But no work of ancient literature is as obsessed with unburied bodies as Sophocles’ “Antigone,” a tragedy first produced in Athens around 442 B.C.: the entire plot centers on the controversy over how a community that has survived a deadly attack will dispose of the body of the perpetrator of that attack—the body, as it happens, of a young man who had planned to bring destruction on the city that had been his home, who “sought to consume the city with fire…sought to taste blood.”