(person) by everyone Wed Mar 05 2003 at 18:29:24

Αντιγονη

There are two heroines with this name.

  1. The best known was the daughter of Oedipus, sister of Ismene, Polynices and Eteocles (Table 29). The earliest legends call her the daughter of Eurygania, who was herself the daughter of the king of the Phlegeans, a people of Boeotia. But the most usual version (used by the tragic writers) says that she was the daughter of Jocasta and the consequence of the incest committed by Oedipus with his own mother. When Oedipus, enlightened about his crimes by the oracle of Tiresias, blinded himself and exiled himself from Thebes, Antigone made herself his companion. Their wanderings took them to Colonus in Attica where Oedipus died. After her father's death Antigone returned to Thebes where she lived with her sister Ismene.

    There she met with a fresh trial. During the War of the Seven Chiefs her two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, found themselves on opposite sides, the former in the Theban army and the latter in the army attacking his native land. In the course of the fighting which took place before the gates of Thebes, each brother died at the other's hands. Creon the king, and uncle of Eteocles, Polynices and the girls, granted a solemn funeral service for Eteocles but forbade anyone to bury Polynices, who had called in strangers against his own country. Antigone was unwilling to comply with this order. Believing that it was a sacred duty, laid down by the gods and the unwritten laws, to bury the dead and especially her close kin, she broke Creon's ban and scattered a handful of dust over Polynices' body, a ritual gesture which was enough to fulfil the duty imposed by religion. For this act of piety she was condemned to death by Creon and walled up while still alive, in the tomb of Labdacus, from whom she was descended. In her confinement she hanged herself and Haemon, son of Creon and her betrothed, killed himself on her corpse while Creon's wife Eurydice, for her part, committed suicide in despair.
     
  2. Another Antigone is also known to legend. She was Priam's sister and a most lovely girl. She was very proud of her hair, which she claimed was more beautiful than Hera's. In a fit of rage the goddess turned Antigone's hair into snakes. But the gods took pity on the unhappy girl and turned her into a stork, the enemy of snakes.

{E2 DICTIONARY OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY}

Table of Sources:

  1. - Sophocles, Antigone
    - Apollod. Bibl. 3, 7, 1
    - Euripides, Phoen. 1670ff.; Antigone (lost tragedy, Nauck TGF, edn 2, pp. 404ff.)
    - Sophocles, Oedip. Col.
    - Hyg. Fab. 72
     
  2. - Ovid, Met. 6.93
    - Serv. on Virgil, Georg. 2, 320

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