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

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So for your chance to see us on stage, live in Belfast, Dublin, or Cork, simply head to therestishistory. Com to get your tickets. Then I saw the mother of Edipus, the beautiful Epikaste, 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 Cadmains as Lord, all through the God's 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 her hind. So that was Homer in The Odyssey. Translation is by Daniel Mendelsohn, who was in one of our recent Restes 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 literature of how Eedipus, the king of the Cadmeans, 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 world.

Now, Eedipus, he's not one 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. This is partly because the story seems so horrific to us, doesn't it? Kept 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 Eedipus has a 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 Eedipus 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 Eedipus has as the hero of the most famous of all Greek tragedies, which was written Some three centuries after the age of Homer and Hesia in Athens. The life of its author, a man called Sofocleys, spanned pretty much the whole of the fifth century BC. This is really when people in their mind's eye counter 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, imbroiled in terrible and ultimately disastrous war against its great rival, the city of Sparta. This play is written against the backdrop of that war, and it massively elaborate on home as a out, but it also tweaks it. When we tend to think of the story of Edipus, it's the story as told by Sofocleys that we think of, I think.

Yeah, not by Homer. Yeah, absolutely. The story that Eedipus tells, let's give it to people. As with Homer, so with Sofocleys, we are in Thebes, seven-gated Thebes, as it's known from its seven gates. This is a city 30 miles north of Athens, and it is the dominant power, so the the Supreme city in the region of Central Greece that is called Biosha. Thebes is ruled by a king called Laus, and his wife, the Queen of Thebes, is called not Epikaste as in Homer, but according to Sofocleys, her name was Jocasta. Laus and Jocasta have a son, and Laos consults an oracle to find out what the fortune of this young boy will be. The news that comes back isn't brilliant because the oracle reveals, and I quote Sofocleys here, that Laos was doomed to perish at the hands of his own child, which isn't at all the prognosis that you want if you're father of a young baby. And so Laes, 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 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 Laeus nor Jocasta are ready personally to kill their child. But it's going down the food chain, down the chain of command. The slave himself can't... He's got this little baby. He can't bring himself to obey his mistress's orders. And so he He takes the baby up onto the slopes of the nearby mountain Katheron, which is a very haunted, sinister place in Greek myth. There he meets with a shepherd and he hands the baby over. The shepherd removes the skewer from the baby's ankles. But of course, if you're a baby and you have a skewer driven through your ankles, that gives a lasting injury. The baby is given the name by the shepherd of Eedipus, which means in Greek, swollen foot. 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 Eedipus to the city of Korynth, which is just beyond the narrow ischmas that joins the Pelop the Southern part of Greece, to Mainland, Greece.

In Korynth, there is a king called Polybus and his wife, the Queen of Korynth, Merope, and they are childless and they are desperate for a son. The shepherd presents this baby, this foundling, to Polybus and Merope, and they bring Edipus up as their own child. And Edipus grows up never doubting that he is indeed the son of the king and queen of Corinthians.

Okay, but then there's a twist, isn't it? Because when... By the way, I saw a really weird production of Edipus early this year with Rami Malik as Edipus. 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, unsettling, slightly stiff Edipus. But Indira Vama played Jocasta, and she was brilliant, I have to say. Anyway, by the way, Edipus grows up. He's a young man, and He's out messing around in Coraith 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 a real family Well, they deny it 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, 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. So Eedipus, again, to quote Soffoques, At this, I took to the road, putting the stars between me and Corinth, determined never to see my home again. He takes the road that leads from Delphi, and instead of heading southwards to Corinth, he reaches the fork in the road that leads northwards towards Thebes.

Because he assumes that the prophecy is about what we know are his adopted parents.

Yes, exactly. 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. They get into a massive argument about who has the right of way. The result is the most infamous explosion of road rage in the entire history of world literature. The old man lashes at Eedipus with his whip. Eedipus hits the old man with his staff and kills him. He then attacks the the old man's servants. He kills them all, or so Eedipus 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 this fork in the road. So Eedipus 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. The first of these is that the city's king, Laos, has been murdered, and he was murdered while traveling to Delphi.

