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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter II: Heroes & Their Quests

Oedipus and the House of Thebes: From Cadmus to Antigone

Oedipus and the house of Thebes: Cadmus and the dragon's teeth, the Sphinx's riddle, the curse of Laius, the Seven against Thebes and Antigone, with sources.

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Oedipus was the king of Thebes who, without knowing it, killed his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, fulfilling an oracle that his parents had tried to escape. His story is the centre of the Theban saga, which runs from the city's founding by Cadmus through the war of Oedipus' sons, the Seven against Thebes, to Antigone's defiance of King Creon. Its classic form comes from the Athenian tragedians, above all Sophocles, but older epic versions differ in important ways.

Cadmus, the Dragon's Teeth and the Founding of Thebes§

The house of Thebes begins with a search. When Zeus, in the form of a bull, carried off the Phoenician princess Europa, her father Agenor sent his sons to find her and told them not to return without her. One of them, Cadmus, consulted the Oracle of Delphi and was told to give up the search, follow a cow and found a city where it lay down. The cow led him into Boeotia.

Sending his men to fetch water for a sacrifice, Cadmus found the spring guarded by a dragon sacred to Ares, which killed them. He slew the beast and, on Athena's advice, sowed its teeth in the ground. Armed men sprang up; Cadmus threw a stone among them and they fought until only five remained. These Spartoi ("sown men") became the ancestors of the Theban nobility. To atone for the dragon, Cadmus served Ares for a "great year" of eight years, then married Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite. The gods attended the wedding, and the necklace given to Harmonia, made by Hephaestus, became a cursed heirloom that would bring ruin a generation later. Herodotus credits Cadmus' Phoenicians with bringing the alphabet to Greece.

Misfortune followed his daughters. Semele, loved by Zeus, was burned up when she asked to see him in his true form and became the mother of Dionysus; Agave, in a Bacchic frenzy, tore apart her son, King Pentheus, as told in Euripides' Bacchae (see Dionysus and the Bacchae); Autonoë's son Actaeon was torn apart by his own hounds; Ino leapt into the sea. Cadmus and Harmonia ended their lives in Illyria, turned into serpents, and were carried to the Isles of the Blessed.

Laius, the Oracle and the Exposure of the Infant Oedipus§

Cadmus' son Polydorus was the father of Labdacus, and Labdacus of Laius. As a young exile Laius was the guest of Pelops and abducted his host's son Chrysippus; some ancient sources, probably following Euripides' lost Chrysippus, made this crime the origin of the family curse, though the tragedians who survive do not insist on it. Back on the throne of Thebes, Laius married Jocasta, called Epicaste in Homer, and was warned by Apollo's oracle that a son of his would kill him.

When a son was born, Laius pierced the infant's ankles and had him exposed on Mount Cithaeron. The shepherd charged with the task pitied the child and gave him to a herdsman of Polybus, king of Corinth, and the childless Polybus and his wife Merope raised him as their own. The name Oedipus was explained as "swollen foot", after the wounds. Grown to manhood, Oedipus was taunted that he was not his father's son, went to Delphi to ask, and was told only that he would kill his father and lie with his mother. Resolved never to return to Corinth, he took the road east. At a narrow place where three roads met in Phocis, he quarrelled with an old man in a carriage who tried to drive him from the road, and killed him and his attendants. The old man was Laius.

The Riddle of the Sphinx and Oedipus the King§

Thebes was then plagued by the Sphinx, a winged lion with a woman's head, sent according to Apollodorus by Hera. She sat on a mountain near the city and devoured those who could not answer her riddle: what goes on four feet, on two and on three, and is weakest when it has most feet? Oedipus answered "man", who crawls as a baby, walks upright as an adult and leans on a stick in old age, and the Sphinx threw herself to her death. Creon, Jocasta's brother, had offered the kingdom and the queen's hand to whoever freed the city; Oedipus married Jocasta and had four children by her: Eteocles, Polynices, Antigone and Ismene.

Sophocles' Oedipus the King (Oedipus Tyrannus, probably 420s BCE), which Aristotle treated in the Poetics as a model tragedy, begins years later, when a plague strikes Thebes and Delphi declares that the killer of Laius must be driven out. Oedipus pursues the investigation with energy and growing anger: the blind prophet Tiresias names him as the guilty man, a messenger from Corinth reveals that Polybus was not his father, and the old shepherd who once saved him confirms the rest. Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus blinds himself with the gold pins of her robe. Few plays have been so closely studied for their construction, in which the hero's search for truth is itself the instrument of his ruin.

