603. Greek Myths: The Riddle of the Sphinx (Part 2)

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Then I saw the mother of Oedipus, the beautiful Epicaste.

The enormity she committed.

Though she knew not what she did, she married her own son, while he, after slaying his father, married her.

But soon enough the gods made it known to the people.

Now he, in beautiful Thebes, suffered agonies as he ruled the Cadmaeans as lord, all through the gods' dire plan, while she went off to the house of Hades, that stern gatekeeper, after hanging a noose straight down from a rafter high in the roof, possessed as she was by her anguish.

For him she left so many woes behind.

So that was Homer in the Odyssey.

Translation is by Daniel Mendelssohn, who was in one of our recent Restus History bonus episodes.

So our club members will know all about him.

And Tom, this is the earliest account that we have in Greek literature of how Oedipus, the king of the Cadmaeans, which means the Thebans, how he slew his own father and married his mother.

And she then hanged herself and descended to the house of Hades, which means the underworld.

Now, Oedipus, he's not one of of the Greek heroes that you read about in children's books for obvious reasons.

Even so, he is one of the most influential, famous, celebrated, damned characters in all human culture, because, of course, he's given his name, among other things, to a very famous complex.

And this is partly because the story seems so horrific to us, doesn't it?

Murdering your father and marrying your mother.

It seems to speak to something in the human condition.

So unpack it a little bit for us.

Well, this notion that

the story of Oedipus has a kind of universal resonance, that it embodies something about the tragic destiny of the whole of humanity,

I think is quite widely

believed,

perhaps in part because of the Oedipus complex, which we will be coming to in due course in this episode.

But I think it's also due to

the starring role that Oedipus has as the hero of the most famous of all Greek tragedies, which was written some three centuries after the age of Homer and Hesiod in Athens.

And

the life of its author, a man called Sophocles, spanned pretty much the whole of the fifth century BC.

And this is really the,

when people in their mind's eye conjure up an image of the golden age of Greece.

This is probably what they see, the Parthenon,

Pericles, and so on.

But it is also an age that witnesses Athens embroiled in terrible and ultimately disastrous war against its great rival, the city of Sparta.

And this play is written against the backdrop of that war.

And it massively elaborates on Homer's account, but it also kind of tweaks it.

So when we tend to think of the story of Oedipus,

it's the story as told by Sophocles that we think of, I think.

Yeah, not by Homer.

Yeah, absolutely.

And the story that Oedipus tells, I mean,

let's give it to people.

So as with Homer, so with Sophocles, we are in Thebes, seven-gated Thebes, as it's known from its seven gates.

And this is a city

30 miles north of Athens.

And it is the dominant power, so the kind of the supreme city in the region of central Greece that is called Boeotia.

And Thebes is ruled by a king called Laius, and his wife, the queen of Thebes, is called not Epicaste, as in Homer, but according to Sophocles, her name was Jocasta.

And Laius and Jocasta have a son.

And Laius consults an oracle to find out what the fortune of this young boy will be.

And the news that comes back isn't brilliant because the oracle reveals, and I quote Sophocles here, that Laius was doomed to perish at the hands of his own child, which isn't at all the kind of prognosis that you want if you're father of a young baby.

And so Laius, understandably, wants to try and foil the oracle.

And so he takes the baby from its cot and he gets a skewer and he drives the skewer through the ankles of the baby and then he hands him over to his wife Jocasta and says get rid of this child.

Jocasta

she's obedient to her husband to the degree that she gives the baby over to a household slave and orders the slave to cast the child away on the trackless mountain.

So neither Laius nor Jocasta

are ready personally to kill their child, but they're, you know, it's going down the kind of the the food chain, down the chain of command.

The slave himself can't, you know, he's got this little baby.

He can't bring himself to obey his mistress's orders.

And so he takes the baby up onto the slopes of the nearby mountain Kytheron, which is a very kind of haunted,

kind of sinister place in Greek myth.

And there he meets with a shepherd and he hands the baby over.

And the shepherd removes the skewer from the baby's ankles.

But of course, you know, if you're a baby and you have a skewer driven through your ankles, that gives a lasting injury.

And so the baby is given the name by the shepherd of Oedipus, which means in Greek, swollen foot.

And the shepherd, for a reason that is never explained, we just have to accept on trust that this is what happens,

travels with the baby Oedipus to the city of Corinth, which is just beyond the kind of the narrow isthmus that joins the Peloponnese, the southern part of Greece, to mainland Greece.

And And in Corinth, there is a king called Polybus and his wife, the queen of Corinth, Merope,

and they are childless and they are desperate for a son.

And the shepherd presents this baby, this foundling, to Polybus and Merope, and they bring Oedipus up as their own child.

And Oedipus grows up, never doubting that he is indeed the son of the king and queen.

of Corinth.

Okay, but then there's a twist, isn't there?

Because when, by the way, there was a, I saw a really weird production of Oedipus earlier this year with Ramy Malik as Oedipus.

Did you see that?

Oh, really?

Freddie Mercury.

Freddie Mercury, or the Bond villain in the last No Time to Die.

He was much better as Freddie Mercury, I thought.

He was a bit of a weird, kind of unsettling,

slightly stiff Oedipus.

But Indira Varmor played Jocasta, and she was brilliant, I have to say.

Anyway, by the way, Oedipus grows up.

He's a young man and he's out messing around in Corinth or whatever.

And some drunkard comes up to him and says, you know you're not really their son, don't you?

And Oedipus is shocked by this and he goes to see them, doesn't he?

And says, what's going on?

And they're all very upset and it's all very, you know, it's a real sort of family drama.

Well, they deny it very indignantly.

Yeah.

Very indignantly.

So again, Oedipus still has no reason to doubt that they are truly his parents.

But he is upset.

And so he does what any hero in such a situation would do.

