Oedipus

Lowell Edmunds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134331277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

An indispensable guide to the myth of Oedipus this book is the first to analyze its long and varied history from ancient times to the modern day, and presented with an authoritative survey that considers Oedipus in art and music as well as in literature.

Lowell Edmunds accepts this variation as the driving force in its longevity and popularity. Refraining from seeking for an original form of the myth, Edmunds relates the changes in content in the myth to changes in meaning, eschewing the notion that one particular version can be set as standard.

KEY THEMES

1
OEDIPUS BEFORE TRAGEDY

Introducing Oedipus meant giving an abbreviated history of the Oedipus myth which jumped from Sophocles to Freud. This book aims to fill in the blanks in this history, starting with the pre-tragic Oedipus. Whereas the Oedipus myth is two-generational in Freud and almost two-generational in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (some scholars believe that the brief appearance of Oedipus’ daughter at the end was added in some later production), it is four-generational in the earliest sources. This chapter first discusses these sources, and then turns from Oedipus in poetry to Oedipus as a cult-hero, one of the “mighty dead,” a class of beings intermediate between gods and men, who have the power to harm or to help and who must be placated with offerings at their graves. In the sources for his cult, one has the spectacle of a multi-generational genealogy which reaches down to historical persons in the fifth century BC. Oedipus is in fact one of the few Greek heroes who has such a genealogy.

The grandfather of Oedipus, Labdacus, a shadowy figure, gives his name to the family – the Labdacids. In the archaic period of Greek literature (800–480 BC), three epic poems told their story. In one of them, the Oedipodeia, the events of the life of Oedipus, perhaps including the story of his father (see under “Laius” below), unfolded; in another, the Thebaid, the conflict between his sons; and in the Epigoni, the third, the exploits of the next generation. In this period, then, the Labdacid myth covers four generations in three epics. Homer, who refers to Oedipus twice in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey, knows him as a hero in the generation before the Trojan War. The other great war of heroic times, besides the one at Troy, was the one fought by Oedipus’ sons at Thebes for the succession to the throne. So said Hesiod, the great poet of didactic epic in the archaic period, who was often paired with Homer. From Hesiod, one might draw the inference that the war for the succession was the high point of Labdacid myth, and the story of Oedipus a lead-up.

Although the evidence for the myth in the archaic period is scanty, it is possible to reconstruct from this evidence a version different in remarkable ways from its embodiment in the Theban tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. This reconstruction begins with the brief life of Oedipus which turns up in the Odyssey (11.271–80). Brief though it is, it provides a way of organizing the evidence from the rest of archaic poetry – fragments of Theban epic and of two lyric poets, Ibycus and Stesichorus, and also a mention of Oedipus in the Iliad. Odysseus tells the story of how he descended into the underworld, where he saw some of the heroines of the past and amongst them Jocasta, here called Epikast

:

And I saw the mother of Oedipus, fair Epikast , 271 who committed an enormity through her mind’s ignorance, 272 marrying her own son. He, having killed [verb exenariz ] his father, 273 married her. Suddenly the gods made it known amongst men. 274 But he in lovely Thebes suffering woes [algea ] 275 ruled the Cadmeans [Thebans] through the destructive counsels [boulas ] of the gods, 276 and she went down to the house of Hades, mighty gate-fastener, 277 having strung up a high noose from a lofty beam, 278 gripped by her sorrow [akhos ]. To him she left woes [algea ] behind, 279 very many, as many as the Erinyes of a mother bring to pass. 280

Odysseus’ story of Oedipus is almost complete in three lines: Epikast

unwittingly married her son; he had killed his father; the gods suddenly made it known (272–74). Odysseus then takes six more lines to recount the aftermath: Oedipus continued to rule, suffering woes which were left to him by Epikast

, who hanged herself (275–80).

Compressed though it is, this narrative, with its repetition of the word algea, “woes”(275, 279), clearly signals the theme that would continue to shape it were it expanded to the length of an epic. The word which refers to the woes of Oedipus is the same one which, in the second line of the Iliad, refers to the “countless woes” of the Achaeans and thus to a central theme of that poem. Another comparison with the Iliad emerges from the word akhos, “sorrow,” referring in the passage just quoted to the sorrow of Oedipus’ mother (279). This word probably constitutes the first element in the name Achilles.¹ As Achilles is in large part the cause of the Achaeans’ suffering, when he withdraws from the fighting and leaves his comrades vulnerable to the Trojans, Epikast

’s sorrow, as described by Odysseus, is the beginning of Oedipus’ woes. The theme of Labdacid suffering also appears in Stesichorus and Ibycus, composers of lyric verse intended, unlike epic, to be sung in choral performance. In a fragment of a lyric “Thebaid” by Stesichorus, the word algea turns up again. Jocasta uses it in a phrase that may refer to pains already suffered (whether by herself or by Oedipus or by both). Ibycus uses the woes (plural of akhos) of Oedipus as an example of the extremity of human passion.²