Wow.

Been 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. This is a female monster called the Sphinx. Just to say, in Sofocleys' play, in his tragedy, Eedipus, this is only alluded to very elliptically. The Sphinx herself is only mentioned once, and Sofocleys is clearly presuming that the people in the audience will know the story of the Sphinx. This often happens in tragedy. It's assumed by the writers that this is common stock of stories that people are familiar with. The story of the Sphynx is basically that she is part of these terrible monsters that Hesia had written about in the Theogony. Hesia 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 Hira. She had the head and breasts of a woman, the body of a lion, wings of a giant predatory bird.

Anyone who walks by the rock on which she is crouched has to answer a riddle. If they can't answer it, then they will be devoured. 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. The riddle, she asks, is very famous. It's so famous that Sofocleys 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 Sofocleys wrote his tragedy in around AD 200 in a posh almanac. 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. Again, in Sofocleys' tragedy, we are not told what happens next. But again, from hence in the play, it's clearly common knowledge. 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're crawling. Then you have two feet, then you have three feet because you have a stick or something of that kind, surely. Then you're slowest when you're-When you're a baby, yeah, exactly. What an amazing riddle that is.

It's an amazing riddle. Eedipus, because he's a hero, he susses it, gives the right answer to the Sphinx. The Sphinx is so depressed that her riddle has been answered, that she hurls herself off a cliff, and that's the end of her. A reward has been claimed that anyone who can get rid of the Sphinx will get to marry Laes's widow Jocasta. And so Eedipus has got rid of the Sphinx, and so he duly marries Jocasta, and he rules in Laeus' place as the king, king, but will come to exactly what his status is in due course.

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

Why would they? They might look similar. Yeah, It's got a particularly long chin or something.

Yeah, like a Hapsberg inheritance or something.

Yeah, maybe. Anyway, 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 joints. So Eedipus has become king, and he rules very, very well. The people of Thebes are very grateful to him, not just because he's got rid of the Sphinx, but also because he's a just 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, Etecles and Polyneses, and two daughters, Antigoni and Ismene. Everything seems to be going brilliantly. But then, Dominic, disaster in the form of a terrible plague, which sweeps Thebes. 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 Eedipus sends his brother-in-law, Creon, to Delphi to try and find out why the gods are angry. Creon returns with the report of what is wrong, and this is where the play starts. Creon Crayon's report of what Apollo has revealed is that Thebes is polluted by the murderer of King Laeus, who had never been caught. Specifically, Apollo has declared, This unclean creature, the murderer, must be driven into exile before before he destroys us all. So Eedipus says, Fine. It is my duty as king to play the detective and to track down Laeus' murderer. As well as being a tragedy, Sofocleys' play is also the first great detective story, and that's a huge part of what makes it so gripping. How is he going to investigate what's been going on? Well, there is a top intelligence source in Thebes. This is a man, although he hasn't always been a man, called Theracius. Theracius had a very, very eventful life. As a young man, he'd been strolling in the environ, beyond Thebes. 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 Hira, 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.

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

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 has often played on people's minds. Hira and Zius have been having one of their domestics, one of their rouse, and the argument is about whether men or women enjoy sex more. And Hira says, Well, obviously, men enjoy it more. And Zius says, No, no, the ladies enjoy it more. They get all the blood.

He's speaking from experience.

So I see us uniquely can pronounce on this. And he says, The ladies do enjoy it more. And Hira doesn't want to hear this at all, does she? She's outraged by this. And she now punishes him again. Oh, my God.

By striking him blind. Yeah. So he's having a very bad deal from Hira.

But Seus compensates him by making him, giving him a profit. He can see into the... He's got second sides or whatever.

