Chrysippus soon killed himself to escape his shame. As king of Thebes, Laius married within the House of Cadmus. Laius and Jocasta remained childless for many years. Troubled by this misfortune, Laius decided to consult the oracle at Delphi for a cure. The oracle offered Laius no cure. Instead, he heard a warning: Have no child by this bride, for if you do, that child will kill you.
Three times the oracle cautioned that a child of Laius would bring ruin not only upon his father, but on the city of Thebes as well. Laius took this warning to heart. He quickly came to regard his childlessness not as a curse, but as a blessing.
To guard against the possibility of begetting a child, Laius ceased having sexual relations with Jocasta altogether. Sadly, though, he never told her why. Jocasta was not pleased. Whether impelled by maternal desire or amorousness, Jocasta contrived to get Laius drunk on wine one night. She then brought him into her bed, where the two conceived a son: Oedipus. Burgess, Ph.
The Seven. He ordered his sons to avenge his death by punishing Eriphyle. Hypsipyle and Opheltes. The Seven against Thebes. Tydeus, one of the Seven, failed in a peace embassy to Thebes and escaped an ambush set by the Thebans. Hero-cults in his honor were established in Thebes and elsewhere. Polynices and Eteocles killed each other in single combat. Antigone defied the edict of Creon forbidding the burial of Polynices. Obeying instead the decrees of Zeus, she gave her brother symbolic burial and was condemned to death by Creon.
Burial of the Heroes. Theseus helped the widows and mothers of the dead Argive heroes recover the unburied corpses and give them proper funerals. Alcmaeon and Eriphyle. Pursued by the Furies, he came to Arcadia, where he married the daughter of King Phegeus, to whom he gave the necklace of Harmonia. As a matricide, he was a pollution on the land and was driven out. His sons became the founders of the Greek district of Acarnania. About the Book. Instructor Resources. Student Resources.
In Rome, the goddess Stimula was identified as Semele. Its notable creations included the Golden Guardian a clone of the original Guardian , Auron, and Dubbilex, a DNA alien telepath who resembles a tall grey alien with horns. Thoth , originally a moon deity, later became god of wisdom and scribe of the gods.
Seshat, goddess of wisdom, knowledge and writing. Scribe of the gods. Credited with the invention of writing and the alphabet. Oedipus was a king in Greek mythology, ruling over the city of Thebes. He was the son of King Laius and Queen Jocasta. Not knowing, he married his mother and had four children with her, Polynices, Eteocles, Antigone, and Ismene.
In Oedipus the King we get choral odes on everything from tyranny to the dangers of blasphemy. Sophocles also uses the Chorus at the beginning of the play to help tell the audience the given circumstances of the play.
Is that all? Apollo declares loudly in the night that he does not want to be born in Thebes. Examined closely and far from the academies, Apollo is a somber and violent god: the pure exile from heaven, as he was called by Aeschylus, who knew of his murders in Olympus and elsewhere. It all starts in the most ordinary way.
One consultation day, a certain Cadmus comes before the Pythia. His sister is nowhere to be found—her name is Europa. Apollo tells him not to worry: Cadmus has more important things to do. Pythia enjoins him in carefully chosen hexameters to leave and to found a city, the city of Cadmus. An animal guide awaits him at the threshold of the oracle. All he needs to do is follow it and sacrifice the offered victim at the place where it collapses from exhaustion.
Cadmus follows the instructions. He does not know what lies ahead for him. Apollo, however, knows exactly where he is going to cross the path of Dionysus.
Performing a sacrifice is easy to talk about, but the ritual comes with certain obligations. Where is he to find the water for the preparatory libation?
A search for water ensues. There is an abundance of it at the fountain of Ares. Yes, Ares, the god of war, or better yet, of warlike fury. And, as a matter of fact, he is settled there. There is here something of a first evil. From these drops of blood will be born the powers of resentment, the family of the Erinyes and, next to them, the Giants, beings devoted to unlimited war.
Ares, in his desire to settle, could not have found a better place. Here is the site chosen by Apollo of Delphi for Cadmus who is wondering what has happened to his sister Europa. Apollo knows what will happen in the future Thebes; he knows its past, its present, and its future. The water of the fountain is clear. One needs only to draw it from the coils of a serpent, a serpent all the less likable for being born from the love of Ares and Erinys.
Seeing that two, and then four, of his companions fail to return, Cadmus becomes angry. He slits the throat of the dragon at the fountain without suspecting that here, at the site of the future city, he is shedding the blood of the son of Ares and Erinys, two powers heavy with resentment and experts in indelible stains.
The second act can begin with Earth Gaia a polymorphous power in the pantheon of Thebes. The warrior dragon had a beautiful set of teeth. They hardly touch the furrows in the ground before a terrible crop of men at arms sprouts up, cousins of the Giants and, like them, devoted to unlimited war.
A horrible massacre ensues. If the founder sent by Apollo to a more or less untamed land is of an easily recognized type, what characterizes autochthony on Theban ground? First, there is what is signified by Ares, called Palaichthon , the Quite-Anciently-of-the-Earth, the Earth where the Erinys sprouts up from a drop of Uranian blood.
Next, there are the true natives, the Sown, authentically born of the land. To be born impure: we quickly see what this signifies in the city of Laius and Oedipus. The children born of the land of Cadmus kill each other, in murder after murder for generations, a stain that is unendingly revived. Who leads the game being played in Thebes? Who has been conducting it since the appearance of Cadmus?
The text by Aeschylus has been lost, unless some undergraduate copied it and his master threw it away in a garbage can of Fayum. At the opening of the Sophoclean tragedy there is a plague loimos that strikes the earth and the women with sterility. It is a consuming fire, it is even a god called Fire Bearer Purphoros. Invoke Apollo. Is he not the god of medicine, Apollo Iatros , the god of Thebes, the one who knows so well how to get rid of plagues? Is there some debt chreos to be paid?
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