Greek Mythology, page 12
Hera, too, was a mistress of disguise, and dressed as an old woman she won Semele’s trust. When the girl discussed her lover, Hera professed disbelief. Did Semele know who the young man was? Had he told her anything about himself? Surely it was time to learn all she could about him – especially as Semele was pregnant. So that night Semele badgered her ardent admirer to promise to do anything she asked. Innocently, he agreed – but when Semele demanded he reveal his true identity, Zeus was horrified. For Zeus’ true identity was the white heat of the lightning blast, which no human could experience and still live. Yet, he had sworn an oath.
Allowing himself a last look at Semele’s unparalleled loveliness, Zeus exploded in a blaze of sulphur, engulfing the room in sudden fire. But in the moment before Semele was vaporized, Zeus plunged his hand into her womb and rescued the child that she was carrying. Then he sliced open his thigh, inserted the foetus and carried it until it was old enough to be delivered. The son he bore was Dionysus. (Subsequently Dionysus rescued Semele from Hades and elevated her to Mount Olympus.) When Pausanias visited Thebes, he was shown the house in which Semele lived. It was so sacred that no one might enter it.
A goddess (perhaps Hera) prepares to snatch the ivy-crowned baby Dionysus as he is born from Zeus’ thigh. (Late fifth- to early fourth-century BC Athenian red figure wine cup.)
Dionysus in Exile from Thebes
While Dionysus was being brought up by the Curetes in Crete (where he was known as Zagreus), Hera commanded the Titans to distract Zeus’ love-child with toys and rattles, tear him limb from limb, boil him in a cauldron and eat him. Mercilessly they obeyed, but somehow the still-beating heart survived. While Zeus retaliated, destroying the Titans in a salvo of thunderbolts, Athene salvaged the heart and set it inside a gypsum doll, from which Dionysus was coaxed back to life, earning him the title ‘Twice-Born’. (Others said that Zagreus was an older god, similarly torn apart, whose surviving heart Zeus placed into the embryonic Dionysus shortly after Semele conceived him.) Dionysus was then raised by nymphs on the craggy slopes of Nysa, an elusive mountain claimed by Africans and Asiatics alike and which together with the prefix Dios (meaning ‘of Zeus’) may have inspired his name.
Like Apollo, Dionysus was able to possess and prophesy, but his nature was darker and more earthy. His power lay in the untamed burgeoning of nature and, through wine, drugs or drama, he could skew perceptions, causing his devotees (and enemies) to behave in ways they otherwise would never have imagined. To him belonged the vine and wine; and early in his divine career (perhaps goaded to madness by Hera), Dionysus wandered east as far as India, planting vineyards and teaching mankind the art of viticulture. Almost always he was accompanied by his thiasos, a throng of revellers: satyrs (half-men, half-goat) and silenoi (half-men, half-horse), and nymphs and maenads, women, who, when he possessed them, were capable of acts of utmost savagery (mainesthai means ‘to be mad’). Frenzied, they performed the ritual of sparagmos, tearing creatures limb from limb.
Sometimes Dionysus’ victim was human. In Thrace he drove a hostile king, Lycurgus, insane. Mistaking his son for a vine, he hacked off his hands and feet. Horrified, the gods caused the harvest to fail and demanded Lycurgus’ death. He was torn apart on the mountainside by man-eating horses.
Dionysus’ Anger Against Thebes
At last Dionysus returned to Thebes, where he found that, while some happily embraced him, his cousin, King Pentheus, was determined to suppress his worship. Dionysus drove the Theban women mad and sent them on to nearby Mount Cithaeron, where they roamed as maenads. Meanwhile, letting himself be taken, then easily setting himself free, Dionysus hypnotized Pentheus into spying on the maenads. As Pentheus clung to the top of a high tree, the women (including his mother Agavë and aunts, Ino and Autonoë) caught sight of him, mistook him for an animal and attacked him. The description of Pentheus’ death in Euripides’ Bacchae is hair-raising:
They stretched out their hands, all the mass of the bacchae, and tore the pine out of the earth. He was so high. He had so far to fall. And his scream seemed to go on for ever. And then the ritual of slaughter. As his mother closed in for the kill, he tore the ribbon from his hair so she would know him, so she’d spare him, and he screamed as he clawed at her cheeks in his terror.… But foam was pouring from Agavë’s mouth. Her eyes were rolling wildly; her reasoning all gone. The god was riding her, and she was deaf to all his screaming. And she drove her foot hard down on Pentheus’ ribcage and grasped his left elbow … and wrenched off his arm. She never would have had the strength, but the god was in her and he gave her power. And then Ino was with her crouched, huddling over him, tearing his flesh, and Autonoë too, and the whole mob of bacchae, a bestial mass writhing, savage and feral and shredding him raw. And the noise was so deafening: Pentheus shrieking till all screams were silent, and the baying of the bacchae in triumph.