He goes to Delphi to consult the Oracle.

And he asks Apollo, well, you know, who are my parents?

I just want to absolutely nail this down.

But Apollo doesn't answer the question.

Instead, what Apollo says is, you are doomed to kill your father and to marry your mother.

No one wants to hear that.

No.

And so Oedipus, again, to quote Sophocles, at this I took to the road, putting the stars between me and Corinth, determined never to see my home again.

Right.

So he takes the road that leads from Delphi, and instead of heading southwards to Corinth,

he reaches the fork in the road that that leads northwards towards Thebes.

Because he assumes that the prophecy is about

what we know are his adoptive parents.

Yes, exactly.

And at this fork in the road, he runs into an old man in a chariot who is escorted by a herald.

He's got various servants in attendance.

And they're coming the opposite direction from Thebes.

And they get into a massive argument.

about who has the right of way and the result is the most infamous explosion of road rage in the entire history of world literature.

The old man lashes at Oedipus with his whip.

Oedipus hits the old man with his staff and kills him.

He then attacks the old man's servants.

He kills them all, or so Oedipus thinks.

But in fact, another twist, one of the attendants does escape.

Listeners should remember this because this is key to what will happen in due course.

There is one witness to what happened at at this fork in the road.

So Oedipus has killed this old man, doesn't know who he is, listeners can probably guess who he was,

continues on his travels and in due course he approaches seven-gated Thebes.

And the city is in a state of absolute turmoil and it's been hit by twin disasters.

And the first of these is that the city's king, Laius, has been murdered.

And he was murdered while traveling to Delphi.

Wow.

Being attacked by robbers.

What a coincidence.

Or so it is reported by the only surviving witness to what had happened.

The second disaster is the fact that, as tends to happen in Greek myth, a terrifying monster has appeared on the high road that leads into the city.

And this is a female monster called the Sphinx.

And just to say,

In Sophocles' play, in his tragedy, Oedipus, this is only kind of alluded to very elliptically.

The Sphinx herself is only mentioned once, and Sophocles is clearly presuming that the people in the audience will know the story of the Sphinx.

And this often happens in tragedy.

It's assumed by the writers that this is a kind of common stock of stories that people are familiar with.

And the story of the Sphinx is basically that she is part of these terrible monsters that Hesiod had written about in the Theogony.

Hesiod says that she was a sibling of Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the underworld, and the Nemean lion, which Heracles had killed.

She had come from Ethiopia, sent to Thebes by the goddess Hera.

She had the head and breasts of a woman, the body of a lion, the wings of a giant predatory bird.

And anyone who walks by the rock on which she is crouched

has to answer a riddle.

And if they can't answer it, then they will be devoured.

And so as she sits on the rock, she is surrounded by the bones and the skulls of the hapless wayfarers who have been unable to answer her riddle.

And the riddle she asks is very famous.

So famous that Sophocles doesn't tell us what the riddle is.

But we know what it was because it was, again, it was obviously part of the story that everyone knew.

And it was written down

about 600 years after Sophocles wrote his tragedy in around kind of AD 200

in a sort of posh almanac.

And the riddle is, there walks on land a creature of two feet and four feet, which has a single voice, and it also has three feet.

Alone of the animals on earth, it changes its nature, of animals on the earth, in the sky, and in the sea.

When it walks propped on the most feet, then is the speed of its limbs least.

And again, in Sophocles' tragedy, we are not told what happens next, but again, from hints in the play, it's clearly common knowledge.

So, Dominic, the answer to that riddle is.

Is it man, Tom?

It is.

Would you like to explain why it's man?

Well, because you have a single voice and

you have

two feet

when you start.

No, you have four feet when you start.

You're a baby.

Yeah, because you're walking on, you have four feet when you start because you're walking on hands and, you know, you're kind of crawling.

Then you have two feet, then you have have three feet because you have a stick or something of that kind surely uh and then you when you you're you're slowest when you're when you're a baby yeah exactly what an amazing riddle that is it's an amazing riddle um oedipus because he's a hero he he susses it gives the right answer to the sphinx the sphinx is so depressed that her riddle's been answered that she hurls herself off a cliff right um and that's the end of her and A reward has been kind of proclaimed that anyone who can get rid of the Sphinx will get to marry Laius' widow, Jocaster.

And so Oedipus has got rid of the Sphinx and so he duly marries Jocasta and he rules in Laius's place as

kind of the king,

kind of the king, but we'll come to exactly what his status is in due course.

I'll tell you what's very unfortunate for Oedipus is that he doesn't clearly doesn't resemble either Laius or Jocasta because it doesn't occur to anybody that they might be in any way related.

But why would they?

They might look similar.

Yeah, well, kind of particularly long chin or something.

Yeah, like a Habsburg inheritance or something maybe anyway i i think that the plot of this is something you don't want to look at too closely it progresses with a terrible inexorability if you don't look too closely at the joins so oedipus has become king and he rules very very well um and the people of thebes are very grateful to him not just because you know he's got rid of the sphinx but also because he's a a just um ruler He wins the loyalty of the foremost men of Thebes, which includes Jocasta's brother Creon.

The city's elders, they salute him as the first of men, whether in the daily affairs of mortal life or in the dealings of mortals with the more than mortal.

He and Jocasta have a very happy marriage.

They have four children, so two sons, Etiocles and Polyneses, and two daughters, Antigone and Ismene.

And everything seems to be going brilliantly.

But then, Dominic, disaster.

in the form of a terrible plague which sweeps Thebes.

And it's evident that this can only mean that the gods are angry with Thebes, with someone in Thebes, perhaps, that some terrible crime has been committed.

This is where the play starts, isn't it?

And the rest is flashbacks.

It begins, so Oedipus sends his brother-in-law Creon to Delphi to try and find out why the gods are angry.

