Thou shalt have given a corpse in recompense
For one on earth whom thou hast cast beneath,
Entombing shamefully a living soul.
The whole plot of the Antigone really turns on the question of the burial of Polyneices, just as that of the Ajax depends upon the problem of the burial of Ajax. Eteocles and Polyneices had fallen in mutual combat as leaders in a war between the Argives and the Thebans, a combat which, from the existence of blood-relationship between the leaders, assumed the external aspect of civil war. The problem of guilt is obscured by political complications. If we inquire whether the mutual slaughter of these two brothers was culpable fratricide, we must answer that, in the circumstances of the case, it seems obvious that either both slayers wore guilty or that both were justified. Theseus was justified,[87] according to legend, in the slaying of the Pallantidae, and, according to Kreon, in the Antigone, Eteocles was justified in slaying Polyneices, for he commands that Eteocles should be buried with full honours—and we know that culpable kin-slayers could not be buried. Polyneices, however, was not, in Kreon’s view, justified in slaying Eteocles. Here are Kreon’s words[88]:
... The man,
Eteocles—I mean—who died for Thebes ...
Shall be entombed with every sacred rite
That follows to the grave the lordliest dead.
But for his brother who, a banished man,
Returned to devastate and burn with fire