Yes, exactly. He can see into the future and all kinds of things that he understands things that most mortals don't. So he seems ideal to solve the crime. And so this is why Eedipus sends for him. And Eedipus says, Okay, Térésius, you're so smart. You know things that are hidden from the rest of us. Who is the murderer? And Térésius, for understandable reasons, refuses to answer. Eedipus 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 Térésius responds in one of the most chilling lines in the whole of drama, You yourself are the killer you seek. Eedipus doesn't understand what he's saying. And Terecius then says, Blind though I am, you are blind as still. In that There is a ominous portending of what is to come. So Eedipus is furious. Jocasta, his wife, tries to calm him down. And she does this by saying, Look, you can't rely on prophets. Sometimes they get things wrong. As an example of this, she cites the prophecy that she and Laes had been given and which she says obviously hadn't come true. Laes was told that he would be killed by his son, but he He wasn't killed by his son, he was killed by bandits at a fork in the road.

At the mention of the fork in the road, Eedipus does a double take. Presumably, this has never been mentioned before to Eedipus, it's the first he's heard of it. He then asked Jocasta to describe Laeus, which Jocasta does. Her description of her dead husband throws Eedipus into a massive panic. When he's told that actually a witness to the attack survived and that this is how the news had come back. He orders this witness to be sent for. And Eedipus then tells Jocasta about his road rage incident at the tea 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 Eedipus to the listeners, this scene is absolutely, I mean, it is absolutely hypnotic. This sense of read as the two of them start to realize the reality of their relationship. I mean, if it's a good production, it is a brilliant, brilliant scene.

It's like a machine of torture, pressing in closer and closer, getting the victim tighter and tighter in its coils. It's terrifying. So both of them are on the cusp of arriving at an understanding of what has happened. And then there is another twist. A messenger arrives from Corinthians 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, what's going on? Why are you delighted that your father's die? 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 if the prophecy is true, end up sleeping with Marope, the Queen of Coreth, who he thinks is his mother. But the messenger then says, Oh, you don't need to worry about that. It's fine. Marope, the Queen of Koreth, she's not your mother. I need to once again, goes completely pale and says, Well, 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 Eedipus on the slopes of Mount Ketheron by Jocastus slave and had then given the baby to Polybus and Merope to be fostered by them.

What are the chances?

Yeah, massive chance. And now the twists and the coincidences are coming fast and furious because when the man that Eedipus had sent for, the guy who had the sole survivor of the road rage incident at the fork in the road. When he turns up, he turns out to be Jocasta's slave, the man who had been given the baby boy with the skewer through his ankles to take up onto Mount Kitharan. Again, people may think, Well, this is 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 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 Laes as he's traveling to Delphi. So that bit, perhaps, you're more credible. Eedipus is saying to this slave, Tell me what happened. And like T Horatius, the slave doesn't want to talk. He can't bring himself to reveal it.

Eedipus then threatens him with torture At this point, the truth comes 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.

Anagnesis, the Greeks called it. It's the the moment of recognition. The old man, Eedipus is staying at the fork in the road, was Laeus, Eedipus' own father. Jocasta, his queen, the mother of his four children, is his own mother. As in the camp that you opened with from Homer in the Odyssey, so in Sofferclees, Jocasta hangs herself. And Edipus, 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 pinning up her dress. He removes these brooches and he stabs the points into his eyes. That's where the... Thereseus had warned him, You are blinded than I am. Edipus is now literally blind. And Creon, his brother-in-law, stroke uncle, tells Ædipus, 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 Edipus's 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.

I noticed in your notes, you talk about not just that it's an emotionally devastating story, but you talk about how taught 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, this sense of claustrophobia. It's one of these classic examples of a play that is set in 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 this sense from the very outset of the walls beginning to close in. There's no escape from it. There's an intensity to it and a terrifying hypnotic quality to what unfolds.