Odysseus’ mention of the “woes” of Oedipus is enough to provide the thematic structure which the myth would have had in archaic poetry. Even if Odysseus does not mention a plague in Thebes (which first appears, in our sources, in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King), comparison with the Iliad suggests that, thematically, a plague could already be implicit in the “woes” which he mentions. Further, Odysseus’ brief summary of the Oedipus myth establishes a dynamic of transfer to be seen again and again in the history of the Oedipus myth in ancient Greek poetry. Epikast

(as the mother is here called) has, in effect, transferred her pain to Oedipus, and he, as will be clear in sources soon to be discussed, transfers his to others. The agents of Epikast

’s transfer are the Erinyes, minor female deities, sometimes referred to in the plural, sometimes in the singular. They are personified curses who see to the retribution of wrongs, especially murders, committed in the family.³ (The Erinys [sing.] was born from the blood of the severed genitals of Uranus, thus from the crime of a son against a father [Hes. Theog. 472].) Orestes is hounded by them in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. At the beginning of the Odyssey, Telemachus fears that, if he gives in to the suitors and offers his mother in marriage to one of them, she will invoke the Erinyes against him (2.134–36). Given the dynamic of transfer, it is not surprising that its typical agents, the Erinyes, turn up in most of the ancient sources for the Oedipus myth (see below).

LAIUS

Odysseus does not name the father of Oedipus. He was Laius, who, as it happens, does not appear in the extant fragments of archaic epic. Some scholars believe that the Oedipodeia included a story about him known from later sources: Laius was hired by Pelops of Pisa, in northwest Greece, to train his son, Chrysippus in chariot-driving. Laius abducted and raped the boy. The source which is believed to link this story to the Oedipodeia is the fragment of an unidentified ancient historian or mythographer called Peisander.⁴ The lengthy fragment going under his name poses a multitude of scholarly problems. For present purposes, it is enough to observe that Peisander, with mention of Oedipus’ children from Euryganeia (a second wife, to be discussed below), certainly shows knowledge of the Oedipodeia. At the same time, he has used other (unnamed) sources, and whether the story about Laius came from one of these, and not from the Oedipodeia, will probably never be known. Peisander says nothing of Pelops’ curse on Laius, which, with Zeus’ backing, took the form of an oracle received by Laius warning that he would be killed by his own son if he were to beget one (see Aeschylus’ “Theban Trilogy” in the next chapter).

RECONSTRUCTING THE STORY

Odysseus is, in the first place, telling a story, the same story or a variant of the same story told in the Thebaid and the Oedipodeia. A few fragments of these Theban epics survive, and they provide a way of filling in some of the blanks in Odysseus’ synopsis. Another way is inference, which permits one to say something about how the story began.

If the marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta (as I shall call her from now on, using her regular name in fifth-century tragedy) took place in ignorance, presumably the parricide did, too. If Oedipus did not know his parents, he must have been separated from them at birth. He would then have been left to die (whether or not mutilated is unclear), only to be rescued, raised by foster parents, and then return to his native land or city. Something must have caused the exposure. The Delphic oracle, as in Sophocles, is not the obvious motivation. Greek myth and Greek epic took shape long before Delphi became the oracular center of Greece. It is mentioned explicitly only once in the Iliad (9.404–5) and once in the Odyssey (8.79–82) and would not have had any greater importance in Theban epic. It cannot be assumed to be implicit in Odysseus’ summary of the myth. Perhaps a dream, Jocasta’s or Laius’, or a prophecy delivered by the illustrious Theban seer Teiresias (on whom see below) led to the exposure.

Between the parricide and the marriage falls Oedipus’ destruction of the Sphinx, of which Odysseus says nothing. But one of the two fragments of the Oedipodeia places her squarely in the myth. She killed Haemon, the son of Creon, the brother of Jocasta, presumably before Oedipus came along. (Sophocles brings Haemon back to life to be the fiancé of Antigone, Oedipus’ daughter.) Had Haemon failed to solve her riddle? Was she indeed a riddler? The fragment does not say. Mention of Creon suggests that he had a role to play, presumably the same one as in other sources, that of regent in the period after the death of Laius and before the accession of Oedipus.

THE SPHINX

The Sphinx, under the name Phix, appears in a genealogy of monsters in Hesiod’s Theogony. She is a “bane to the Cadmeans,” i.e., the Thebans (326). Hesiod says no more. He mentions neither her riddle nor Oedipus. The earliest vase paintings of this specifically Theban sphinx, as distinguished from the many earlier sphinxes in Greek art, which go back to Egypt and/or the Near East, show her pursuit or capture of Theban youths. Typically this monster has a lion’s body, a female human head, and wings. At the time of these paintings (sixth c. BC), the Theban epics were already widespread, and so it is impossible that those who saw the vases did not thi...

Table of contents

• GODS AND HEROES OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
• CONTENTS
• SERIES FOREWORD
• LIST OF MAPS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• WHY OEDIPUS?
• KEY THEMES
• OEDIPUS AFTERWARDS
• NOTES
• FURTHER READING
• WORKS CITED
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INDEX