Swathed in leopard-skins, Bacchic women tear apart a male victim, perhaps Pentheus. (Red figure wine cup attributed to Douris, c. 480 BC.)
The soothing intervention of her old father, Cadmus, restored Agavë to her senses; but Dionysus’ wrath was unappeased. He exiled Cadmus from his city, eventually turning him and his wife into snakes. It was an ignominious end for a great hero – for Cadmus had founded Thebes.
Cadmus & the Sown Men
Cadmus was the brother of Europa, the princess carried off by Zeus in the form of a bull to Crete, to become the mother of Minos, king of Knossos. Cattle played an important role in Cadmus’ career, too. Searching for Europa, Cadmus consulted the oracle at Delphi. Its advice was to abandon his quest, and instead follow a cow with moon-shaped markings on both flanks, and, where it lay down exhausted, found a city.
The cow collapsed at Thebes. Joyfully Cadmus sacrificed it to Athene. Then he sent his followers to fetch water. But the local spring was guarded by a dragon, and only after the creature had slaughtered many of his men could Cadmus himself kill it. As he was still reeling from the fray, Athene appeared, commanding him to knock out the dragon’s teeth and sow them, like seed, across the earth. He did so. Immediately armed men sprang out of the ground. But these Sown Men (Spartoi) were so belligerent that they attacked each other. Only five were left alive. These pledged allegiance to Cadmus and helped him build a wall round Thebes’ acropolis, the Cadmeia. Many an historical Theban claimed them as ancestors.
The gods loved Cadmus, and when he married Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, they attended his wedding in Thebes and showered his wife with gifts. But Cadmus was not comfortable with kingship, and eventually he abdicated in favour of his grandson Pentheus – with disastrous consequences as we have seen.
Zethus, Amphion & the City of the Seven Gates
Several generations passed before the lower town was walled. A local river nymph, Antiope, was seduced by Zeus (in one of his least elegant disguises – a satyr) and gave birth to twins. When her uncle, the wolfish Lycus, found out, he exposed them on Cithaeron, and bade his wife Dirce inflict whatever punishments she chose upon Antiope. At last Antiope escaped and fled on to the mountain with Dirce in pursuit. Here she met two strapping cowherds, who initially refused to help her. Almost too late, the old man who was with them revealed the truth: they were Antiope’s long-lost sons, Amphion and Zethus, whom he had reared as his own. Emboldened, the twins rescued Antiope and tied Dirce by her hair to the horns of a bucking bull. She did not survive the experience. Where her broken body fell a spring welled up, which is still called after her.
Vengefully, the brothers killed Lycus, who was ruling as regent for Cadmus’ great-grandson, Laius. While Laius fled into exile, they strengthened Thebes’ protective walls. As Zethus heaved great boulders, Amphion employed an easier technique. So virtuosic was he on the lyre that he could charm even rocks, which glided willingly towards the wall and slid snugly into place. Soon the ramparts were finished, a fine battlemented wall, punctured by seven well-towered gates.
Later, when Amphion’s wife Niobe boasted that she had more children than the goddess Leto, Apollo and Artemis killed them all. Some say that Amphion committed suicide in grief, though the Roman Hyginus tells how, wild-eyed, he attacked Apollo’s temple at Delphi and was cut down by the god. Zethus was equally unfortunate. When his one son died – perhaps in an accident, perhaps at his mother’s hands – he killed himself. As late as the second century AD the mound that covered Amphion and Zethus’ remains was jealously guarded, as its soil was thought to have magic properties.
