CCIV 110 WOMEN IN ANCIENT GREECE SPRING 2000

BACKGROUND NOTES

SOPHOCLES, ANTIGONE

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Suggestions for Study
For each class, I suggest that you first read the assigned text "cold," using only the notes. Just go through it and let yourself be confused, if that happens. (None of the readings is all that long: most of them are under 20 pages; the few that are longer are easier reading.) Second, read the supplementary material, if any is assigned (passages from the "Introduction" and the like). Third, read the Background Material on this site. Fourth, reread the assigned text. Now you should understand it better and you should have answers to some of the questions that will have arisen in the course of your initial reading. Fifth, consult the Illustration and Study Questions site on the Web, and spend some time thinking about the issues raised there.
As a general rule, for each class hour at Wesleyan, you are expected to spend three hours of preparation time. Thus, for each of our classes, which meet for an hour and 20 minutes, you should plan to spend about four hours in preparation time. For many classes, you will not need this much time. When you have time left over, you should spend it thinking about your paper, beginning a draft, and/or commenting on other students' papers.

Contents (Sections):
Sophocles, Antigone
The Play
The Myth
Oedipus and the Sphinx
Date of the Play and Plays on Related Themes
Funerary Ritual
Criminal Sanctions
Marriage and Family

The Myth
Link here to a summary of the mythical background to the play in Apollodorus.

Antigone's famous heroism, however, may well have been a Sophoclean invention.

At the end of Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, Antigone and Ismene emerge to lament the death of their brothers, and Antigone there threatens to bury Polyneices. This section of the play, however, is usually regarded as a later addition.

Euripides also wrote an Antigone, and its plot has sometimes been connected with the story related in a late mythographer, Hyginus. Link here to the story in Apollodorus and to the footnote which summarizes the version in Hyginus.

And there is a story in Pausanias about an area in Thebes associated with Antigone's burial of Polyneices which suggests that she cremated him on Eteocles' pyre.

Oedipus and the Sphinx
Link here to an image of Oedipus confronting the Sphinx
and to the famous vase painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx in the Vatican
For two famous modern interpretations, see "Oedipus and the Sphinx" by Ingres (1808) in the Louvre (info) and
Gustave Moreau (1864) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (info)
And here are various images of the Sphinx:
Archaic (530-520 bce)
Archaic (520 bce); frontal face of same, with painted and incised details; another sphinx on the same vase; frontal face of same
Archaic (510 bce)
Late Archaic (470 bce); two youths seated before a sphinx statue; detail of Sphinx
Classical (430-420 bce); Satyr playing before seated sphinx

Date of the Play and Plays on Related Themes
Oedipus the King, in which Oedipus discovers that he has unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, may have been produced sometime between 429-425 BCE. For the arguments on which the dating is based, see the discussion of Sophocles' Suriving Works on Perseus.

Oedipus at Colonus, in which Oedipus, accompanied by Antigone, comes to Athens to die in a sacred grove at Colonus, was a posthumous play, produced after the poet's death by his grandson, in 401 BCE. See the discussion of Sophocles' Suriving Works on Perseus.
Contrast Pausanias' remarks about a shrine of Oedipus containing his bones, located near the Areopagus in Athens, where Orestes' trial took place, and where there was also a shrine to the Eumenides.

Antigone is conventionally dated to 442 BCE, on the strength of a report linking Sophocles' generalship of 441/440 BCE to his success with this play. See the discussion of Sophocles' Surviving Works on Perseus.

An alternative view, however, dates the play to 438 BCE, and argues that its plot was inspired by the "crucifixion" by Pericles of the Samian rebels in the summer of 439 BCE. For a summary of the argument, see the Tyrrell and Bennett Introduction to the play (scroll down to the material referenced at note 7, toward the end of the Introduction).

Funerary Ritual
In the classical period, a funeral and the cult of the dead encompassed the following:
1. Prothesis ("laying out"): The body was washed, anointed with olive oil, wrapped in a cloth and laid out upon a couch. Family members sang a mourning-song over the body.

2. Ekphora ("carrying out"): The bier was borne to the tomb on a chariot followed by mourners on foot; after the burial, a grave mound was heaped up and the site was marked by a large vase or stele (burial plaque).

3. Visitation: on anniversaries of death and other occasions, the grave mount and tomb were visited and offerings (cakes, oil, wreaths, small vessels, etc.) were made.

Antigone's "crime" in the play, as the Guard describes it in lines 421ff., is clearly a symbolic funerary ritual. But see also Antigone's own description of her actions in lines 900 ff. of the play. And see also note 26 to the Tyrrell and Bennett translation: they explain that "Antigone proposes to conduct a cremation burial of the sort provided Elpenor."

For further details on and discussion of women and funerary ritual in ancient Greece, link here to these pages by Patricia M. Luce, composed for her CCIV 243 final project:
Introduction
Prothesis
Burial
Lamentation
Solon's Laws
Euripides' Suppliant Women
Conclusion

Criminal Sanctions
As Antigone explains in the opening lines of the play, Creon has announced that anyone who disobeys the edict forbidding burial or mourning of Polyneices will be put to death by stoning.

This was a sanction reserved for those who had committed treason, and associated with the archaic period. For an overview of penalties more common in the later period, link here to a Tufts student page on Crime and Punishment at Olympia and Delphi.

(And compare also the remarks above about Pericles' punishment of the Samian rebels in 439 BCE.)

Marriage and Family
In the classical period, marriage normally transferred a woman from her natal family (the family into which she was born) to her husband's family.

When a man died leaving only a daughter and no sons, however, the daughter was encumbered with the responsibility for maintaining her father's line. She was married to her nearest relative traced through the paternal line (usually her uncle, father's brother), and the children born of the marriage carried on her father's lineage.

Contrast this with the practice of the so-called "levirate," described in Deuteronomy, Chapter 25:5-10, whereby, when a man died without leaving a son, his widow was married to his brother, and their first son was accounted the son of the dead man.

Think about these different sets of practices and their implications in relation to what Antigone says about her brother in lines 906ff.