, Antigone, on being handed over by Creon to her lover Haemon to be slain, is secretly carried off by him and concealed in a shepherd's hut, where she bears him a son, Maeon. When the boy grows up, he attends some funeral games at Thebes, and is recognized by the mark of a dragon on his body. This leads to the discovery that Antigone is still alive. The demi-god Heracles then intercedes, pleading in vain with Creon for Haemon, who slew both Antigone and himself to escape his father's vengeance. This intercession by Heracles is also represented on a painted vase. (Heydermann, Über eine nacheuripideische Antigone, 1868).

    The story of Antigone has been a popular subject for books, plays, and other works, including:

    Daughter of Eurytion

    A different Antigone was the daughter of Eurytion and wife of Peleus.

    Peleus and Telamon, his brother, killed their half-brother Phocus and fled Aegina to escape punishment. In Phthia, Peleus was purified by Eurytion and married Antigone, Eurytion's daughter. Peleus accidentally killed Eurytion during the hunt for the Calydonian Boar and fled Phthia.

    Peleus was purifed of the murder of Eurytion in Iolcus by Acastus. Also in Iolcus, Peleus lost a wrestling match in the funeral games of Pelias, Acastus' father, to Atalanta. Astydameia, Acastus' wife, fell in love with Peleus but he scorned her. Bitter, she sent a messenger to Antigone to falsely tell her that Peleus was to marry Acastus' daughter; Antigone hanged herself. (Apollodorus, iii. 13).

    Astydameia then told Acastus that Peleus had tried to rape her. Acastus took Peleus on a hunting trip and hid his sword, then abandoned him right before a group of centaurs attacked. Chiron, the wise centaur, returned Peleus' sword and Peleus managed to escape. He pillaged Iolcus and dismembered Astydameia, then marched his army between the pieces.

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    Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Classical Literature Companion. The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Copyright © 1993, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
    Mythology Dictionary. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition Edited by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Copyright © 2002 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.  Read more
    Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Antigone" Read more

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