This lecture continued our exploration of the House of Labdacus, from the death of Oedipus to the sack of Thebes by the Epigonoi. I wanted to start to do more with this course this week, moving away from a straightforward narrative and identification of themes to a more detailed explanation of the representation of the myth in various texts, and to think about why it might have been manipulated in these ways – but without just giving the answers to the students (never an easy task!).
Yet even on its most superficial reading, the myth still makes some interesting points. For example, in the epic Thebaid, Oedipus curses his sons because they, like he, violated some sort of taboo – this contrasts markedly with the expression of the curse in tragedy, which seems to occur simply because they mistreated him, and may show the hero as remaining the transgressive character he appears in Sophocles’ OT.
The violation of taboos and the transgression of social norms seems to lie at the heart of this myth – even taking aside the violation of divine imperative, crossing of gender boundaries, parricide and incest of the last lecture, we see the cycle continuing in curses, treason against one’s fatherland, fratricide, desecration of the dead, violation of the will of the gods and the demands of the state, multiple suicides, vengeance, and matricide in the second half of the myth. If myths are, as Csapo (2005) states, representative of social ideologies, norms of behaviour must be defined in this myth through the exploration of their extreme opposites.
Tags: Greek literature, Greek myth, mythological theory, Oedipus, taboo, teaching, Thebes
