Jen C

That’s a good question, will the cycle recur? I understand at there are other plays that follow Oedipus’s children, but does Oedipus’s and iocaste’s actions stop that cycle? If they didn’t die or find out their flaws would have their crocked lineage continue?

Great — this post does have the two-way connection the “Blog Me” button is supposed to create.

The Greeks would have known what happened before this two-hour chunk of the story… Laios had been warned not to have children with his wife, but one drunken night he ignored that prophecy, leading to the birth of Oedipus; earlier Laios had kindnapped the son of a friendly king, and abused the youth sexually, a crime for which he and his whole kingdom suffered. So the suffering of Oedipus is really one phase of a longer story that Oedipus himself did not begin.

I don’t know enough Greek mythology to be able to tell you where it all began, but Laios’s father disrespected Dionysus and in retaliation was ripped apart by a mob of drunken women; I just looked it up on line, and that guy’s father was ripped apart by his mother by order of Dionysus, and that guy’s father was Cadmus, a more well-known mythological character who killed a dragon and sowed the teeth of the dragon, and from the teeth grew men who would become the warrior army of Thebes. Cadmus appears to have been the grandson of Poseideon the sea god (who fancied a mortal woman), and on the other side the grandson of the goddess of the Nile (who fancied a mortal man).

I just looked it up, and it seems the dragon Cadmus killed and whose teeth he used to create soldiers (having been told to do so by Athena, the goddess of wisdom) was sacred to Ares the god of war. After enduring many misfortunes as punishment for killing Ares’s precious snake-dragon-serpent thing, Cadmus grumbled something along the lines of “If serpents are so holy to the gods, I’d be better off as a serpent,” and those mischievous gods promptly turned him into a snake. His wife begged the gods to turn her into a snake too, and so perhaps as snakes they are finally happy together.

The Greeks would have seen, in the trials that Cadmus and his family endured, as an ongoing debate between Athena and Ares, as an opportunity to debate whether warlike strength is more important than wisdom. (Note that Oedipus is wise enough to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, and that he acts in warlike anger when he meets Laios (though it’s probably true that the Greeks would have seen Laios as equally brash; in some versions, Laios with his retinue of servants orders his servant to kill one of Oedipus’s horses, and Oedipus retaliates on one of Laios’s lackeys, which brings the two men to blows — note that in this version, Laios started it, and Oedipus was defending his property, so it doesn’t sound as if Oedipus’s sin was bullying an older man; apparently Laios didn’t have his servants say “Stand aside in the name of the king,” or else Oedipus would have known who he attacked.