The Greek word muthos means simply a ny traditional tale. Some Greek myths — like the Homeric ones — are epic from ancient Greek epos, which just means 'word' ; others were more ordinary. Thebes was one of the most fertile generators of epic myths that have stood the test of time. Thebes was founded not by a Greek person, but by Kadmos, a Phoenician. Kadmos came from the Near East, specifically from the city of Tyre, located in what is Lebanon today.
As the story goes, Kadmos made the trip across the eastern Mediterranean to mainland Greece, not to found a city but to rescue his sister, Europa, who'd been snatched and in some versions, raped by a Greek. But not by any old Greek, in fact by no lesser a figure than the king and father of all the Greek immortal gods, great Zeus himself.
Kadmos, though, didn't content himself with finding and saving his sister: he stayed put in Greece, settled down — and founded Thebes. Not in any ordinary way, mind. Soon the city was surrounded by massive stone walls and equipped with a — suitably magical — number of gates: seven. This new city of Thebes was the mythical city in which a certain Oedipus was later born.
His parents had been foretold, by the great oracle of the shining archer-god Apollo, that their as yet unnamed son was destined, doomed, to murder his father before marrying and having children with his very own mother.
Those basic rudiments of the Oedipus myth are probably quite widely known, and they are horrifying enough. But the many bells and whistles added to the myth heaped horror upon horror. With his mother-wife he sired four children who were also his half-brothers and sisters. When he discovered the fact that he was not only a patricide but also monstrously incestuous, he blinded himself; and when his mother-wife learned the truth, she committed suicide.
Oedipus and many other Theban myths inspired some of the greatest playwrights of ancient Greece. The Athenian Sophocles' tragic play Antigone c. Yet Antigone is just one of the great Sophocles's extant 'Theban plays': he also wrote two Oedipus plays, one set in the unfortunate's native city Oedipus Tyrannus , or Oedipus the King , the other in the playwright's own home village Oedipus at Colonus. And what of the other two members of Athens' 5th-century BC holy trinity of astonishing tragic dramatists, Aeschylus the older and Euripides the younger?
Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes probably BC survives, as does Euripides's Bacchae BC, named for the 'mad' female devotees of the ecstatic god of theatre himself, Dionysus, whose mother was Theban. So — what was it about those pretty horrendous Theban myths that so attracted some of the greatest playwrights of ancient Greece — and indeed of the world — and their audiences?
I have a go at trying to answer that tough question in the book. The Classical Athenians thought they were a cut above other Greeks, culturally speaking. They were particularly snotty and snooty towards their Theban near-neighbours, whom they derided and derogated as mere 'Boeotian swine', more interested in the belly than in the mind or the soul. A -Tourists have been visiting Egypt for centuries and Egyptians have well-earned reputation for warmth and kindness toward visitors.
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