Yeah. It was these qualities that led Aristotle, the great philosopher who wrote a lost book about comedy, which Umberto Eco fans will recognize that in the name of the Rose, but also a famous work on tragedy. He praised Eedipus as being the greatest of all tragedies And providing the model of what a tragedy should be. And in the 16th century, Renaissance theorists summed up what Aristotle admired about Eedipus as the three unities. So unity of place, it's in one location, Unity of time, so you're not jumping around all over the place. The plot of Eedipus is compressed within what you see is what you get, and unity of action, i. E. There shouldn't be loads of mad subplots taking you off. So it's the model of a tragedy, but it is, as we said, it's the first great detective story and the twist, it's worthy of Agatha Christie, the detective investigating crime who discovers that he himself is the criminal. The mad thing is that these tragedies were staged as part of a competition. Sofically, it's actually one second prize.

Imagine how good that top play must have been. It might have been brilliant.

It didn't survive. I would say that the classes today agree with Aristotle that it's number one. So again, to quote Edith Hall, who is an excellent critic, Dominic.

She once complimented you on something.

Possibly.

Oh, come on.

She described Sofocleys 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 for Rogerus was excellent.

Oh, come on. I can't believe you. You said that explicitly. You hinted at it, and then that wasn't enough for you. Why don't you just read it out? Why don't you read out the review?

Well, it's in the spirit of Eedipus. 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. On that bombshell, we will explore what it all means, because Sofocleys, of course, is not the only writer to have talked about Eedipus. The most famous writer, probably even more famous than Sofocleys, Tom, because I guess a lot of people today, not experts in Greek tragedy, don't know about Sofocleys. 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. This episode is brought to you by Uber. Now, do you know that feeling when someone shows up for you when you need it most?

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As vis my patience, so vis 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 ground-breaking 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 Eedipus, 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, Eedipus's story featured very prominently in it, didn't it, Tom?

It did. To quote him, Eedipus's destiny moves us only because it might have been ours, because the Oracle laid 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 wish against Our Father, our dreams convince us that this is so. Now, personally, I feel the word perhaps in that is quite a lot of heavy lifting. But this was not the opinion of Freud's admirers. On his 50th birthday, which was the sixth of May 1906, his fans presented him with this medallion. On one side, there was an image of Freud in profile, and on the other, there was an image of Eedipus with the Sphinx.

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

No, not if you're Freud, because beneath Eedipus, they had put a quotation from Soffoley's play, He who knew the famed riddle and was a man most mighty. So aligning Edipus 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 emerged from the 20th century, the Eedipus complex. It remains part of pop culture to this day, all this, Tell me about your mother, stuff.

That takes us to the question about the story of Eedipus. 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? 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... 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, 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 a trend in Western culture, really reaching back to the romantic period. As you say, that myth embodies timeless truths. If you can only fathom what they mean, you will crack the riddle of what it is to be human. It's something that you see, I mean, you said in romanticism, but also, say, in existentialism. So Kamu was all over it.

Kamu or TS. Elliott, modernism, the myths are still with us in different forms.

It appeals to people across the political spectrum. So the Nazis, they were all into that idea, but so have New Age, all that stuff. So it's a very fundamental conviction. As you say, I do not think that myth is timeless. Even if its power can transcend history, because there's no question that to sit down and watch Sofocleys, if you get a good production, as you did, it is incredibly powerful still. But the tragedy itself emerges from very and distinctive historical contexts. I think that the story of Edipus is a perfect illustration of this, because Sofocleys, when he wrote it, was not... I don't think he was channeling the secret impulses of his subconscious at all. That play could not have been written in Fantasiechna, Vienna. It could only have been written in the democracy of fifth century Athens. We'll come to that in a moment, how Sofokleys' 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 Edipus. Although Sofocleys' tragedy, as we've been saying, is very tight, very claustrophobic, it absolutely does not exist in isolation.

Eedipus is just a single character in the great sweep of a famous epic. In our previous episode, we talked about how Zus 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. We quoted Hesia, the war before seven gated Thebes as rivals fought over the flocks of Eedipus. But this is a four-generation additional death struggle. It begins, as myths in Greece tend to begin, with a rape, with the abduction by Seus of a Phenitian princess called Europa. Seus notoriously disguises himself as a bull, appears on the beach outside the city of Thierry, and Europa is a princess from Taya. 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 Minator and the Labyrinth and Deedalus and all of that. Europa has a brother called Cadmus, the Prince of Tire. 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. 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. Then Apollo says, You are to found a city where this heffer, by divine inspiration, falls to the ground, stretching out her weary hooves. And so Cadmus finds this cow, follows it to Biosha, where the cow duly lies down. And Cadmus knows that this is where he has found his city. And you can only found a city by offering a sacrifice to the God. 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 diligently does. And from these teeth, Sprout Mighty Warriors, who are known as the spartoy, which literally means the sown ones.