And Creon returns with the report of what is wrong.

And this is where the play starts.

So

Creon's report of what Apollo has revealed is that Thebes is polluted by the murderer of King Laius, who had never been caught.

And specifically, Apollo has declared this unclean creature, the murderer, must be driven into exile before he destroys us all.

And so Oedipus says, fine, it is my duty as king to play the detective and to track down Laius' murderer.

as well as being a tragedy,

Sophocles' play is also the first great detective story.

And that's a huge part of what makes it so gripping.

So, how is he going to investigate what's been going on?

Well, there is a top intelligence source in Thebes, and this is a man, although he hasn't always been a man, called Tiresias.

And Tiresias had a very, very eventful life.

So,

as a young man, he'd been strolling in the environment beyond Thebes, and he'd come across two copulating snakes, and he'd hit them with his staff.

Unfortunately,

these snakes turn out to have been sacred to Hera, the queen of the gods.

And so she punishes him.

And I'm using the word there that the Greeks would have used by turning him into a woman for seven years.

So for seven years, he lives as a woman, and then he gets turned back into a man.

So that's very contemporary, isn't it?

But at the end of these seven years,

he now has the opportunity to solve a question that i think is playing on you know has often played on people's minds so um herea and zeus have been having one of their domestics one of their rows and the argument is about whether men or women enjoy sex more and hera says well obviously men enjoy it more and zeus says no no the ladies enjoy it more they get they get all the blame he's speaking from experience

Cyrusius uniquely can pronounce on this and he says the ladies do enjoy it more, you know.

Um, and uh, Hera doesn't want to hear this at all, does she?

She's outraged by this, and she now punishes him again.

Oh my gosh, by striking him blind, yeah, yeah, so he's having a very bad deal from Hera, but Zeus compensates him by making him giving he's a prophet, he can see into the, you know, he's he's got the second sight or whatever, yes, exactly.

He can see into the future and all kinds of things, and he understands things that most mortals don't.

So, he seems ideal to solve the crime, and so this is why Oedipus sends for him.

And Oedipus says, okay, Taius, you know, you're so smart.

You know things that are hidden from the rest of us.

Who is the murderer?

And Tairesius, for understandable reasons, refuses to answer.

Oedipus loses his temper and says, well, the only reason you're not telling me must be because you are complicit in the murder.

To which Tairesius responds in one of the most chilling lines in the whole of drama.

You yourself are the killer you seek.

And Oedipus doesn't understand what he's saying.

And Tiresias then says that, you know, blind though I am, you are blinder still.

And in that, there is a kind of ominous portending of what is to come.

Yep.

So Oedipus is furious.

Jocasta, his wife, tries to calm him down.

And she does this by saying, look, you can't rely on prophets.

You know, sometimes they get things wrong.

And And as an example of this, she cites the prophecy that she and Laius have been given, and which she says obviously hadn't come true.

You know,

Laius was told that he would be killed by his son, but he wasn't killed by his son.

He was killed by bandits at a fork in the road.

And at the mention of the fork in the road, Oedipus does a double take.

So presumably, this has never been mentioned before to Oedipus.

It's the first he's heard of it.

And so he then asks Jocasta to describe Laius, which Jocasta does.

And her description of her dead husband throws Oedipus into a massive panic.

And when he's told that actually a witness to the attack had survived and that this is how the news had come back, he orders this witness to be sent for.

And Oedipus then tells Jocasta about his road rage incident at the T-junction, the old man, the chariot, all of that.

And Jocasta turns completely white and looks at him in absolute horror just to say if you ever get a chance to see oedipus to the listeners this scene is absolutely i mean it is absolutely hypnotic the sort of sense of dread as the two of them start to realize um what you know the reality of their relationship i mean it's if it's done if it's a good production it is a brilliant brilliant scene it's like a kind of um a machine of torture pressing in closer and closer and take getting the victim tighter and tighter in its coils.

It's terrifying.

So both of them are kind of on the cusp of arriving at an understanding of what has happened.

And then there is another twist.

A messenger arrives from Corinth with news that Polybus, the man, the king, who Oedipus believes is his father, has died.

And to everyone's surprise, Oedipus isn't upset about this at all.

He's delighted.

And when people say, well, you know, what's going on?

Why are you delighted that your father's died?

He explains about the prophecy he'd had from Delphi and says, well, now at least I don't have to worry about killing my father.

There is, though, still

the possibility that he might, as you know, if the prophecy is true, end up sleeping with Merope,

the queen of Corinth, who he thinks is his mother.

But the messenger then says, oh, you don't need to worry about that.

It's fine.

Merope, the queen of Corinth, she's not your mother.

And Oedipus again goes completely pale and says well you know what do you mean how do you know this

and the messenger reveals that he is the very same shepherd who'd been given the infant oedipus on the slopes of mount kitheron by jocasta's slave and had then given the baby to polybus and merope to be fostered by them what are the chances yeah massive chance yeah and now that the twists and the coincidences are coming fast and furious because when the man that oedipus had sent for the the guy who had you know the sole survivor of the road raid incident at the fork in the road.

When he turns up, he turns out to be Jocasta's slave, the man who'd been given, you know, the baby boy with the skewer through his ankles to take up onto Mount Kytheron.

And again, people may think, well, this is a bit much of, you know, a bit too much of a coincidence.

Actually, this is less of a coincidence.

It's pointed out by Edith Hall.

in a brilliant essay that as a slave the man would have been constantly in attendance on his royal owners so it's perfectly plausible if I could use that word in connection with this story, that he would have, you know, if he's a trusted slave, he would have been given the task of disposing of the baby and he would have been on attendance

on Laius as he's traveling to Delphi.

So that bit perhaps you know, more credible.

Oedipus is saying to this slave, you know, tell me what happened.