Other Versions: Homer, the Epic Cycle and Oedipus at Colonus§

The Sophoclean version was not the only one. In the Odyssey (book 11) Odysseus sees Epicaste in the Underworld: she married her son, the gods soon made it known, she hanged herself, and Oedipus went on ruling Thebes in sorrow, pursued by the Furies of his mother. The Iliad mentions funeral games held for him, implying he died at Thebes as king. Pausanias, citing the lost epic Oedipodea, says that Oedipus' children were born not to Jocasta but to a second wife, Euryganeia. Blinding and exile may therefore be later, perhaps tragic, developments.

Sophocles returned to the story at the end of his life in Oedipus at Colonus, produced posthumously in 401 BCE. The blind old exile, led by Antigone, arrives at Colonus near Athens, is received by Theseus (see Theseus and the Minotaur), curses his sons and passes mysteriously from the earth at a spot known only to the Athenian king. His grave becomes a protection for Attica. The play reflects the real practice of hero cult, in which the tomb of a powerful dead man was believed to aid the land that held it, a subject treated in Greek Burial, the Dead and Hero Cults. Several places, among them Colonus and the Areopagus at Athens and Eteonus in Boeotia, claimed his bones.

The Seven against Thebes and the Epigoni§

Oedipus' sons agreed to rule in alternate years, but Eteocles refused to give up the throne. Polynices went to Argos, married a daughter of King Adrastus and raised an army, led by seven champions, one for each of the seven gates of Thebes. Lists differ, but they usually include Adrastus or Eteoclus, Polynices, the fierce Tydeus, the blasphemous Capaneus, Hippomedon, the young Parthenopaeus and the seer Amphiaraus, who foresaw the disaster and joined only because his wife Eriphyle, bribed with the necklace of Harmonia, compelled him.

Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes (467 BCE) presents the assault from inside the city: a scout describes each attacker and the emblem on his shield, and Eteocles assigns a defender to each gate, choosing at the last to meet his brother at the seventh. In Euripides' Phoenician Women Creon's son Menoeceus gives his life to save the city. Capaneus, boasting that not even Zeus would stop him, was struck by a thunderbolt on his scaling ladder; Amphiaraus was swallowed by the earth with his chariot and later honoured at a healing oracle at Oropus. The brothers killed each other in single combat. Ten years later the sons of the Seven, the Epigoni, succeeded where their fathers had failed and took Thebes, a war told in a lost epic of that name.

Antigone and the Burial of Polynices§

Creon, now ruler, decreed that the defender Eteocles be buried with honour while the body of Polynices, who had attacked his own city, be left for dogs and birds. In Sophocles' Antigone (probably about 441 BCE) Antigone defies the edict, sprinkling dust on her brother's corpse because the unwritten laws of the gods require burial. Creon has her walled up alive in a rock-cut tomb. Warned by Tiresias, he relents too late: Antigone has hanged herself, his son Haemon, her betrothed, kills himself over her body, and his wife Eurydice takes her own life. In Euripides' Suppliants the mothers of the fallen Argives appeal to Athens, and Theseus forces the Thebans to release the dead.

The Theban stories have been read in every age. Seneca wrote a Latin Oedipus; Hegel took Antigone as the classic collision of family duty and the law of the state; Sigmund Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), used Oedipus the King to name the "Oedipus complex"; and Claude Lévi-Strauss made the Theban saga the test case of his structural analysis of myth. Jean Cocteau, Jean Anouilh and Bertolt Brecht rewrote the plays for the twentieth century, and George Steiner traced Antigone's long afterlife in Antigones (1984). The saga's interlocking curses invite comparison with the other great dynasty of tragedy, the house of Atreus.

Frequently asked questions§

What was the riddle of the Sphinx?§

The Sphinx asked what walks on four feet, then on two, then on three. Oedipus answered that it is a human being, who crawls as a baby, walks upright as an adult and uses a stick in old age; defeated, the Sphinx killed herself.

Did Oedipus know Jocasta was his mother?§

No. He had been raised in Corinth and believed Polybus and Merope were his parents, which is why he fled Corinth after the oracle. He learned the truth only years later, in the investigation dramatised by Sophocles.

Who founded Thebes?§

Thebes was founded by Cadmus, a Phoenician prince searching for his sister Europa. Guided by a cow on the advice of Delphi, he killed a dragon of Ares and sowed its teeth, from which the first Thebans sprang.

What happened to Antigone?§

In Sophocles' play she buried her brother Polynices against Creon's decree, was sentenced to be walled up alive, and hanged herself in the tomb. Other versions, including a lost play of Euripides, gave her a different fate.

Sources and further reading§