The Spartoy are about to tack Cadmus when he reaches down for a stone and throws the stone into the middle of the assembled throng of the Spartoy. The Spartoy all get furious about this, all start attacking each other. They all get wiped out except for five. And these five surviving members of the Spartoy 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 of Homer that you quoted at the beginning of this episode, they're called Cadmaians.

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

It does, yes.

What I don't understand is, so Cadmus killed this serpent, which is sacred to Aries, and so that was seen as poor form from Cadmus.

Well, it's seen as poor form by Aries.

Oh, by Aries. Okay, right. 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 Thebers 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.

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 about their ancestors. 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 Teresius striking the snakes that turn out to be sacred to hero. You never know when you're going to offend a God. That's part of the jeopardy. It's like a computer game where you pick up the wrong thing and all kinds of disasters happen. That's basically what's happened to Cadmus.

Tom, you don't play computer games.

No, I don't. I'm trying to give a populist spin on it. The ones I have, I remember that thing happening. The dynasty of Cadmus, for that reason, is under a shadow, as royal dynasties in Greek myths invariably are. So Eedipus, for instance, is doubly descended from Cadmus. So one of Cadmus's 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.

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 Eedipus, and Creon, Edipus's uncle, brother-in-law. Laeus, Edipus's father, is also a descendant of Cadmus, and he's actually a very, very bad man. So when he was young, he had gone to the Peloponese, and he had been employed by a king in the Pelipanese to teach a prince called Chrisipus how to drive a chariot. Laeus had raped the young Chrysippus. Laeus is the first ever male rapist of a boy. 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. There are all kinds of horrors that have preceded the reign of Edipus, and equally, there are lots of horrors that will follow it. We have a fragment from an epic poem that was written shortly after the time of Homer and Hesia. It describes Edipus laying a curse on his two sons, Polynices and Etiokles, and these lines, he prayed to Zius and the other immortals that by each other's hands, they would go down into Hades. He's praying that Eteclies and Polynices will kill each other.

It comes to pass because according to this tradition, Etychles and Polynices, after Eedipus has left Thebes blinded. They share the rule of Thebes, but it doesn't work out. Ethically, succeeds in expelling Polynices from the city. Polynesius 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. Etecles and Polyneses meet in single combat and they kill each other. And so it is that Eedipus's curse is fulfilled. But even that is not the end of the bloodshed, because a generation later, there is another mass spout of slaughter. Because Polyneses 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. 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.

This is Diomedes, who appears in the Iliad and is the great friend of Adycius.

But we know about Adycius, 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, it makes it... It's like an enormous quarry that they can get to work on and extracting material for their plays. So Sofocleys is not the only great tragedian to have written on a Theban theme. There are two other great Athenians Athenians, Escalus and Euripides, and they do exactly the same. I think the appeal of the story, aside from providing material for good plays, is twofold. The first is that any play that makes the Thebans look bad is absolute catnip to the Athenians. The Athenians hate the Thebans.

Thebes and Athens are only 30 miles apart. Because there's a history, isn't there? A massive babble between them. The Thebans had actually invaded in 506 and tried to basically strangle the Athenian democracy at birth. Actually, this has been a massive moment in Athenian history because the Athenians won, and this was the foundational moment of their new political system, their political experiment.

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

They're excited fighting 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. Then in 480, when the Persians invade, again, the Thebans blocked their copybook by siding with the Persians rather than with the alliance between Athens and Sparta, because the Thebans hate the Athenians much more than they fear the Persians. 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. When Thebes is portrayed on the Athenian stage as this sink of impiety and crime and incest and fratricide and so on, obviously, the element of propaganda there is very strong because the Sofocleys' 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, 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 Thebe and invasion is an important aspect of what people are expecting to see, illustrated on the stage.

