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may be regarded as a trait. In Homer, Achilles takes revenge on
Hector for having killed his friend Patroclus and refuses to carry out
Hector’s dying request that he be buried with honour. Instead,
Achilles taunts him, telling him that ‘dogs and birds shall devour
[him] utterly’.10 There is no direct allusion to Hector or Achilles in
Sophocles’ play, but the comparisons are obvious, as is the signifi-
cance of Hector’s burial which provides the conclusion to the Iliad.
In this manner, a meme has been passed down, adapted to a new
situation, without it even being iterated or voiced. In one sense,
this could be regarded as analogous to genetic masking, a situation
where a dominant allele is present but has no visible effect on a
phenotype. Whether Sophocles’ Antigone intentionally imitates, or
borrows from, the Homeric myth is therefore besides the point—an
important (and indeed dominant) trait is clearly present, although
not foregrounded, and may be inherited by a new version of the
story where it does become visible again. The idea of excessive hy-
bris, especially on the part of the victor, was abhorrent to the
Greeks, and Creon, like Achilles, pays with his life for his arrogance
and unremitting lack of mercy. In this scenario, the central theme
is that all deserve proper burial, traitors or not. If such a basic right
is ignored or rejected, then there are clear grounds for revenge. To
illustrate how important this was to Sophocles, we may note that
even Ajax’s enemies, in the play of that name, refrain from throwing
his body into the sea and concede to his having a proper burial de-
spite the fact that he has tried to kill them and then taken his own
life.
10 See The Iliad, Book 22, ll, pp. 339–53, trans. by A.T. Murray, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd., 1924. The whole passage reads as follows:
Then, his strength all spent, spake to him Hector of the flashing helm: “I implore thee by thy life
and knees and parents, suffer me not to be devoured of dogs by the ships of the Achaeans; [340]
nay, take thou store of bronze and gold, gifts that my father and queenly mother shall give thee,
but my body give thou back to my home, that the Trojans and the Trojans’ wives may give me
my due meed of fire in my death.” Then with an angry glance from beneath his brows spake unto
him Achilhes swift of foot: [345] “Implore me not, dog, by knees or parents. Would that in any
wise wrath and fury might bid me carve thy flesh and myself eat it raw, because of what thou hast
wrought, as surely as there lives no man that shall ward off the dogs from thy head; nay, not though
they should bring hither and weigh out ransom ten-fold, aye, twenty-fold, [350] and should
promise yet more; nay, not though Priam, son of Dardanus, should bid pay thy weight in gold;
not even so shall thy queenly mother lay thee on a bier and make lament for thee, the son herself
did bear, but dogs and birds shall devour thee utterly.”
ADAPTATION STUDIES AND BIOLOGICAL MODELS: ANTIGONE AS A TEST CASE