And like Tiresias, the slave doesn't want to talk.

You know, he can't bring himself to reveal it.

Oedipus then threatens him with torture.

And at this point, the truth comes out.

out and the slave reveals that he'd been given this baby by Jocasta.

So this is the point when there's no escaping the reality.

And Agnorisis, the Greeks called it.

It's the kind of the moment of recognition.

The old man Oedipus has stayed at the fork in the road was Laius, Oedipus' own father.

Jocasta, his queen, the mother of his four children.

is his own mother.

And as in the account that you opened with from Homer in the Odyssey, so in Sophocles, Jocasta hangs herself.

And Oedipus, and this is a detail that's not in Homer, goes to see the hanging body of his wife, stroke mother.

And she's wearing two golden brooches that are kind of pinning up her dress.

And he removes these brooches and he stabs the points into his eyes.

And so that's where the, you know, Tiresias had warned him, you are blinder than I am.

Oedipus is now literally blind.

And Creon, his brother-in-law's stroke uncle, tells Oedipus, your reign is over.

I am now going to rule in Thebes.

And the play ends with, so every tragedy has a chorus.

And the chorus at the end of Oedipus' tragedy laments the horror of what has happened.

None can truly be called happy, they say, until that day when he bears his happiness down to the grave in peace.

And I notice in your notes, you talk about, you know, not just that it's an emotionally kind of devastating story, but you talk about how taut and compressed it is.

And that's actually the thing that really struck me about it, seeing the recent production.

I think it was the old Vic.

The sort of sense of claustrophobia.

It's one of these classic examples of a play that is set over a very short space of time, because it's just a series of conversations.

It's in the same place, a very small group of characters.

And you just have the sense from the very outset of the walls beginning to close in.

You know, there's no escape from it.

There's an intensity to it and a sort of a terrifying kind of hypnotic quality to what unfolds.

Yeah.

And it was these qualities that led Aristotle, the great philosopher, who wrote a lost book about comedy, which Umberto Echo fans will recognize that in the name of the rose,

but also a famous work on tragedy.

And he praised Oedipus as being the greatest of all tragedies and providing the model of what a tragedy should be.

And in the 16th century,

Renaissance theorists kind of summed up what Aristotle admired about Oedipus as the three unities.

So unity of place, it's in the, you know, one location, unity of time, so you're not jumping around all over the place.

The plot of Oedipus is compressed within, you know, what you see is what you get.

And unity of action, i.e.

there shouldn't be loads of kind of mad subplots taking you off.

Yeah.

So it's the model of a tragedy, but it is, you you know, as we said, it's the first great detective story.

And the twist, you know, it's worthy of Agatha Christie, the detective investigating a crime who discovers that he himself is the criminal.

And the mad thing is, is that these tragedies were staged as part of a competition.

Sophocles only won a second prize.

Imagine how good that top play must have been.

Mind, I mean, brilliant.

It didn't survive.

And I would say that the classists today agree with Aristotle that it's number one.

So again, to quote Edith Hall, who is an excellent critic, Domino.

She once complimented you on something.

Possibly.

Oh, come on.

That's, yeah.

She described Sophocles as this definitive tragedy.

Well, people can, I mean, people can discount that if she's been dissing out praise to lesser authors.

Anyway, it is a great tragedy.

She may have mentioned that my translation of Herodotus was excellent.

Oh, come on.

I can't believe you said that explicitly.

You hinted at it, and then that wasn't enough for you.

And you want, I mean, why don't you just read it out?

Why don't you read out the review?

Well, it's in the spirit of Oedipus.

It's the bombshell revelation.

People often let themselves down in this podcast, but nobody's let themselves down as badly as you have there.

Right, on that bombshell, we will explore what it all means because Sophocles, of course, is not the only writer to have talked about Oedipus.

The most famous writer.

probably even more famous than Sophocles, Tom, because I guess a lot of people today are not experts in Greek tragedy don't know about Sophocles.

The most famous writer was a psychoanalyst from Vienna.

And after the break, we'll be exploring what that gentleman had to say.

Come back after the break.

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As with my patients, so with myself, I have identified love of the mother and jealousy of the father, and I believe it now to be a general phenomenon of early childhood.

So that was Sigmund Freud writing on the 15th of October 1897.

And at that point, he had been working for two years on his most groundbreaking book, which was called The Interpretation of Dreams.

And Freud was pondering the mysteries of the subconscious.

He believed that people had in the attic, in the cupboard, all kinds of unacknowledged fears and anxieties and desires, including sexual desires.

And Freud had come to believe that in the story of Oedipus, he had found a key to unlocking some of the darkest secrets of the human mind.

Two years later, when he published The Interpretation of Dreams, Oedipus's story featured very prominently in it, didn't it, Tom?

It did.

So to quote him, Oedipus's destiny moves us only because it might have been ours.

because the oracle laids the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him.

It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother

and our first hatred and our first murderous fish against our father.

Our dreams convince us that this is so.

Now, personally, I feel that the word perhaps in that has been quite a lot of heavy lifting.

But this was not the opinion of Freud's admirers.

So on his 50th birthday, which was the 6th of May 1906, his fans presented him with this kind of medallion.

And on one side, there was

an image of Freud in profile.

And on the other, there was an image of Oedipus with the Sphinx.

That's such a strange present to receive, isn't it?

No, not if you're Freud.

Because

beneath Oedipus, they had put a quotation from Sophocles' play, he who knew the famed riddle and was a man most mighty.

So aligning Oedipus with Freud.

And in 1910, Freud coined the most famous phrase in the whole of psychoanalysis.

I mean, one of the most famous phrases to have been, to have emerged from the 20th century, the Oedipus complex.

And, you know, it remains part of pop culture to this day, all this kind of, oh, tell me about your mother kind of kind of stuff.