It's a massive civic occasion. You have maybe, the highest estimate It 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. 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 part of it. And sometimes the propagandistic element of tragedy is very, very overt. So there is another play that Sofocleys wrote about Oedipus, and it was the very last one he wrote. And in it, Sofocleys shows the very aged Oedipus, so he's still in exile from Thebes, being given sanctuary from his native city by the Athenians. The place of his refuge, and ultimately of his grave, is a village in Attica called Kolonos, which was Sofocleys Sofocleys' own birthplace. Before he dies, Edipus promises the Athenians that he will provide protection to them. As a dead hero, his spirit will, I'll quote Sofocleys, will provide the Athenians with a defense, a bulwark stronger than many shields and spears of mast allies.

This play, Eedipus Colonnus, was Sofocleys' last, and it was produced posthumously in 401 BC, four years after Sofocleys 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 Sofocleys, against that backdrop, as almost his last will and testament, would have written for his fellow citizens a play in which the legend of Edipus offers the Athenians a message of hope and reassurance.

But it's not just propaganda, though, is it? The Edipus story. I I completely take your point. There's an antithieb and propaganda to it. But when you go to see the play or if you read it, if you read a really good translation, it has an emotional intensity and a power and a profundity. The It still speaks to you as it spoke to Sigmun Freud. You don't have to be a complete Freudian to see that there is a universality to it.

Yeah. I think that if the Athenians had just used that great festival of drama to say, Aren't we brilliant? Aren't the Thebans awful? Then no one today would find the masterpieces of Athenian tragedy in any way moving or unsettling. You're absolutely right that, say, Eedipus 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 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 usabeia, as the Greeks called it, his piety, his devotion to the gods. Equally, as a poet who is drawing on the great masterpieces, to give Homer, but also the epics, talking about Theban history, he is happy to tweak it, to to adapt it, to shape it to his own needs, but he can't jettison it completely. He has too much respect for that legacy from the past. When in the Odyssey, that passage that you read, Homer describes the incest and the horrors of Eedipus's reign as the expression of what Homer calls the God's dire plan. This is a framing that Sofocleys feels duty bound to honor.

But as we've seen, he doesn't just honor it. I mean, he scratch it's the tension of it up to a completely excruciating degree. And because Eedipus is shown playing the detective, the audience comes to share in the horror of Eedipus's discovery far more intently than if Sofocleys had opted not to write it as a who done it. Sofocleys is deliberately making the impact of Eedipus's discovery as appalling as he possibly can. And so we finish the in no doubt that Eedipus had committed his crimes of parasite 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 offense is against laws that are timeless and eternal and sacred. Sofocleys 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 Eedipus 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 cosmic inevitability in which he is merely a plaything, a porn.

Right. And although Eedipus is obviously a Theban, he is also a mortal who is trapped in the toils of a terrifying divine plan. The Athenians sitting there watching it know this. They know that they're not just watching a Theban, they're watching someone who is a mortal as they are. I think what Sofocleys is doing in Oedipus is something very, very bold because he's offering his fellow citizens subtle reflections on where Athens is, how their political order functions through the prism of their oldest enemy, Thebes. You can see this in the echoes of the political circumstances that Athens is facing at the time when Sofocleys is putting on his tragedy. So remember, what prompts Eedipus to send the messenger to Delphi, which 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 Eedipus. In Edipus, the plague is raging in a city. This is almost certainly an echo of a terrible plague that had hit Athens in 429 BC, kept returning year after year.

I think, 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 ghosty presence. The name by which his play is best known, Eedipus Rex, obscures the fact that in Greece, the name is Eedipus tyrannos. And tyrannos is not a king. So the 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.

A little bit like a Roman dictator, maybe?

