Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/309

 SEPULTURE OF THE CHIEFS 277 and his mother Eurydike, the wife of Kreon, inconsolable for his death, perished by her own hand. And thus the new light which seened to be springing up over the last remaining scion of the devoted family of CEdipus, is extinguished amidst gloom and horrors which overshadowed also the house and dynasty of Kreon. 1 The other tale stands more apart from the original legend, and seems to have had its origin in the patriotic pride of the Athenians. Adrastus, unable to obtain permission from the The- bans to inter the fallen chieftains, presented himself in suppliant e;uise, accompanied by their disconsolate mothers, to Theseus at Eleusis. lie implored the Athenian warrior to extort from the perverse Thebans that last melancholy privilege which no decent or pious Greeks ever thought of withholding, and thus to stand forth as the champion of Grecian public morality in one of its most essential points, not less than of the rights of the subterra- nean gods. The Thebans obstinately persisting in their refusal, Theseus undertook an expedition against their city, vanquished them in the field, and compelled them by force of arms to permit the -sepulture of their fallen enemies. This chivalrous interposi- tion, celebrated in one of the preserved dramas of Euripides, formed a subject of glorious recollection to the Athenians through out the historical age : their orators dwelt upon it in terms of animated panegyric ; and it seems to have been accepted as a real fact of the past time, with not less implicit conviction than the battle of Marathon. 2 But the Thebans, though equally per- suaded of the truth of the main story, dissented from the Athe- nian version of it, maintaining that they had given up the bodies for sepulture voluntarily and of their own accord. The tomb of 1 Sophokl. Antigon. 581. Nvv yap ea^araf vnsp 'Pi&e ereraro dof h> Qidiirov (Jojizoif, etc. The pathetic tale here briefly recounted forms the subject of this beautiful tragedy of Sophokles, the argument of which is supposed by Boeckh to have been borrowed in its primary rudiments from the Cyclic, ThebaTs or the CEdipodia (Boeckh, Dissertation appended to his translation of the Anti- gone, c. x. p. 146) ; see Apollodor. iii. 7, 1. JEschylus also touches upon the heroism of Antigone (Sep. Theb. 981).
 * Apollodor. iii. 7, 1 ; Eurip. Supp. passim ; Herbdot. ix. 27 ; Plato, Menex
 * in. c. 9; Lysias, Epitaph, c 4 ; Isokrat. Orat. Panegyr. p 196, Auger