Laius & the Oracle
With Amphion and Zethus dead, Laius returned to Thebes and claimed his rightful throne. He was not a pleasant man. According to late sources, while an exile in Elis he kidnapped King Pelops’ son, Chrysippus, and raped him – the first instance of (human) homosexual rape in Greek mythology. In punishment the gods inflicted suffering on not just him but his descendants also.
Laius and his wife, Jocasta, were childless, so the king went to nearby Delphi to ask what they should do. The oracle’s response was chilling. Better by far, she said, that Laius had no children, for his son was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Returning home, Laius wisely shunned Jocasta, but in frustration she made him drunk and forced herself upon him. Only when she was clearly pregnant did Laius reveal the oracle’s response. To try to cheat Fate, when the child was born they drove a nail through its feet and gave it to a servant to take on to Mount Cithaeron and leave it there to die. But the baby survived. Moved by compassion, the servant gave him to a kindly Corinthian shepherd, who took him in and tended his wound. As winter approached, the shepherd drove his flocks back down to Corinth, where he gave the infant to King Polybus and Queen Merope (in some accounts called Periboea). Childless, they adopted him and named him from his deformity: Oedipus (‘Swollen Foot’).
Oedipus grew up believing Polybus and Merope to be his parents, but when he approached manhood, a drunken party-goer jeered at him, calling him a bastard and not Polybus’ son. Despite reassurances, Oedipus, by nature inquisitive, set out to discover the truth from that fount of all knowledge, the Delphic oracle. Rather than deliver a straight answer, the priestess gave devastating news: he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother.
Determined never to return to his beloved Corinth, Oedipus struck out east across the mountains, until he came to a fork in the road. In Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, Oedipus narrates how, as he hesitated, a mule-cart drawn by colts and accompanied by outriders swept towards him on the road from Thebes. In the cart sat a troubled old man. As they approached:
The man out front and the old man both tried to force me off the road. In fury I punch the driver as he shoves at me. The old man sees me, looks out for his moment as he passes by, and from the carriage lashes my face with his two-pronged goad. I gave as good as I got – no! Better! I did not hesitate. I smashed my stave hard in the middle of his back and sent him spinning. And then I killed them all.
The old man was Laius. The first part of the prophecy had been fulfilled. But crucially Oedipus was wrong: there was one survivor.
Oedipus & the Riddle of the Sphinx
Oedipus found Thebes in turmoil. As part of the gods’ punishment, the land was being ravaged by the Sphinx (‘Strangler’) – a monster with a lion’s body, eagle’s wings and the breasts and head of a beautiful woman. Seated on a high cliff on Mount Phaga (or, in some versions, on a column) the Sphinx posed passers-by a riddle. If they failed to answer correctly – as they always did – she swooped down, strangled them and ate them raw.
As Oedipus approached, the Sphinx asked: ‘What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening?’ Without hesitation the resourceful Oedipus replied correctly, ‘Man’, who as a baby in the morning of his life crawls on hands and knees, as a healthy adult walks upright and in old age uses a walking stick. Petulant, the Sphinx jumped to her death.
Pausanias recounts another local version of the myth in which the Sphinx was the (human) daughter of Laius. Only she and the true heir to Thebes’ throne knew secrets the oracle had once shared with Cadmus about the moon-flanked cow. If anyone claimed the kingship, this Sphinx asked him to prove his legitimacy by revealing what these secrets were, killing all who failed. Oedipus succeeded only because he had been told them in a dream.
Thebes’ citizens hailed Oedipus as their saviour, and – their old king having died – awarded him the throne and Laius’ widow, Jocasta, as his wife. Together they had four children: two sons, Eteocles and Polyneices; and two daughters, Antigone and Ismene. Thebes prospered. Then a plague struck. In Oedipus the King, a priest reports:
The land is sterile. The corn rots in the husk, and in the pasture-lands our flocks, our herds are dying of hunger. Our womenfolk – in pain, with spasms and contractions – are giving birth to still-born foetuses. And now the god of fever, of all plagues the most pestilent, has swooped down hard on us to scourge our city. So Thebes lies empty, while the black house, Hades’ house of death, is rich with groans and lamentation.
