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Oedipus' story of Thebes is rooted in a
family with.

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Close connections to the land.
Yes indeed.

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We've seen.
Or I mentioned earlier in one of our

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lectures the connection of this figure
Cadmus in Oedipus' own background.

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The founding families of Thebes it was
told emerged when Cadmus was now on a.

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He was on a journey from his background
in.

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From his family.
Ancestral home in Venice.

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And comes to the place of Thebes and
there's a serpent on a This.

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That's wound itself around a spring, and
is now threatening people who try to get

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there.
Cadmus, who is powerful and strong, slays

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the serpent, takes the serpents teeth and
throws them into the ground.

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Well, from these teeth sprout up out of
the ground itself grand heroes that are

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armed.
They have this massive battle, fight one

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another in this archetypal act of
fratricide.

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Five of them survive and they become the
founding families of Thebes.

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This is the story.
This is where the Thebans understand

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themselves to come from.
Or at least this is where the Athenians

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understand the Thebans to come from.
Remember, these are Athenian based

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tragedies that we see.
So these five men survive, become the

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founding families of Thebes, and introduce
us to another in our installment of

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universal laws.
Remember we're saying universal with

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tongue in our cheek just a little bit.
Universal law number seven.

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A deep connection to the land is a common.
Human expression.

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Humans have loved to claim deep
connections to the land.

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There is an aristocratic dimension to this
that shows up in Greek materials.

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And I'm familiar with it.
With some aristocrats in my own

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experience.
People who claim they are a seventh

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generation Bostonian or an nineteenth
generation Floridian or whatever, whatever

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happens to be.
There is People get great pride when

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claiming to have been connected to the
land.

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I think that there's some residual sense
of back in a futile society.

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The idea that this land just kind of came
to you, and it belongs to you in some

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sense.
The, the idea of being dislocated and

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wandering, such as, Odysseus embraces, is
also a little bit, disconcerting, and to

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think that you have an actual rooted
connection to a land, is a nice thing to

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have.
Well, the Greeks surely thought that.

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And in story like, the stories like we see
in the founding families of Thebes,

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there's a strong, strong connection to the
land.

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In fact, the idea shows up in this idea of
birth from the land itself.

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There's a Greek term for this, called
autochthony.

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Autochthony meaning from the ground
itself.

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Remember chthonic is a term we've already
ran into talking about earth-based things

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and auto added in front of that means the
earth itself.

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So autochthony is a theory that people
were born from the earth itself.

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From the earth itself.
This expresses a deep connection to the

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land.
Of course you were born from it.

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It's your own,
Room, I mean you came up out of it.

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You're sort of emerged there like a plant
belonging to it.

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Stories of autochthonous birth are common
in ancient myth.

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We have connections to the earth, and
great heroes in the past.

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There are hints that they have these
connections.

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When people do have autochthonous
connection to the land, they also are

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going to have some defect in the foot.
This is typically associated with ideas of

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autochthony.
The claim is, then, that if you grow up

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like a plant out of the ground.
And you sort of, you know, pop up.

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At some point, someone has to pick you.
So they pluck you out of the Earth,

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And when they do, your feet get misfigured
somehow, in one way or another.

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We have this in you will recall Achilles
has his heel, this is probably connected

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with that background.
He's got a weak spot at his lower

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extremities and his heel.
Jason, a, a famous hero from the Greek

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side of things famously loses a sandal,
early on in his adventures, suggestion

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there is there's a connection with
autochthony that's, feet are typically a

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side of vulnerability in Homer, we see
this in the case of Hector Achilles uses

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after his feet is a kind of handled a
draggin around,

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Lameness shows up in other lameness of the
feet shows up in other lineages of grand

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heroes where we think autochthony is being
hinted at.

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Whether it all coheres together in a
single picture is another question.

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In the case of Oedipus it seems clearly to
be something that's going on.

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Oedipus' name.
Recall that when we look at what the

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background of a Greek hero is, we've gotta
address what the name is.

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We hear in Oedipus' own story that his
background in Greek his name is pretty

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closely typically term for, Greek terms
for swollenness,

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Oideo, a Greek term meaning to swell, plus
pous, foot.

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So Oedipus is he of swollen foot.
Now in his case, of course there are

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multiple reasons why his foot is swollen
his father after all cuts right through

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his poor little infant tendons, and binds
them together at his ankles, so he has

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vulnerability there.
But there is a, a further connection, to

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this autochthonous background that's being
hinted at in talking about Oedipus' own

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lameness of his feet.
The feet come up in several places in

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Oedipus' story.
And let's just.

