Studies in Fifth Century Thought and Literature

Sir Richard Jebb called attention long ago to a problem of motivation in Antigone's presumed double burial of Polynices, and he remarked, ‘I have never seen this question put or answered’. Were he alive, he might well wish he had never raised the question, so frequent and various have been the answers proposed during the intervening three-quarters of a century. It has even been suggested that concern for the question is irrelevant to the text or fostered merely to produce ‘original’ literary criticism. The number of able scholars who have dealt with the problem of the double burial, however, would appear to reflect a real uneasiness about the true meaning of the text.

In 1931, S. M. Adams suggested that not Antigone but the gods effect the first burial of Polynices. The idea was met by a flurry of rebuttals, indeed with almost as much suspicion as the earlier theory of Rouse that Ismene performs the first burial. Adams persisted, however, and repeated his proposal as part of a longer article on the Antigone, which became a chapter in his Sophocles the Playwright. Reviews of the book either passed over the theory or responded negatively, the most favorable comments being ‘controversial’ or ‘interessant’.

During the past thirty years, however, a movement toward belief in some sort of divine assistance in the burial of Polynices has been discernible. Reinhardt believes that in general the divine and human spheres intermingle in Sophocles and discusses Polynices' two burials in this light.