5/4/2023 0 Comments Antigone sorty![]() Today we’re going to return, one final time in Ancient Greek literature, to the city of Thebes, that ancient civilization located about thirty miles or fifty kilometers northwest of Athens on the Greek mainland. But another example of a story taking hundreds of years to be told was an Ancient Greek story that spanned several generations back in times of legend – a tale that took place in the city of Thebes. The story of the Israelites in the Pentateuch and the Historical Books of the Old Testament is another example – the composition of these texts spanned hundreds of years and multiple phases of ancient near eastern history. The events that took place at the city of Troy that inspired the Iliad and the Odyssey were one such occasion – these epic poems were produced over long periods of time. Sometimes, in literature, it takes many people, and many generations, to tell a single story. The bulk of the play is about the opposition between Antigone, her uncle Creon, and her beloved cousin Haemon, who tries to play the role of a mediator. But one reason is that sequels and remakes are things that we’ve always done.Īntigone's family tree. What’s wrong with us, we sometimes wonder – what’s wrong with us, if we just want to hear variations of things we’ve heard before – the same songs with different instrumentation? Why are entirely new stories sometimes hard to find? There are plenty of reasons, of course. They take characters, and situations, and archetypes that we know, and reinvent them – new James Bonds, new Star Treks, an endless new churn of superhero movies, summer after summer, popcorn bucket after popcorn bucket. They’re sequels, or remakes, or prequels, or origin stories. Many of the movies that we watch these days are sequels. But even in 441 BCE, the story of Sophocles’ Antigone was not an original one. Antigone's central motif of one strong willed person who will not back down or compromise her beliefs has resonated with hundreds of generations, for many different reasons across the past two and a half thousand years. Antigone is one of the great plays from Ancient Greece that’s still common in undergraduate and high school classrooms. You should, however, be able to enjoy Antigone even without knowing the other two plays, and I’ll give you some background upfront so you’ll know exactly what’s going on from the very first scene onward. If you’re just jumping in and you want to hear the back story, you can hear the first two Oedipus plays in Episodes 30 and 31. In this episode, we’re going to hear the story of Antigone, the third of Sophocles’ three Theban plays, probably produced during the spring of 441 BCE in the city of Athens. Episode 32: Trees Bending to the Torrent. Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Trees Bending to the Torrent Sophocles' Three Theban Plays, Part 3: Antigone
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