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Pull out a few of these to have a look at
them.

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Creon, talks about line 130, this sphinx,
riddling sphinx induced us to neglect the

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mysterious crimes and rather seek solution
of troubles at our feet.

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Something right in front of them, yes,
that seems to be what he's saying but also

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there's a bit of a trouble when we get to
Oedipus, with his feet.

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There's a neat, that's a riddle that needs
solving.

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Why is it, that there's this terrible scar
there?

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Taureseus four:17 talks about a deadly
footed, double-striking curse from father

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and mother both shall drive you forth.
And Oedipus'.

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Versus their connected with his feet,
through Tiresias, this, prophet, who has,

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Apollo's own insight.
Jocasta,

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King Laius pierced his ankles and bind the
hands of others cast him forth.

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So we have the mentioning of the pinning
of the ankles of Oedipus.

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Oedipus then jumps in talking about going
on foot.

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I was encountered by Harold and a carriage
with a man in it, recounting his own his

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own version of the event where Lias gets
killed.

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He is on foot at the time.
There's something, there's a connection

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there with Oedipus' rootedness in his
foot.

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Based identity, and messenger jumps in as
he's telling Oedipus his own background, I

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loosed you, the tendons of your feet were
pierced and.

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Fettered, so that from this you're called
by your present name, Oedipus of the

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swollen foot.
Each of these points in the story links us

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back to Oedipus' foot defect and the foot
defect typically, in mythology, is tied to

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a background of autochthonous birth,
A pure connection to the land.

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So what Sophocles has done, extremely
skillfully in tying these two things

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together, is to take some piece of
Oedipus' past that is a purposeful

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intervention by his father in order to try
to kill him.

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In other words, the misfiguring of his
feet.

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And link it to another way of talking
about Oedipus' own background.

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That misfiguring of the feet, yes, can be
an emblematic of the father's attempt to

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kill him and brush him aside.
Or it can be emblematic of Oedipus' own

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connection to Cithaeron, his own special
rebirth, and the ability to over.

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Overcome the problems in his own life.
He's now is going to belong in a special

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way to this land.
This earthborn connection is going to give

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him a certain kind of rootedness that,
despite his own father's attempts to erase

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his connection to Oedipus, Oedipus is
still going to survive and grow on from

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those.
In fact, if his own father had not tried

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to ostracize him, put him out for lost on
the hillside.

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Oedipus would not have been reborn and had
this special connection to Cathyron.

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Now, the connection has, that a sadness to
it, in addition to sense of rebirth from

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the womb of capyron in the sense that he
is now from nowhere.

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He's literally from a trackless hillside.
He doesn't belong to people anymore.

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He's a singleton growing out of the earth.
What's his background.

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What's his connection.
What's his name.

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What do all these things do for him.
None of them leads back to anything of

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linkage.
Instead the only thing that has ground

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truth so to speak for Oedipus anymore is
this autochthonous connection to

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Cithaeron.
The Giving us this iteration of a deep

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connectiveness has a sad kind of pathetic
quality to it.

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All that Oedipus has left is the.
Barren wasteland and the I idea that he's

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abandoned.
Autochthonous birth, has, in some sense,

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though, always, this sense of removing a
person from genetic lineage, from

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genealogy.
Where did you come from?

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Well, who knows what people were in my
background.

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I came from the land itself.
That fantasy of not having.

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Any lineage, any parents.
To just sort of have emerged up out of

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nothingness is has a certain appeal for
people with very complex family

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backgrounds.
There's a, and a kind of ultimate escapism

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I think built into this idea of Oedipus,
that yes indeed [inaudible] is my

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background.
His family connections are so messed up

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and compromised, he turns his back on them
and now claims a special linkage only to

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that hill.
Eventually all this though the attempt to

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turn back on things and claim a connection
to a land gets very complicated.

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And suggest, in Sophocles own way I think,
the complexity of human's claim, to deep

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conection to with the land, and instead I
think, underwrite or at least, keeps in

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front of us, the ideal that we as human's
are mostly, just, pretty much, always,

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going to be, wanderers.
What connection to the land do we have,

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well, we're sort of stuck, with
connections, to each other, the only way

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to get away from that, is to, become, an
escapist in Oedipus' horrible, horrible