So.

That takes us to the question about this story of Oedipus.

Is it specific?

Is it distinctively Greek?

Does it come from a particular historical time and place?

Or, as Freud believed, is it expressing something universal about the human condition?

So in other words, something that was as true in Vienna in the 1890s as it was in classical Athens.

And most people, I think,

take the attitude, don't they, that myths are timeless, that they express something that is, you know, it looks different at different time periods, but it's always there.

And the Oedipus complex will always be with us because it's part of being human.

But I'm going to guess that you don't think that.

Well, I mean, just to say that that assumption on Freud's part that it embodies timeless truths about the nature of the human subconscious is part of a much broader trend in Western culture, really reaching back to the Romantic period, that, as you say, that myth embodies kind of timeless truths.

If you can only fathom what they mean.

you will crack the riddle of what it is to be human.

And it's something that you see, I mean, you've said in Romanticism, but also say in existentialism.

So Camus was all over it.

Camus or T.S.

Eliot and modernism, you know, that myths are still with us in different forms.

And it appeals to people across the political spectrum.

So the Nazis, you know, they were all into that idea, but so have kind of New Age, you know, all that kind of stuff.

So

it's a very kind of fundamental conviction.

As you say, I do not think that

myth is timeless.

And

even if its power can transcend history, because there's no question that to sit down and watch Sophocles, if you get a good production, as

you did, I mean, it is incredibly powerful still.

But the tragedy itself emerges from very precise and distinctive historical contexts.

And I think that the story of Oedipus is a perfect illustration of this, because Sophocles, when he wrote it, was not...

I don't think he was channeling the secret impulses of his subconscious at all.

You know, that play could not have been written in Fantasie Ecna Vienna.

It could only have been written in the democracy of fifth century Athens.

And we'll come to that in a moment, how Sophocles' tragedy is a play at least as much about Athens as it is about Thebes.

But before we do that, just to dwell on one key thing that explains the myth of Oedipus.

Although Sophocles' tragedy, as we've been saying, is very tight, very claustrophobic, it absolutely does not exist in isolation.

Oedipus is just the single character in the great sweep of a famous epic.

So, in our previous episode, we talked about how Zeus had sponsored two terrible wars, which had the aim of wiping out the race of the heroes, and how the Trojan War was one of these, but the other was an earlier conflict.

And we quoted Hesiod, the war before seven-gated Thebes as rivals fought over the flocks of Oedipus.

But this is a four-generational death struggle.

And And it begins, as myths in Greece tend to begin, with a rape, with the abduction by Zeus of a Phoenician princess called Europa.

And Zeus notoriously disguises himself as a bull, appears on the beach outside the city of Tyre.

And Europa is a princess.

from Tyre and she clambers on the bull's back and the bull then plunges into the sea and swims away to Crete And there Europa stays and she gives birth to three sons.

And the most famous of these is Minos, as in

the story of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth and Daedalus and all of that.

Europa has a brother called Cadmus, the prince of Tyre.

And Cadmus is sent by their father to go and search for Europa.

And he travels to Greece and he comes to Delphi and he asks for help.

and Apollo says, you're never going to find her.

Give up your quest.

Instead, what you should do is to go and find a cow that has a half moon on the flank

and then apollo says you are to found a city where this heifer by divine inspiration falls to the ground stretching out her weary hooves

and so cadmus finds this cow follows it uh to bootia where the cow duly lies down and cadmus knows that this is where he must found his city and you can only find a city by offering a sacrifice to the gods.

So he is preparing to sacrifice the cow to the gods.

But to do that, first of all, he needs to purify himself.

And so he looks for a spring, finds one, but horror, the spring is guarded by a giant serpent sacred to Ares, the god of war.

Cadmus fights and kills the serpent.

Athena then appears to him and says, take the teeth of this serpent, the dragon's teeth, and sow them.

which

Cadmus obediently does.

And from these teeth sprout mighty warriors who are known as the Spartoi, which literally means the sown ones.

The Spartoi are about to attack Cadmus when he reaches down for a stone and throws the stone into the middle of the assembled throng of the Spartoi.

The Spartoi get furious about this, all start attacking each other.

They all get wiped out except for five.

And these five surviving members of the Spartoi help Cadmus to build the citadel of his new city, which is called Thebes, and they father the city's five most distinguished dynasties.

So the Thebans live in the city founded by Cadmus, which is why in that passage of Homer that you quoted at the beginning of this episode, they're called Cadmaeans.

And Thebes goes on to be a great city, doesn't it?

It does, yes.

What I don't understand is, so Cadmus killed the serpent, which was sacred to Aries.

And so that was seen as poor form from Cadmus.

Well, it is, it's seen as poor form by Ares.

Oh, by Aries, okay, right.

So I mean, poor form on Cadmus's part.

So his descendants then carry this a bit of a curse.

But what I don't understand is, surely this story was told by the Thebans themselves, because it's their origin myth.

So why would they tell a story in which they look bad?

The canonical accounts that we have are Athenian.

And so we'll be looking at the implications of...

So this is Athenian propaganda?

Not entirely.

I mean, clearly, this is a very, very ancient story.

And people from cities are prepared to tell bad things

their ancestors.

I mean, Cadmus is a hero.

Killing the serpent is a great feat, but it's just bad luck that this serpent was sacred to Ares.

I mean, it's like Tiresias striking the snakes that turn out to be sacred to Hera.

You never know when you're going to offend a god.

That's part of the jeopardy.

You know, it's like a kind of computer game where you pick up the wrong thing and all kinds of disasters happen.

That's basically what's happened to Cadmus.

So you don't even, you don't play computer games.

No, I don't.

I'm trying to give a kind of, you know,

populist spin on it.

But the ones I have, I kind of remember that thing happening.

