Heroes: Volume II of Mythos

OEDIPUS fn1 The foundation of Thebes, as befits its precedence, is recounted in the first volume of Mythos (page 224). fn2 The story of Tantalus is treated in Mythos (page 261): the fate of House of Atreus belongs to the story of the Trojan War. fn3 See the first volume of Mythos (page 230). fn4 Pronounced Lie-us. fn5 The curse of Ares had lain on the royal house of Thebes ever since Cadmus slew the Ismenian water dragon. See the first volume of Mythos (pages 220 and 244). fn6 They were responsible for finishing the construction of Thebes’ walls and its acropolis, the Cadmeia. See the first volume of Mythos (page 225). fn7 As previously pointed out, not the Italian Pisa, but a city state in the Peloponnese (which hadn’t yet earned that name from Pelops), the large peninsula to the south west of Greece joined to the mainland by the Isthmus of Corinth. It was inherited by Pelops when he won the hand of Hippodamia in marriage. See the story of Perseus (here). fn8 Another version of the story maintains that Chrysippus was killed by his half-brothers Atreus and THYESTES out of jealousy at their father’s love for him. Euripides wrote a play about the life and fate of Chrysippus that is sadly lost to us. fn9 The Greek for that is ‘anagram’. fn10 Zeus’s mother RHEA had fooled her husband Kronos into eating the stone, thinking it was the infant Zeus. When Kronos later vomited up the stone, Zeus threw it so that it landed at Pytho/Delphi. See the first volume of Mythos (page 97). fn11 And of course, in Greek letters Python and Typhon are not anagrams, but we’ll pretend we don’t know that. fn12 The Sphinx is usually given as a child of Echidna and Typhon, though some sources suggest she was their grandchild – a daughter of Orthrus and Chimera. fn13 An asclepion was a cross between a health spa, a hospital and a temple to Asclepius. fn14 See the first volume of Mythos for the full story (page 330). fn15 Oedipus Tyrannos in its original Greek, but often confusingly given the Latin title Oedipus Rex. I was a perfectly dreadful Oedipus in a production (the W. B. Yeats translation) at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1979. The unhappy citizens of Edinburgh still talk about it in hushed, disbelieving tones. One of Laurence Olivier’s most celebrated feats was his double bill as Oedipus and as Mr Puff in Sheridan’s The Critic. They say Olivier’s scream as Oedipus when he suddenly realises the truth about himself – the cascade of truths – was one of the great moments in theatrical history. They don’t say that of my performance. fn16 As in the third state of man in the Sphinx’s riddle … fn17 Literally rivals, since their plays were submitted in competition, only the prizewinning texts going into production. fn18 There was also a fourth work by Aeschylus, a comic companion piece or ‘satyr’ play, called Sphinx. They are sometimes collectively referred to as Aeschylus’s Oedipodea. fn19 I sometimes dream that a great find will restore thousands of the great lost works of antiquity to us. Many perished in the catastrophic fire (or fires) at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, but who knows? – maybe one day a huge repository of manuscripts will be uncovered. We have eighteen or nineteen plays by Euripides, for example, yet he is known to have written almost a hundred. Only seven of Aeschylus’s eighty remain, while just seven plays of Sophocles have come down to us out of a hundred and twenty known titles. Almost every character you come across when reading the Greek myths had a play about them written by one, other or all three of the great Athenian masters. The loss of so many of their works might be regarded as the greatest Greek tragedy of them all.

THESEUS fn1 The same Aethra to whom Bellerophon had once been engaged. fn2 In Euripides Heracleidae or ‘Children of Heracles’, it is given that Alcmene was the daughter of Pelops’s son Pittheus, making him the common grandfather of Heracles and Theseus. Hence my occasional use of the word ‘cousin’ when talking of the two heroes. fn3 See the story of Heracles (here). fn4 How Medea acquired such a dreadful reputation, and how she came to be in Athens, you will recall, is told in the story of Jason (here and here).