Oedipus sent to Delphi for a remedy. The answer came: ‘seek out the killer of Laius’. Ignorant that he was himself the killer, Oedipus launched a murder investigation, summoning the one survivor of the attack to give evidence. Sophocles shows the search interrupted by a messenger from Corinth, bearing the sad news that King Polybus has died. For a brief moment, Oedipus experiences intense relief – Polybus (he still believes) was his father; the oracle told Oedipus that he would kill his father; Polybus has died of natural causes; surely, then, oracles cannot be trusted!
However, the messenger turns out to be the very man who, as a shepherd, rescued the baby Oedipus and took him to Corinth; the sole survivor of the attack on Laius’ entourage turns out to be the servant once charged with exposing the baby. Together, their evidence reveals the awful truth. Horrified at discovering that between them she and Oedipus have broken almost every taboo known to mankind, Jocasta hangs herself. Finding her, Oedipus:
ripped the golden brooch-pins from her dress, and arched them high, and punched them hard into his eyeballs.… Not once but many times he strafed his eyes with blows. And at each blow, the eyeballs, bursting blood, kept drenching down his cheeks, not trickling blood-flecks, dripping, slow – no! But explosive, uncontrolled, a deluge of black blood burst, beating down as thick as hail.
In Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles recounts how Oedipus wandered in exile until he came to a grove of the Furies just outside Athens. Here he was received kindly by Theseus, and met a mystical death, apparently absorbed into the earth at Colonus, where in antiquity he was worshipped as a hero.
Famous though this account of Oedipus’ self-punishment is, it may have been invented by Sophocles. Homer knew another version. In the Odyssey ‘the fair Epicasta’ (as Homer called Jocasta) marries her son in ignorance, only to hang herself when the gods ‘immediately revealed the situation to mankind’; in the Iliad, rather than blind himself and go into exile Oedipus ruled on and, when he fell in battle bravely defending Thebes from attack, lavish funeral games were celebrated in his honour. One of Sophocles’ reasons for altering the myth is to compare the physically sighted hero’s blindness to the truth with his subsequent clear-sightedness when blind. In this respect Oedipus mirrors another of Thebes’ most memorable mythological figures, the prophet Teiresias.
Teiresias
Teiresias’ early adventures took place on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Stumbling across two copulating snakes, he thrashed them with his stick, which made Hera so livid that she changed him into a woman. After seven years of promiscuity, Teiresias found two more snakes, similarly entwined, and thrashed them too, at which Zeus changed him back into a man. Later, when he was arguing with Hera about whether men or women derive greater pleasure from sex, Zeus suggested they ask Teiresias. His reply – a woman’s pleasure is nine times that of a man’s – so angered Hera that she struck him blind. As compensation, Zeus let him live for seven generations, and gave him the power of prophecy.
Others attributed Teiresias’ blindness either to divine vengeance because he had revealed more than was permitted, or to Athene’s anger because – before he could foretell the future – he accidentally saw her bathing naked. Remorsefully, the goddess allowed her serpent-son Erichthonius to lick his eyelids, and so bestowed the gift of prophecy. Still others said that Aphrodite turned Teiresias into an old woman because he failed to award her first prize in a beauty contest.
Teiresias first appears in the Odyssey, when Odysseus consults his ghost in Hades, but he is most closely associated with the mythology of Thebes. In historical times Teiresias’ ‘Observatory’, where he deduced the future by listening to the twittering of birds, was shown on the Cadmeian Hill, while outside nearby Haliartus was the spring where he died as he drank its waters. In Greek tragedy Teiresias regularly warns misguided heroes of the errors of their ways, be they Pentheus in Bacchae, Oedipus in Oedipus the King or Creon in Antigone.
Antigone & the Fourteen Against Thebes
Creon achieved his bitter reign in the fallout from a murderous dispute between Eteocles and Polyneices, whom Oedipus, their father, cursed for abandoning him to his suffering. At first the brothers agreed to rule Thebes in alternate years, but when Polyneices’ turn came, Eteocles refused to surrender the throne. Angered, Polyneices took refuge in Argos, where he married King Adrastus’ daughter and persuaded his father-in-law to help restore him to his rightful throne.
