Classical Mythology, 7th Edition - obinfonet: dia logou

THE THEBAN SAGA 403
2. There are several variants of the riddle and its answer. The shortest (Apollodorus
3. 53-54) is given here.
3. Cf. Lowell Edmunds, Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), a survey of the many versions of the myth.
Two modern novels are of merit: Oedipus on the Road (1990), originally in French by
Henry Bauchau, recounting the journey of Oedipus, blind and bleeding, from Thebes,
with his daughter Antigone and a shepherd-bandit named Clius, though an imaginative,
geographical and spiritual landscape; and Emmeline (1980) by Judith Rossner,
a powerful retelling of the Oedipus legend, set in the eastern United States in the
mid-nineteenth century.
4. In the intervening four years Athens had surrendered to Sparta and her allies at the
end of the Peloponnesian War; the "long walls" between the city and its port had
been pulled down. The democracy had been replaced by an oligarchy led by a committee
of thirty, itself soon replaced by the restored democracy.
5. The transformation of the Erinyes ("Furies") into Eumenides ("Kindly Ones") is the
climactic theme of Aeschylus' Oresteia (see Chapter 18); Aeschylus brings the goddesses
to Athens where they take up their new home.
6. In lines 1284-1345 of his speech, Polynices names the Seven against Thebes. We translate
a similar passage from Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes on pp. 396-397. Another
catalog is given by Euripides in the Phoenissae (1090-1199), where a messenger reports
the failure of the attack on Thebes.
7. For a psychoanalytic interpretation, a good place to begin is with Oedipus: Myth and
Complex, A Review of Psychoanalytic Theory, by Patrick Mullahy (see the Bibliography
for Myth and Psychology on pp. 32-33 and 402). Mullahy discusses Sigmund Freud,
Alfred Adler, C. G. Jung, Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Eric Fromm, and Harry Stack
Sullivan. Of related interest is a study of the use of myth (with emphasis upon psychoanalytic
interpretation) in the works of William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S.
Eliot, and W. H. Auden: Lillian Feder, Ancient Myth and Modern Poetry (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971).
8. The legends contained in the lost epics (with the titles of Oedipodea and Thebais) are
discussed by G. A. Huxley, Greek Epic Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1969), chap. 3.
9. The herald's description of Eteoclus (son of Iphis), whom Aeschylus names as the
third hero in place of Adrastus, is omitted. For other catalogues of the Seven in Euripides
and Sophocles see note 6 in this chapter.
10. Antigone, as the symbol of individual conscience against the unjust laws of the state,
has inspired many literary and musical works. See George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984).