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tragic dramatists, the vogue for variation was soon established. As
one prominent classicist has put it:
Of the close to six hundred works attributed by title to all the known
tragic poets, there are a dozen different plays entitled Oedipus (at least six
from the fifth century, including plays by all three surviving tragedians),
eight plays named Thyestes (including versions by Sophocles and Euripides),
and seven named Medea (Euripides’ being the first).8
Indeed, of the six hundred titles, ‘more than one hundred appear
twice or more,’ making Greek tragedy one of the most persistently
self-replicating genres until the advent of the novel. Antigone, how-
ever, stands aside from the bulk of Greek drama in that the tale ap-
pears either to have been fabricated in fifth century Athens or
adapted from a previously unrecorded oral source, probably local.
The Oedipus story is mentioned in Homer, but he makes no mention
of either of Oedipus’ daughters, Ismene and Antigone. Both appear
in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, but that is from a different trilogy to
either Oedipus Rex or the play Antigone, and while it may shed some
light on Sophocles’ view of her involvement in the myth, there is no
evidence to suggest that he saw his two Antigones as the same char-
acter. Euripides is reported to have written an Antigone, although its
plot has to be reconstructed (mostly from Hyginus) and the account
is not reliable. Nevertheless, the Hyginus report does suggest that
Euripides considerably revised and reshaped the plot. His Antigone,
instead of dying, marries and has a child with Haemon, Creon’s son.
A single extra detail, noted by Hyginus, is that of Argia (the wife of
Polyneices) helping Antigone to bury her brother.9
Although no other tragic play on the subject of Antigone has
survived antiquity, parts of the story, such as the correlation be-
tween Creon’s treatment of Polyneices’ body and Achilles’ treat-
ment of Hector’s corpse in Homer’s Iliad, have often been noted and
8 Peter Burian, ‘Myth into muthos: the shaping of the tragic plot’, The Cambridge Companion to Greek
Tragedy, ed. P.E: Easterling, Cambridge: CUP, 1997, pp. 178–208.
9 A full account can be found in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford: OUP, 1996.
MARTIN S. REGAL