Heroes: Volume II of Mythos

T HE A FTERMYTH If the preceding scene sounds like something from a drama, that is because I have freely (too freely, some may think) drawn the narrative from Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King,fn15 probably the best known of all the classical Greek tragedies. As with almost every myth, there are variant storylines, but the version that has come down through Sophocles is the most often told and retold. Creon took over the throne and blind Oedipus tapped his wayfn16 into self-banishment and exile, his faithful daughter Antigone by his side. Two more plays, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone, constitute what is known as Sophocles’ ‘Theban Cycle’ telling the story of the further episodes in the life of Oedipus and his family. In Oedipus at Colonus, the blind king is looked after by Theseus and dies in Athens, bestowing the place of his death upon the Athenian people as a blessing which will grant them victory in any future wars with Thebes. Sophocles’ two great rivals, Aeschylus and Euripides,fn17 found themselves equally unable to resist dramatising this beguiling and perplexing story. Aeschylus wrote his own Theban Cycle consisting of three separate trilogies: the Laius and Oedipus are lost, but the Seven Against Thebes (which chronicles the struggle between Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polynices for the throne of Thebes after their father’s death) is extant, if rarely performed, being generally considered dramatically underpowered and overladen with stodgy dialogue.fn18 The prodigiously profuse, prolific and productive Euripides wrote an Oedipus that is lostfn19 while his Phoenician Women treats the same episode that Aeschylus covers in the Seven against Thebes. It has been inferred that in the Oedipus of Euripides, Jocasta does not commit suicide and Oedipus is blinded not by himself, but by vengeful Thebans loyal to the memory of Laius. In other versions of the myth, Oedipus marries Jocasta but has no children by her. After he discovers the truth about himself he divorces her and marries EURYGANEIA (who may have been Jocasta’s sister) and it is by her that he has his four children. In this telling Eteocles, Polynices, Antigone and Ismene are clean of the taint of incest. However they were conceived, the main lines of the story tell us that, after Oedipus went into exile, his sons Eteocles and Polynices assume the throne of Thebes, each ruling in alternate years. Naturally, brothers being brothers, it all goes wrong. Eteocles refuses to give up the throne when it is his brother’s turn to take over. In a huff, Polynices storms off to Argos to raise an army led by seven champions, the so-called Seven against Thebes, but they perish during a botched assault on the city walls. Polynices and Eteocles kill each other in battle and Creon now takes over as king in his own right, ruling that the body of Polynices, whom he considers to have been the guiltier of the pair, be denied proper burial. Antigone, distraught at the idea of her brother’s soul being denied rest, attempts to cover the corpse but is caught in the act. Creon sentences her to death for her disobedience and has her sealed up in a cave. Although he changes his mind at the last minute and commands her to be set free, it is too late. She has hanged herself. By the end of Sophocles’ dramatisation of this myth, Antigone and her fiancé HAEMON (Creon’s own son) have both committed suicide. At the news of this so too does Creon’s wife, EURYDICE. The curse on the Theban royal house was relentless and the Greeks seemed endlessly to be fascinated by it. Sigmund Freud notably saw in the Oedipus myth a playing out of his theory that infant sons long for a close and exclusive relationship with their mothers, including an (unconscious) sexual one, and hate their fathers for coming between this perfect mother–son union. It is an oft-noted irony that, of all men in history, Oedipus was the one with the least claim to an Oedipus Complex. He left Corinth because the idea of sex with his mother Merope (as he thought) was so repugnant. Not only was his attraction to Jocasta adult (and the incestuous element wholly unwitting), but it came after the killing of his father Laius, which itself was accidental and entirely unconnected to any infant sexual jealousy. None of which put Freud off his stride. Aside from the encounter with the Sphinx, there is little in Oedipus to connect him to the common run of Greek heroic figures. He strikes us today as a modern tragic hero and political animal; it is hard to picture him shaking hands with Heracles or joining the crew of the Argo. Many scholars and thinkers, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche in his book The Birth of Tragedy, have seen in Oedipus a character who works out on stage the tension in Athenians (and all of us) between the reasoning, mathematically literate citizen and the transgressive blood criminal; between the thinking and the instinctual being; between the superego and the id; between the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses that contend within us. Oedipus is a detective who employs all the fields of enquiry of which the Athenians were so proud – logic, numbers, rhetoric, order and discovery – only to reveal a truth that is disordered, shameful, transgressive and bestial.