take the common-sense view of Socrates in Plato's Dialogue, who told his friends that, do what they would, they could not bury him; or of Anchises in the Æneid, that
"He lacks not much who lacks a grave."[1]
Tradition unanimously consecrated the importance of sepulture. The fiercest battles in Homer are those waged for the possession of the dead bodies of heroes like Sarpedon or Patroclus. The most cruel insult to the conquered is that of Achilles, when he lashes the corpse of Hector to his chariot, and drags it round the walls of Troy. The most touching scene in all the Iliad is where Priam humbles himself in the dust before the victor to obtain the body of his son for burial. So strong was the feeling even in actual history, that after the battle of Arginusæ (fought in the same year that Sophocles died) we find the Athenian people condemning ten victorious generals to death for having allowed the seamen of sinking vessels to be drowned unrescued, and so be deprived of a grave. Hence, without question, the tragedies which must have excited the keenest sympathy in a Greek audience were those in which the interest turned on the violation of funeral rites—as in the 'Ajax' and 'Antigone' of Sophocles, and in the 'Suppliants' of Euripides.
The sisters Antigone and Ismene had returned to
