ANTIGONE, the daughter of (Edipus, known in Greek legend, first, for the faithfulness with which she attended her father when he, on discovering that Jocaste, the mother of his children, was also his own mother, put his eyes out and resigned the throne of Thebes; secondly, for having, in defiance of a decree, buried with due rites the body of her brother Polynices, for which act she was sentenced to be buried alive in a vault. Her character and these incidents of her life presented an attractive subject to the Greek tragic poets, especially Sophocles, whose plays of Antigone and Oe dipus at Colonus still exist; and Euripides, whose Antigone, though now lost, is partly known from extracts incidentally preserved in later writers, and from passages in his play of the Phoenissoe. In the order of the events, at least, Sophocles departed from the original legend, according to which the cremation of Polynices took place while Oedipus was yet in Thebes, not after he had died at Colonus. Possibly his having left Thebes at all is an invention of the poet Again, in assigning Antigone the tragic end of being buried alive, Sophocles differs from Euripides, in whose play that calamity was averted by the intercession of Bacchus, and was followed by the marriage of Antigone and Haemon, the son of her persecutor Creon, who had succeeded to the throne. In another version of the legend (Hyginus, Fab. 72), founded apparently (Heydemann, Ueber eine nach Euripideische Antigone, Berlin, 1868) on a tragedy by some follower of Euripides, Antigone, on being handed over by Creon to her lover Haemon to be slain, was instead secretly carried off by him, and concealed among herdsmen, where she bore him a son Maeon. The boy having grown up, went to the games at Thebes, and being there recognised by ...