Antigone, Medea, and Civilization and Barbarism in Spanish American History

Abstract

Sophocles' Antigone and Euripides' Medea are two of the most performed and adapted of the ancient Greek tragedies. This chapter analyzes some examples of their reception in Spanish America. Among the many adaptations of Antigone by Sophocles and Medea by Euripides in Latin America are the works of Argentine dramatists Leopoldo Marechal, Alberto de Zavalía, and David Cureses. Amidst their own historical circumstances, these authors rewrote both tragedies to introduce other interpretations of certain moments from Argentine and Colombian history from previous centuries, based on the fundamental antinomy between civilization and barbarism. The Argentinean authors have turned to the two Greek myths and a single megatext to dramatize four different periods in Argentinean and Latin American history: The Head in the Cage, in the eighteenth/nineteenth century, The Limit, during the political rule of Rosas, and in Antígona Vélez and The Frontier, during the decades of 1820 and 1870, respectively.

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