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SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE AND FUNERAL ORATORY
'For this date and supporting discussion, see Nicole Loraux, The Invention of
Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, translated by Alan Sheridan (Cam-
bridge [Mass.] 1986) 56-72.
2Voluntarily: Pindar (O. 6.15) and Pausanias (1.39). Entreaties: Aeschylus' Eleu-
sinians ap. Plut. Thes. 29.4. See Otto Schroeder, De laudibus Athenarum a poetis tragicis
et ab oratoribus epidicticis excultis (Gottingae 1914) 40-43.
3R. C. Jebb, Antigone (Oxford 1888) ix-x.
4For the concept of the "authorial audience," the audience an author may
have had in mind in writing a work, see Peter J. Rabinowitz, "Shifting Stands, Shifting
American Journal of Philology 111 (1990) 441-456 ? 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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442 LARRY J. BENNETT AND WM. BLAKE TYRRELL
When Adrastus and Polyneices marched against Thebes and were de-
feated in battle, the Cadmeians would not allow the burial of the corpses
Authors . . . imagine presumed audiences for their texts. Since textual decisions
are consequently made with the authorial audience in mind, the actual readers
must come to share its characteristics as they read if they are to understand the text
as the author wished. (117)
7Brian Vickers, Towards Greek Tragedy: Drama, Myth, Society (London 1973)
529-31, 545.
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SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE AND FUNERAL ORATORY 443
8Thuc. 2.39.1, 4; 40.3; 42.4; 43.4. Lys. 2.9, 12, 14, 20, 23, 25, 33, 34, 47, 50, 63, 68
P1. Menex. 246c. Dem. 60.10, 11, 26, 29, 30. Hyp. 6.17.
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444 LARRY J. BENNETT AND WM. BLAKE TYRRELL
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SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE AND FUNERAL ORATORY 445
pylon and the city's "most beautiful suburb" (Thuc. 2.34.5). It was
perhaps escorted by hoplites in full armor;12 the high-pitched keening
of the women fills the air, soon to be superseded by the orator's so-
norous words. When the dead arrive at the public cemetery, the mourn-
ers seek renewal through an oration that replaces not only the familial
rites of fertility and purification but also the praise and laments sung for
individual heroes by poets.13
Funeral oratory develops a propagandistic image for Athens. In
the fact of their growing imperialism, Athenians told themselves a story
of their self-sacrifice on behalf of Greek freedom against oppressors,
both foreign and Greek. Their ideology enacts a simple dualism of
Athenians vs. hoi alloi that, heedless of fact, praises the city under
praise of its dead.14 The myth of the Theban Dead belongs to a litany of
Athenian services in mythic times to Greeks, the humble, and the help-
less.15 Common to its myths are the themes of military intervention
forced upon Athenians and their willingness to act alone without oth-
ers. Repeatedly, the orator asserts that Athenians acted alone to accom-
plish noble ends. The key words are I[6vog, xacksg, and ei@qtog. "They
alone endured risks for the sake of all Greece against many thousands
of foreigners" (Lys. 2.20). "They alone twice repelled by land and sea
the expeditions from all Asia" (Dem. 60.10). "We alone did not venture
to surrender them" (PI. Menex. 245c). "We were left alone again be-
cause of our unwillingness to commit a disgraceful and unholy act" (PI.
Menex. 245e). Plato's shift from "we alone did not venture" to "we
were left alone" shows that he "perceived the hidden meaning of the
monos boast, that it also signified abandonment, failure and loss of
esteem."'6 The barbaroi "disembarked onto Marathon, thinking that in
this way we would be most deserted (FQY[oT&TovT)g) of allies" (Lys.
