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The Dramatization of the Theban Legend

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

H. C. Baldry
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Extract

Modern scholarship has devoted much time and ingenuity to the problem of the sources from which the Greek tragic poets drew the plots of their plays. It has been commonly assumed that somewhere in that largely unknown area of literature which lies between Homer and the fifth century b.c. most legends had already crystallized into more or less the shape in which we know them from drama; and that the Attic playwrights (with the possible exception of Euripides) made little more than minor alterations in tales already familiar to their audience. But there is little evidence to support this assumption, either in the scanty remains of Cyclic epic and choral lyric, or in the occasional remarks on the subject by ancient commentators. In this article I attempt to illustrate by a single example a different point of view: the belief that in dealing with this aspect of tragedy we should put the same emphasis on the creative artistry of the dramatists themselves which it has received from Kitto and others in discussing other sides of their work; and that where (as in most cases) the source of their version is unknown, the very fact that it is moulded to suit a dramatic purpose should lead us to give the author, rather than a hypothetical and perhaps imaginary tradition, the benefit of the doubt.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , March 1956 , pp. 24 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1956

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References

page 25 note 1 Tr. Butcher and Lang.

page 26 note 1 Tr. Lang, Leaf, and Myers.

page 29 note 1 Fr. 62.

page 30 note 1 Cf. Aristotle's παρατείνειν (Poetics 1455b2).

page 30 note 2 742–57, 766–91, tr. H. Weir Smyth. I have altered the translation of τροφ⋯ς (786) for reasons explained below.

page 31 note 1 In 785–6 I follow Hermann's widely accepted reading, τέκνοισιν δ' ⋯ρ⋯ς ⋯φ⋯κεν ⋯πικότους τροφ⋯ς. The scholiast on O.C. 1375 apparently regarded τροφ⋯ς as a reference to the Thebais story that Oedipus cursed his sons for sending him the thigh from a sacrifice instead of the shoulder. But this would be a very obscure way of alluding to the Thebais version; and it seems clear from the context that the curse, like the blinding, was an immediate sequel to the discovery and part of the triple climax, not a later development. For these reasons I accept the interpretation of Hermann, Schütz, Weil, and others: ‘curses resulting from anger at having brought up sons the offspring of an incestuous union’. Cf. L. & S. s.v. ⋯πίκοτος: ‘in wrath at the sons he had bred’. For the conception that their breeding was the cause of their fate, cf. 926–32.

page 33 note 1 Cf. Plutarch, , Theseus 29.Google Scholar Plutarch–s words (Αἰσχύλου 'Ελευσίνιοι, ⋯ν οῑς κα⋯ τα⋯τα λέγων ⋯ Θησεὺς πεποίηται) suggest that the incident was mentioned or described in the play, rather than that it constituted the plot.

page 34 note 1 Poetics 1453b23.

page 34 note 2 Ibid. 1455a34 ff.

page 34 note 3 ὑπ⋯ρ τ⋯ν τεττάρων, 284.

page 35 note 1 On the other hand, I cannot go all the way with the interpretation of L. H. G. Greenwood in chapter v of his Aspects of Euripidean Tragedy.