A Roman dictator has a legal sanction behind him. A tyrannos doesn't. And Eedipus 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 Laus had done by virtue of descent from Cadmus, even though, in fact, as it turns out, Eedipus is descendant 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 tyrannos. I think that the echoes there would have been sufficient to rouse in in the guys who were sat there watching Edipus 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?

Do you think this also reflects the political turbulence of the Peloponesian War? Are we in the middle of the Peloponesian War at this point?

Yes, we're in the Peloponesian War.

Which Athens loses, right?

Exactly. I think that's a very, very unsettling concept. The idea that the laws by which men live and the laws that govern the heavens and which are ordained by the gods, that they're not necessarily complementary. It's an issue that Sofocleys had already pondered in an earlier play, and this is one that had also taken Thebes as its setting. This is a play called Antigoni, and it's named after one of the two daughters that Eedipus had had with Jocasta. It's set in the wake of Eedipus's exile and the war between Eedipus's two sons, Eedipus and Polyneses, who remember Polyneses had led the seven against Thebes, and Eetikles and Polyneses had died fighting one another in front of the walls of Thebes. Antigoni, Sofocleys' first surviving play with a Theban setting, opens with both brothers, Etychles and Polyneses, dead before the walls of their city. But only Etychleys, because he had been defending Thebes, is to be afforded proper burial. This is decreed by Creon, their uncle, the brother of Jocasta, who is now ruling as king. He says, Polyneses, because he had brought a foreign army against Thebes, he is not to be given a proper burial.

He's to be left as food for dogs and birds. 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. The person who feels this most strongly is Crayon's niece, Antigoni, the daughter of Oedipus, who defies Crayon and casts dust on Polynesi's corpse so that he will then be able to cross the sticks and reach Hades. In earlier versions of the myth, she'd been a very, very marginal figure. So Loel Edmondson has written a wonderful book on Oedipus. He compares her to Rosencranes and Gildenstern. In Stoppard's play, the peripheral characters from Hamlet, Rosencranes and Gildenstern are Dead, become the focus of the tragedy. It's a wonderful way of demonstrating how Antigoni's centrality in this tragedy is something that seems to be very, very novel. Antigoni completely takes center stage, and she's brought before Creon, and Antigoni 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.

She's standing up for the divine law that you should bury your brother. Creon is standing up for the civic law, the law of man. And he wins, right? Because it's a tragedy. Antigoni defies him. Well, he seems to win. She's walled up in a tomb, and she hangs herself.

She does hang herself. But Creon loses as well because his son, who'd been betrothed by Antigoni, he commit 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 Edopus, 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 I think it's hard in light of the utter devastation that has been visited on the house of Edipus and of the divine order that had sanctioned it, that this is inadequate as a resolution. I think that what Sofocleys 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. What Sofocles is doing in Antigoni 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. 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 Antigoni, They are framed as being simultaneously whimsical, but guardians of divine purpose. They could seem amoral or very sternly moral, depending on your perspective. They could seem arbitrary or wholly just. There is a massive tension there that the tragedy is unable to resolve. That's why there are so many arguments about who the hero is of Antigoni. Is it Antigoni? 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, 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 to 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. The further implication, which Sofocleys, as a very pious man, doesn't dwell on, is it raises the question that 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?

We'll explore how many people worry about this. I don't think that most people in the theater watching Antigoni or Eedipus or whatever are worrying particularly about this. I think one of the features of the Greek mind is the ability to hold completely contradictory notions in their 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 Sofocleys' plays and watching other tragedies comedies as well who are starting to worry about this question. 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 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. If you're a club member, can you hear that right away, Tom?

You absolutely can.

Oh, that's good news. What if 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 There's benefits, I understand. Loads of amazing benefits in it. And a chat community, and everyone loves a chat community. On that bombshell, we will return next week with more thrilling Greek myths.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. You are not luminous, Watson, but you are a conductor of light.

Here they are. Dr. Mortimer, I presume?

Yes.

Hi. John. Dr. John Watson. Who is your client?

He was my client. Sir Charles Baskervilles. Keep reading.

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