Truly Bewept, Full of Strife: The Myth of Antigone, the Burial of Enemies, and the Ideal of Reconciliation in Ancient Greek Literature

Abstract

Over the past five decades, the myth of Antigone has been the subject of noted literary, literary-critical, dramatic, philosophical, and philological treatments in Slovenia, not least due to the influence of one of the most important Slovenian plays of the twentieth century, Dominik Smole’s Antigona. The rich Slovenian discussion of the myth has often dealt with its most famous formulation, the Antigone of Sophocles, but has paid less attention to the broader ancient context; the epic sources (the Iliad, Odyssey, Thebaid, and Oedipodea); the other tragic versions (Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes and his lost Eleusinians; Euripides’s Suppliants, Phoenician Women, and Antigone, of which only a few short fragments have been preserved); and the responses of late antiquity. This article analyses the basic features of this nearly thousand-year ancient tradition and shows how they connect in surprising ways—sometimes even more directly than Sophoclean tragedy does—with the main issues in the Slovenian reception: the question of burying the wartime (or postwar) dead and the ideal of reconciliation.