Posts Tagged ‘Oedipus’

Greek Mythology: seminar 4

March 25, 2010

Hero-cult

I think I am going to leave it here for the seminars on this module, as the last one was simply a revision session ahead of the exam – you can access the passages we used on the Greek Mythology page.

This was quite a difficult topic for students to get their heads round. Quite simply, our conception of ‘hero’ is rather different from that of the ancient Greeks. A hero, in Greek thought, was an individual who lived in the pre-historical ‘heroic’ age – up till the end of the Trojan War. To us, ‘hero’ implies Superman, or a war-veteran, or a fireman who saves kittens from a burning building (or even some depictions of Heracles) – someone who has done something special, above and beyond the call of duty, something ‘heroic’.

It was difficult then, to reconcile this notion with the heroes under question: Heracles, Oedipus, and Neoptolemus. All were figures of the heroic age, all were worshipped in cult, but all were very ambivalent characters. Heracles is a particularly good (or bad) example – he is a uniquely transgressive figure, and as such is worshipped as both god and hero. Yet there seems to be no mention of a heroon for him – plenty of shrines, but no real centre of ‘hero’ cult. Oedipus is similarly transgressive, and his cult centre is at Athens, where he came, a suffering old man, at the end of his life. Neoptolemus is most famous for his bad behaviour during the Trojan War – throwing Astyanax off the walls, murdering Priam, installing Andromache as his concubine and parading her in front of his wife…there is even ambiguity as to his death; whether he went to Delphi to challenge Apollo or to propitiate him.

My students were puzzled by the question ‘why are these figures worshipped?’ They were not ‘good guys’, but were intrinsically flawed individuals. And so a lot of ensuing discussion focused on the role of heroes in Greek literature, society and religion; trying to strip away our 21st-century cultural colouring and address the issue of what it means to be a ‘hero’ in the ancient Greek world.

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in Greek Mythology, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Greek Mythology – seminar 3

December 8, 2009

Incest

Greek myth (and perhaps even more so Roman, if we read Ovid) was full of intra-familial unions. This deserves comment, as the incest taboo is one of the most fundamental in just about any society. Even before the genetic problems of such intercourse became common knowledge, children of incest appear to have been considered in some way transgressive. This seems to have been one of the areas by which myth demonstrated, by means of negative exempla, the norms of human behaviour.

One group looked at father/daughter incest, and the myth of Thyestes and Pelopia. In some sources, Thyestes raped his daughter, unaware of who she was. In others, he received an oracle that he could avenge himself on his brother Atreus if he got a son (Aegisthus) on her, and another (in Hyginus) suggests she consented to this out of a sense of duty. Even so, the story ends with her killing herself when her son’s parentage is discovered, suggesting that not even the will of the gods can override the shame of such an act.

The second group looked at mother/son unions, and the myth of Oedipus is the obvious paradigm for this. Do we believe in Freud’s Oedipus complex? And why is there so much more ancient literature on this myth than other tales of incest? Have we sanctified and valorised the mother-son bond as a result of Western Catholicism? There are interesting parallels in the primordial myths, not only of Greece, but also of other cultures – mother/son intercourse tends to be the preserve of the early gods – Oedipus seems in that respect to transgress into the divine sphere.

The last group examined brother/sister incest, with the myth of the Aeolids. The Odyssey suggests the children of Aeolus were all happily married to each other; later versions highlight Macareus and Canace’s illicit affair, Aeolus’ wrath, and her suicide. What is allowable in the world of the ‘apologoi’ is less so in other genres. But again, cf. Zeus and Hera, a model picked up by the Ptolemies in Hellenistic Egypt. Mortals should not emulate the gods – where they do so, however unwittingly, it leads to death and the subversion, rather than continuation, of the oikos.

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in Greek Mythology | Leave a Comment »

Greek myth 5: The Theban cycle part 2

November 5, 2009

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:, , , , , ,
Posted in Greek Mythology | 1 Comment »

Greek myth 4: the Theban Cycle

October 21, 2009

Leading on from the story of Heracles in last week’s lecture, this session looked at the beginnings of the story of Thebes – it’s a big enough topic that it has 2 lectures devoted to it: this one, which covered the foundation of the city to the death of Oedipus, and one to follow next week, on the Seven against Thebes to the razing of the city by the Epigonoi.

Oddly enough, the character that students seemed to associate most with Thebes was Theseus, rather than Oedipus. But it was easy enough to lead from that into the main discussion by looking at the opposition between Thebes and Athens; the transgressive House of Labdacus and Theseus as the hero who rights their wrongs (apparent also in Euripides’ Heracles, set in Thebes).

What characterises the Theban line seems to be this issue of transgression, from Cadmus’ slaying of the dragon of Ares (for which expiation is demanded in Euripides’ Phoenician Women) to the mutual murder of the sons of Oedipus. Zeitlin’s (1990) theory of Thebes as the ‘other’ space on the Athenian stage is a good lens through which to view this tendency towards transgression, but although the myth has mostly survived in tragedy, this doesn’t fully explain the use of the theme in epic or other genres.

There seems to be a layering of meaning as the myth develops in the Classical period – not least because there may be 2 different traditions at work here (Cadmus as the founder of Thebes/Amphion and Zethos as the builders of its walls). Folkloric elements (Edmunds 1985) come through and are juxtaposed with the function of the topos in the Athenian psyche. Yet trying to narrate the myth makes it seem somehow simplistic – next week, I think I may try some more detailed textual comparison with the class.

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Greek Mythology | Leave a Comment »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.