So the dynasty of Cadmus, for that reason, is under a kind of shadow, as royal dynasties in Greek myths invariably are.

So Oedipus, for instance, is doubly descended from Cadmus.

So one of Cadmus' children is a girl called Agave,

and she in turn has a son who is called Pentheus.

And we will be hearing what happens to them in the next episode.

Oh, that's an exciting little hint.

It's nothing good.

Okay.

So Pentheus has grandchildren and we have met them.

One of them is Jocasta, the mother or wife of Oedipus and Crion, Oedipus' uncle, stroke, brother-in-law.

Laius, Oedipus's father, is also a descendant of Cadmus, and he's actually a very, very bad man.

So when he was young,

he'd gone to the Peloponnese.

and he had been employed by a king in the Peloponnese to teach a prince called Chrysippus how to drive a chariot.

And Laius had raped the young Chrysippus.

And Laius is the first ever male rapist of a boy.

And this is the man who in old age will be murdered in his chariot by his own son.

So

maybe an element of karma there.

Yeah.

So there are all kinds of horrors that have preceded the reign of Oedipus.

And equally, there are lots of horrors that will follow it.

So we have a fragment from an epic poem that was written shortly after the time of Homer and Hesiod.

And it describes Oedipus laying a curse on his two sons, Polynices and Etiocles.

And these lines, he prayed to Zeus and the other immortals that by each other's hands, they would go down into Hades.

So he's praying that Eticles and Polynices will kill each other.

And so it comes to pass, because according to this tradition, Etocles and Polynices, after Oedipus has left Thebes, you know, blinded, they share the rule of Thebes, but it doesn't work out.

Etocles succeeds in expelling Polynices from the city.

Polynices is furious about this, wants to have revenge.

So he goes to Argos, he recruits a great army there, lots of heroes, and he appoints seven captains to lead the assault on Thebes, one for each of the city's seven gates.

And all save one of these die in the great battle that then follows.

And Aetacles and Polynices meet in single combat and they kill each other and so it is that oedipus's curse is fulfilled but even that is not the end of the bloodshed because a generation later there is another mass bout of slaughter because polynices son back in argos a guy called thesander recruits another army the sons of the seven against thebes they rally to his cause and they succeed where their fathers had failed and they capture Thebes.

And among these, so among one of the sons of the seven, is one of the most famous of the Greek warriors who ends up fighting on the plain of Troy.

And this is Diomedes, who appears in the Iliad and is the great friend of Odysseus.

But we know about Odysseus, we know about Troy and all of that stuff because of the Iliad.

Greeks, however, I guess, would have known just as much about these battles for Thebes.

But because those stories have not endured, they seem very obscure to us.

Is that right?

Yeah, the stories from Homer, the stories about the wars in front of the walls of thebes these are part of the common stock of literary material that people are familiar with and definitely

people in athens know all about it and so at the end of the sixth century bc

the athenians invent this novel literary form called drama

the fact that you have not just Homer's epics, but you have all these stories that are told about Thebes.

I mean, it makes it, you know, it's like an enormous quarry that they can get to work on and kind of extracting material for their plays.

And so Sophocles is not the only great tragedian to have written on a Theban theme.

There are two other great Athenian tragedians, Aeschylus and Euripides, and they do exactly the same.

And I think the appeal of the story, aside from providing, you know, material for good plays,

is twofold.

And the first is that any play that makes the Thebans look bad is absolute catnip to the Athenians.

The Athenians hate the Thebans.

So Thebes and Athens are only 30 miles apart.

And because there's a history, isn't there, of massive bad blood between them.

So the Thebans had actually invaded in 506 and tried to basically strangle the Athenian democracy at birth.

And actually, this had been a massive moment in Athenian history because the Athenians won.

And this was the sort of foundational moment of their new sort of political system, right?

Their political experiment.

So quite like the Battle of Valmy for the French revolutionaries, kind of marching out to defend their novel political system.

Their exciting cannons or whatever it was.

Yes.

But the Athenians defeat the Thebans and this is seen as the foundational moment where the democracy is secured.

And then in 480, when the Persians invade, again, the Thebans block their copybook by siding with the Persians rather than with with the alliance between Athens and Sparta because the Thebans hate the Athenians much more than they fear the Persians.

And then in 431, when this great war breaks out between Athens and Sparta, the first engagement in that war isn't actually between the Athenians and the Spartans, it's between the Athenians and the Thebans.

And so when Thebes is portrayed on the Athenian stage as this sink of impiety and crime and incest and, you know, fratricide and so on, Obviously, the element of propaganda there is very strong

because the Sophocles plays and all the plays, people are not going to see them in the way that we would go.

People are not going there to take in a show or something like that.

Paul Cartlidge, who's written brilliantly, not just on Athens, but on Thebes as well, he describes this festival of drama as a festival of democratic liberation.

The idea that the democracy has held its independence against Theban invasion is an important aspect of what people are expecting to see kind of illustrated on the stage.

And it's a massive civic occasion.

You have maybe,

the highest estimate would be 15,000 people attending it, which would be maybe half the entire citizen body of Athens, with, I guess, the sole exception of the Olympic Games.

It would be the largest single gathering of citizens anywhere in

the Greek world.

And, you know, it is a celebration of the democracy, of Athens, and of the relationship that Athens and her citizens have with the gods.

And so that is a crucial part of it.

And sometimes the propagandistic element of tragedy is very, very overt.

So there is another play that Sophocles wrote about Oedipus, and it was the very last one he wrote.

And in it, Sophocles shows the very aged Oedipus, so he's still in exile from Thebes, being given sanctuary from his native city by the Athenians.

And the place of his refuge and ultimately of his grave is a village in Attica called Colonos, which was Sophocles' own birthplace.

And before he dies, Oedipus promises the Athenians that he will provide protection to them.

