George Steiner's Antigones

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I believe what Steiner is trying to say on this page, and for much of chapter two, is that though Antigone and/or her family were mentioned in several classical works, they were not always depicted in the same way. Therefore, the discrepancies can be explained by either variations in the story of the original circumstances surrounding the family, or, more likely in Steiner's opinion, the artistic license that classicists used when portraying Antigone. Steiner goes on to say, because we cannot know what Antigone's role was in the surviving myths, we cannot make connections between the myths and Sophocles' Antigone. Steiner does admit, however, that current evidence suggests that the conflict between Antigone and Creon stemmed from Sophocles' imagination. Yet, the idea was so enchanting that it may have enticed other writers to alter their texts to agree with Sophocles.

In the second paragraph, Steiner examines the difficulty in determining what is the "historical truth" within classical writings. He suggests that the difficulty is related to the inability to know with any certainty how the Greeks distinguished between what we refer to as myth and history. So, I believe the point that Steiner is trying to make is that we know that the meaning of words can evolve over time so it is challenging to know absolutely how the Greeks would have defined the words myth and history or even if there would have been a difference. On the other hand, it could be possible that the meanings are lost in translation and "the text is made mute" (Steiner 202).