The characters and stories of Greek tragedy have had an enduring impact on Western literature and art, and probably none more than Antigone (442 or 441 B.C.E.). Sophocles' play influenced many modern writers and thinkers, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. In the passage below, a guard describes what he saw when he discovered Antigone lamenting over the body of her dead brother, Polyneices:

. . . then we saw the girl.
She was crying out with the shrill cry
of an embittered bird
that sees its nest robbed of its nestlings
and the bed empty. So, too, when she saw
the body stripped of its cover, she burst out in groans
calling terrible curses on those that had done the deed;

and with her hands immediately,
brought thirsty dust to the body; from a shapely brazen

urn...