oi. Death. According to various translations of a very special, very spontaneous (read: random) passage from Sophocles' Antigone, Death is the one thing Man cannot conquer. Otherwise, Man is pretty awesome, making himself master of...a lot of things. Birds, trees, language, etc.
Death however, is harder to conquer.
As I think on it, the reason for that might be that death is one of the few things that cannot really be escaped. I don't mean that in the sense that it is impossible to escape your OWN death (though that in itself is also true and cliched) but rather that it is impossible to escape death that you have either witnessed or inflicted.
Oedipus kills his father without knowing it, and that murder comes back to bite him. He is unable to conquer death in the sense that death is the substance of his downfall (even if it is not his own)
Antigone on the other hand is adamant that her brother be properly buried. However, that action accomplishes little but give her some peace of mind - at the expense of punishment - and certainly doesn't bring him back.
while the connection may seem tenuous, I think that Sophocles wrote in that chorus narrative bit because he was poetically enamored with the idea that man cannot ever conquer death. As a creative mind, I can imagine him taking a cliched phrase (though it may not have been cliched at the time) and asking himself hypothetically : "What are all the ways in which man might try to conquer death? What are the various ways in which death might inevitably conquer man?"
I think that's the reason why those themes show up in these plays - Sophocles was curious.
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