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Antigone

 
Dictionary: An·tig·o·ne   (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.


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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).

For more information on Antigone, visit Britannica.com.

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.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Antigone
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Antigone (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.


Mythology Dictionary: Antigone
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(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.

  • Wikipedia: Antigone
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    This article is about the daughter of Oedipus. For the daughter of Eurytion, see Antigone (daughter of Eurytion). For the play by Sophocles, see Antigone (Sophocles). For other uses, see Antigone (disambiguation).
    Antigone by Frederic Leighton, 1882

    Antigone (pronounced /ænˈtɪɡəni/; Greek Ἀντιγόνη) is the name of two different women in Greek mythology. The name may be taken to mean "unbending", coming from "anti-" (against, opposed to) and "-gon / -gony" (corner, bend, angle; ex: polygon), but has also been suggested to mean "opposed to motherhood" or "in place of a mother" based from the root gonē, "that which generates" (related: gonos, "-gony"; seed, semen).[1]

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    Classical depictions

    Oedipe et Antigone by Johann Peter Krafft (1809)

    Antigone is a daughter of the accidentally incestuous marriage between King Oedipus of Thebes and his mother Jocasta. She is the subject of a popular story in which she attempts to secure a respectable burial for her brother Polyneices, even though he was a traitor to Thebes.

    In the oldest version of the story, the funeral of Polyneices 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' Antigone ends in disaster, and Creon's son Haemon (or Haimon), who loved Antigone, kills himself. (Also see Oedipus for a variant of this story.) Queen Eurydice, wife of King Creon, also kills herself at the end of the story due to seeing such actions allowed by her husband. She had been forced to knit throughout the entire story and her death alludes to Greek Mythology's 3 Fates.

    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 (Imagines 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 Doria Pamphili in Rome. And in Hyginus' 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 himself after finding Antigone's corpse. This intercession by Heracles is also represented on a painted vase. (Heydermann, Über eine nacheuripideische Antigone, 1868).

    Adaptations

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

    The Antigone Project, (2004), evening-length theatre piece conceived by Chiori Miyagawa and Sabrina Peck, written by Tanya Barfield, Karen Hartman, Chiori Miyagawa, Lynn Nottage, Caridad Svich

    Lucinda Caval (2007), a play by Caridad Svich

    • Governing Alice by C. Denby Swanson
    • Echo Boom by Caitlin Montanye Parrish
    • Dear Antigone a song by The Breathing Process

    Further reading

    • Antigones by George Steiner. An examination of the legacy of the myth and its treatment in Western art, literature, and thought—in drama, poetry, prose, philosophic discourse, political tracts, opera, ballet, film, and even the plastic arts. [2]

    References

    1. ^ Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2 (London: Penguin, 1960), p.380.
    2. ^ Antigones

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    Ismene (character – in Greek Legend)
    Creon (brother of Jocasta and uncle of Antigone)
    Anouilh, Jean (French playwright)

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