You know, as a dead hero, his spirit will, well, quote, quote, Sophocles will provide the Athenians with a defence, a bulwark stronger than many shields and spears of massed allies.

And this play, Oedipus at Colonus, was Sophocles' last, and it was produced posthumously

in 401 BC, four years after Sophocles had died.

And by this time, the great war with Sparta was over and Athens had been defeated.

And so it's not surprising, I think, that Sophocles against that backdrop, as kind of almost his last will and testament, would have written for his fellow citizens a play in which the legend of Oedipus offers the Athenians a message of hope and reassurance.

But it's not just propaganda though, is it the Oedipus story?

I completely take your point that there's kind of anti-theban propaganda to it.

But when you go to see the play or if you read it, if you read a really good translation,

you know, it has an emotional intensity and a power and a kind of profundity

that still speaks to you.

I mean, as it spoke to Sigmund Freud.

I mean, it's not, you don't have to be a complete Freudian to see that

there is a kind of universality to it.

Yeah, and I think that if the Athenians had just used, you know, their great festival of drama to say, aren't we brilliant?

You know, aren't the Thebans awful?

Then no one today would find the masterpieces of Athenian tragedy in any way moving or unsettling.

And you're absolutely right that, say, Oedipus is much more than just an exercise in point scoring against Thebes.

Because what you see in it, I think,

is

a playwright who is

kind of very, very boldly, fearlessly almost, stress-testing his most fundamental conviction.

There is no doubt he hugely respected the gods.

He was famous for his quality of Eusebia, as the Greeks called it, his piety, his devotion to the gods.

Equally, as a poet who is drawing on the great masterpieces, particularly of Homer, but also the epics, talking about Theban history, he is happy to kind of tweak it, to adapt it, to shape it to his own needs, but he can't jettison it completely.

He has too much respect for that kind of legacy from the past.

And so, when in the Odyssey, that passage that you read, Homer describes the incest and the horrors of

reign as the expression of what Homer calls the god's dire plan.

This is a framing that Sophocles feels duty-bound to honour.

But as we've seen, he doesn't just honour it.

I mean, he ratchets the tension of it up to a completely excruciating degree.

And because Oedipus is shown playing the detective, the audience comes to share in the horror of Oedipus' discovery far more intently than if Sophocles had opted not to write it as a kind of whodunit.

Sophocles is deliberately making the impact of Oedipus's discovery as appalling as he possibly can.

And so we finish the play in no doubt that Oedipus had committed his crimes of parricide and incest utterly unwittingly.

and had done so in obedience to the plans of the gods.

But equally, we're left in no doubt that his offence is against laws that are timeless and eternal and sacred.

And Sophocles describes these laws as begotten in the clear ether of heaven, fathered by Olympus alone.

Nothing touched by the mortal is their parent, nor shall oblivion ever lull them to sleep.

So

the horror of it is the expression of timeless divine laws that all mortals are bound to honor.

Yeah.

But at the same time, we

feel desperately sorry for Oedipus because we recognize this isn't really his fault, that he is the prisoner of the gods and of laws that he...

I was going to say he doesn't understand.

He does understand, but he's the prisoner of a kind of cosmic inevitability in which he is merely a plaything, a pawn.

Right.

And although Oedipus is obviously a Theban, he is also a mortal who is trapped in the toils of a terrifying divine plan.

And the Athenians sitting there watching it know this.

They know that they're not just watching Athan.

They're watching someone who is immortal as they are.

And I think what Sophocles is doing in Oedipus is something very, very bold because he's offering his fellow citizens

kind of subtle reflections on where Athens is,

how their political

order functions

through the prism of their oldest enemy, Thebes.

And you can see this in the echoes of the political circumstances that Athens is facing at the time when Sophocles is putting on his tragedy.

So remember, what prompts Oedipus to send the messenger to Delphi, which kind of sets in train the whole

tragedy, is the fact that there is a plague raging through the city.

Now, he might have got this from the opening of the Iliad, where likewise there is a plague.

But I think it's unlikely, because in the Iliad, the plague is raging in an army encampment.

This is not what is happening in Oedipus.

In Oedipus, the plague is raging in a city.

And this is almost certainly an echo of a terrible plague that had hit Athens in 49 BC, kept returning year after year.

I think, you know, assuming the play is staged after 429,

Athenians sitting there watching it would immediately be struck by the parallel.

There is another parallel, I think, that is also there as a ghostly presence.

So the name by which his play is best known, Oedipus Rex, obscures the fact that in Greece, the name is Oedipus Tyrannos.

And Tyrannos is not a king.

So our word tyrant comes from it.

It's not exactly a tyrant, but it's someone who has

an autocratic degree of power over the entire city.

He can use that for good or he can use it for bad.

It's a bit like a Roman dictator, maybe?

A Roman dictator has a kind of legal sanction behind him.

A Tyrannos doesn't.

And Oedipus is a man who rules as a Tyrannos because he's defeated the Sphinx.

He's hailed by his fellow citizens.

They want him installed.

But he's not ruling as a king in the way that Laius had done by virtue of descent from Cadmus, even though, in fact, as it turns out, Oedipus is descended from Cadmus.

And there is a similar figure in Athens at this time, Amatis Pericles,

the great leader of the democracy, who is seen by his enemies as a kind of Tyrannos.

So I think that the echoes there would have been sufficient to rouse in the guys who are sat there watching Oedipus for the first time a really unsettling reflection, which essentially is, what if the laws of the gods and the laws of a mortal city

even a city as devoted to the gods as Athens, and Athens is a famously god-devoted city.

What if these two

frameworks of law cannot be reconciled?

And do you think this also reflects the political turbulence of the Peloponnesian War?

Are we in the middle of the Peloponnesian War at this point?

Yes, we're in the Peloponnesian War.