2.21). In the epitaphios abandonment becomes single-minded action:
"[The Athenians] did not wait for allies" (Lys. 2.23), "The freedom of
all Greece was preserved with the lives of these men" (Dem. 60.23); and
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446 LARRY J. BENNETT AND WM. BLAKE TYRRELL
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SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE AND FUNERAL ORATORY 447
The Athenians judged that those men, if they had done some wrong, paid
the utmost penalty by dying and that the gods below were not receiving
their due. (2.7)
Athenians regu
"They stopped t
ligence of their
us ... to yield to
ligence" (PI. Men
on the intelligen
If I seem to you t
a fool's estimation. (Antigone: 469-70)
I say that these two girls, the one just now, the
first, have appeared without sense. (Creon: 561-62)
Lord, the sense which grows does not abide with those faring
departs. (Ismene: 563-64)
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448 LARRY J. BENNETT AND WM. BLAKE TYRRELL
Antigone not only deprives her sister of posthumous credit for the ri
she harshly underlines her solitary defense of justice. "Many thin
the orator declares, "conspired for our ancestors . . . to fight for
tice" (Lys. 2.17). Beset with evils, Antigone considers it a profit
dos) to die (461-64). The kerdos theme reflects the topos of Athen
willingness to encounter danger despite their wealth. Among th
brave men, "the possession of wealth and enjoyment of life's plea
are treated with disdain" (Dem. 60.2).19 On the other hand, Creo
materialistic outlook illustrates the attitude of hoi alloi, that is, th
against which the orators create their image of Athenians.20
The third episode ends on Creon's decision: "I will lead her wh
the path is deserted of people" (773). The chorus of Theban old m
have concluded the third stasimon when they espy Antigone. She
to them to attend to her plight. "O citizens of my paternal land, lo
me" (806). Together, they join in a kommos in which they "debate
Vernant's term,21 the chorus over the meaning of her resolve to disob
Creon and bury her brother. She embodies the "angry, stubborn
per," of the Sophoclean hero, while the chorus speak both in char
as Theban elders and in "meta-character" as the voice of the subtext.22
Creon marks its end sarcastically: "You know, don't you, how if permit-
ted one would never stop singing and wailing before dying?" (883-84).
Antigone returns to spoken iambics to describe her future reunion with
her family in Hades, give the nomos for her actions, and pray for ven-
geance upon her enemies (891-923). Creon enjoins the guards to haste,
and when the elders react ("This word comes nearest to death" [933-
34]), he replies: "I do not encourage you to console yourselves that
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SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE AND FUNERAL ORATORY 449
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450 LARRY J. BENNETT AND WM. BLAKE TYRRELL
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SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE AND FUNERAL ORATORY 451
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452 LARRY J. BENNETT AND WM. BLAKE TYRRELL
31 For bibliography and a survey of interpretations of these lines, see Hester (note
24 above) 55-58; also Sheila Murnaghan, "Antigone 904-20 and the Institution of Mar-
riage," AJP 107 (1986) 192, n. 1.
32Jebb (note 3 above) 164.
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SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE AND FUNERAL ORATORY 453
the dead: "Those who are of the age for producing children sh
strength from the hope of other ones" (Thuc. 2.44.3). A. W. G
finds it "extraordinary" that Pericles in his epitaphios should
the living with hope of future children to replace those killed.33 T
seems to Gomme preposterous for parents of an age of men
fighting. But Pericles is not talking about marriage between p
marriage as the institution that replenishes the city's warrior
cles' is the transpersonal view of the third day of the ceremony w
spoke before the assembled gathering.
Antigone does devalue marriage with her nomos, but her
tion sounds the sacrifice Athens must make for its survival. She sacri-
fices marriage in the dramatic context to her family of father, mother,
brothers, but in the subtext, she offers the polis the sacrifice that women
had to offer, husbands and sons, to bury the Theban Dead of the epi-
taphios. Although the same rhetoric as Pericles', coming from the lips
of Antigone, it causes a contradiction. Men and women offer different
sacrifices to the polis-the former their lives, the latter their husbands
and sons. Sophocles' use of a female to represent men breaks down
(since Goethe35) into a famous problem for moderns.
Antigone cannot represent Athenians with the purity of motive
obtained by Euripides' Theseus. Theseus asserts his decision to bury
the dead as the culture's ideal-man, warrior, leader with the consent of
the led (Supp. 346-51). By tending to the dead, the duty and obligation
of kinship, sex, and family, Antigone unavoidably "intrudes" upon the
public sphere of the polis according to a dynamic familiar to theater-
Murnaghan points out how marriage depends upon the execution of "a series of offices
with stable functions held by a succession of different individuals" (199). By stressing this
aspect of marriage, Murnaghan believes that Antigone places marriage "in the category of
those things it is characteristic of her to devalue and reject. For throughout the play
[Antigone] consistently undervalues human institutions" (200).
35Conversations of Goethe with Eckerman and Soret, tr. John Oxenford (London
1901) 227-28.
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454 LARRY J. BENNETT AND WM. BLAKE TYRRELL
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SOPHOCLES' ANTIGONE AND FUNERAL ORATORY 455
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456 LARRY J. BENNETT AND WM. BLAKE TYRRELL
45The authors express their appreciation for the contribution made to the present
study by the journal's anonymous reader.
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