Which Athens loses, right?

Exactly.

So I think that's a very, very

unsettling concept.

the idea that the laws by which men live and the laws by that govern the heavens and which are ordained by the gods, that they're not necessarily complementary.

And it's an issue that Sophocles had already pondered in an earlier play.

And this is one that had also taken Thebes as its setting.

And this is a play called Antigone, and it's named after one of the two daughters that Oedipus had had with Jocasta.

And it's set in the wake of Oedipus's exile.

and the war between Oedipus's two sons, Aeticles and Polyneices, who remember Polyneces had led the seven against Thebes, and Aeticles and Polyneses had died died fighting one another in front of the walls of Thebes.

And

Antigone, Sophocles' first surviving play with a Theban setting, opens with both brothers, Aetacles and Polynices, dead before the walls of their city.

But only Aetacles, because he had been defending Thebes, is to be afforded proper burial.

And this is decreed by Creon, their uncle, the brother of Jocaster, who is now ruling as king.

And he says, Polyneices, because he had brought a foreign army against Thebes, you know, he is not to be given a proper burial.

He's to be left

as food for dogs and birds.

And he says, furthermore, that even to mourn this traitor against his native city will mean death for whoever mourns him.

So he issues this decree in his role as king of Thebes.

He is the arbiter of the law in the city.

But

his edict does not satisfy everyone in Thebes that it is legal.

And

the person who feels this most strongly is Creon's niece, Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, who defies Creon and casts dust on Polynesius' corpse so that he will then be able to cross the sticks and reach Ades.

In earlier versions of the myth, she'd been a very, very marginal figure.

So Lowell Edmondson has written a wonderful book on Oedipus.

He compares her to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

In Stoppard's play, The Peripheral Characters from Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Dead, become the focus of the tragedy.

It's a wonderful way of demonstrating how Antigone's centrality in this tragedy is something very, seems to be very, very novel.

Antigone completely takes centre stage, and she's brought before Creon.

And Antigone openly defies him.

I do not believe your laws, you being only a man, sufficient to overrule divine ordinances, unwritten and unfailing as they are.

So she's standing up for the divine law that you should bury your brother.

And Creon is standing up for the civic law, the law of man.

And he wins, right?

Because it's a tragedy.

Antigone defies him.

Well, he seems to win.

She's, what, walled up in a tomb?

So,

and she hangs herself.

She does hang herself.

But Cron loses as well because his son, who'd been betrothed to Antigone, he commits suicide.

And so does Creon's queen.

She kills herself.

So the ruin by the end of the play is completely total.

And you have a chorus who, as at the end of Oedipus, has witnessed this tragedy.

And they draw the seeming lesson, the chiefest part of happiness is wisdom, that and not to insult the gods.

But, you know, I mean, I think it's hard.

in light of the the utter devastation that has been visited on the house of oedipus and of the divine order that had sanctioned it, that this is kind of inadequate as

a resolution.

And I think that what Sophocles is doing

is exploring contradictions in the stories told of the gods and their relationship to the heroes that had never before been exposed so remorselessly.

So what Sophocles is doing in Antigone is emphasizing that there are essentially two frameworks of law, that one is mortal, it derives from human legislators, and it exists because it has been written down.

You can consult it.

The other is divine.

It lacks an author and it cannot be put into writing.

And the implications of this for the gods, who will destroy humans no matter what laws they draw up, if it offends their framework of laws,

in Antigone, they are

framed as being simultaneously kind of whimsical but guardians of divine purpose they are

you know they could seem amoral or very sternly moral depending on your perspective they could seem arbitrary or wholly just and there is a massive tension there that the tragedy is unable to resolve and that's why there are so many arguments about who the hero is of of Antigone.

Is it Antigone?

Is it Creon?

I mean,

who is right?

Maybe it's possible that neither are right.

And that, I think, is the power of the tragedy.

And you can only imagine that for the citizens of a city that is in a terrible war, that is suffering from plague,

you know, these are really, really pressing questions.

Yeah, of course.

Because if things are going badly for them, might that not be?

Because this is the verdict of the gods, because they have in some way transgressed, as Oedipus did, in a way for which they're not entirely responsible, right?

That they've transgressed without knowing it, as he did.

Absolutely.

And the further implication, which Sophocles, as a very pious man, doesn't dwell on, is it kind of raises the question that you, you know, you began the series with, which is,

well, if the tension between

the laws given by the gods and the laws given by mortals is so excruciating.

Is it possible that the stories that are told about the gods, that they're not actually authentic.

Yeah, if they're not written down in scripture, but just written down by human beings and there are competing versions, might the implication of that not be that they are literary concoctions rather than expressing timeless truths?

You know, we'll explore how many people kind of worry about this.

I mean, I don't think that most people in the theater watching Antigone or Oedipus or whatever.

are worrying particularly about this.

I think one of the features of the Greek mind is the ability to kind of hold completely contradictory notions in the head at the same time.

I don't think it's just the Greeks think everybody can do that.

Yeah, it's not.

But there are definitely people in the audience watching Sophocles' plays and watching other tragedies and comedies as well who are starting to worry about this question.

And in our next episode, we will be looking at one of those people, and he is another great tragedian called Euripides.

And we will be looking at one one of his plays in particular, a play called The Backeye, which features all kinds of frolics in woods and violent dismemberings and a spot of transvestism.

Wow, that's so much to look forward to.

So if you're a club member, can you hear that right away, Tom?

You absolutely can.

Oh, that's good news.

And if what if you want to, you're not a member of the club, but you wanted to join the club, where would you go?

You would go to therestishistory.com.

Yeah, and loads of benefits, I understand.

Loads of amazing benefits and a chat community and everyone loves a chat community.

Right, on that bombshell, we will return next week with more thrilling Greek myths.

Bye-bye.

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