Oedipus' story of Thebes is rooted in a
family with. Close connections to the land.
Yes indeed. We've seen.
Or I mentioned earlier in one of our lectures the connection of this figure
Cadmus in Oedipus' own background. The founding families of Thebes it was
told emerged when Cadmus was now on a. He was on a journey from his background
in. From his family.
Ancestral home in Venice. And comes to the place of Thebes and
there's a serpent on a This. That's wound itself around a spring, and
is now threatening people who try to get there.
Cadmus, who is powerful and strong, slays the serpent, takes the serpents teeth and
throws them into the ground. Well, from these teeth sprout up out of
the ground itself grand heroes that are armed.
They have this massive battle, fight one another in this archetypal act of
fratricide. Five of them survive and they become the
founding families of Thebes. This is the story.
This is where the Thebans understand themselves to come from.
Or at least this is where the Athenians understand the Thebans to come from.
Remember, these are Athenian based tragedies that we see.
So these five men survive, become the founding families of Thebes, and introduce
us to another in our installment of universal laws.
Remember we're saying universal with tongue in our cheek just a little bit.
Universal law number seven. A deep connection to the land is a common.
Human expression. Humans have loved to claim deep
connections to the land. There is an aristocratic dimension to this
that shows up in Greek materials. And I'm familiar with it.
With some aristocrats in my own experience.
People who claim they are a seventh generation Bostonian or an nineteenth
generation Floridian or whatever, whatever happens to be.
There is People get great pride when claiming to have been connected to the
land. I think that there's some residual sense
of back in a futile society. The idea that this land just kind of came
to you, and it belongs to you in some sense.
The, the idea of being dislocated and wandering, such as, Odysseus embraces, is
also a little bit, disconcerting, and to think that you have an actual rooted
connection to a land, is a nice thing to have.
Well, the Greeks surely thought that. And in story like, the stories like we see
in the founding families of Thebes, there's a strong, strong connection to the
land. In fact, the idea shows up in this idea of
birth from the land itself. There's a Greek term for this, called
autochthony. Autochthony meaning from the ground
itself. Remember chthonic is a term we've already
ran into talking about earth-based things and auto added in front of that means the
earth itself. So autochthony is a theory that people
were born from the earth itself. From the earth itself.
This expresses a deep connection to the land.
Of course you were born from it. It's your own,
Room, I mean you came up out of it. You're sort of emerged there like a plant
belonging to it. Stories of autochthonous birth are common
in ancient myth. We have connections to the earth, and
great heroes in the past. There are hints that they have these
connections. When people do have autochthonous
connection to the land, they also are going to have some defect in the foot.
This is typically associated with ideas of autochthony.
The claim is, then, that if you grow up like a plant out of the ground.
And you sort of, you know, pop up. At some point, someone has to pick you.
So they pluck you out of the Earth, And when they do, your feet get misfigured
somehow, in one way or another. We have this in you will recall Achilles
has his heel, this is probably connected with that background.
He's got a weak spot at his lower extremities and his heel.
Jason, a, a famous hero from the Greek side of things famously loses a sandal,
early on in his adventures, suggestion there is there's a connection with
autochthony that's, feet are typically a side of vulnerability in Homer, we see
this in the case of Hector Achilles uses after his feet is a kind of handled a
draggin around, Lameness shows up in other lameness of the
feet shows up in other lineages of grand heroes where we think autochthony is being
hinted at. Whether it all coheres together in a
single picture is another question. In the case of Oedipus it seems clearly to
be something that's going on. Oedipus' name.
Recall that when we look at what the background of a Greek hero is, we've gotta
address what the name is. We hear in Oedipus' own story that his
background in Greek his name is pretty closely typically term for, Greek terms
for swollenness, Oideo, a Greek term meaning to swell, plus
pous, foot. So Oedipus is he of swollen foot.
Now in his case, of course there are multiple reasons why his foot is swollen
his father after all cuts right through his poor little infant tendons, and binds
them together at his ankles, so he has vulnerability there.
But there is a, a further connection, to this autochthonous background that's being
hinted at in talking about Oedipus' own lameness of his feet.
The feet come up in several places in Oedipus' story.
And let's just. Pull out a few of these to have a look at
them. Creon, talks about line 130, this sphinx,
riddling sphinx induced us to neglect the mysterious crimes and rather seek solution
of troubles at our feet. Something right in front of them, yes,
that seems to be what he's saying but also there's a bit of a trouble when we get to
Oedipus, with his feet. There's a neat, that's a riddle that needs
solving. Why is it, that there's this terrible scar
there? Taureseus four:17 talks about a deadly
footed, double-striking curse from father and mother both shall drive you forth.
And Oedipus'. Versus their connected with his feet,
through Tiresias, this, prophet, who has, Apollo's own insight.
Jocasta, King Laius pierced his ankles and bind the
hands of others cast him forth. So we have the mentioning of the pinning
of the ankles of Oedipus. Oedipus then jumps in talking about going
on foot. I was encountered by Harold and a carriage
with a man in it, recounting his own his own version of the event where Lias gets
killed. He is on foot at the time.
There's something, there's a connection there with Oedipus' rootedness in his
foot. Based identity, and messenger jumps in as
he's telling Oedipus his own background, I loosed you, the tendons of your feet were
pierced and. Fettered, so that from this you're called
by your present name, Oedipus of the swollen foot.
Each of these points in the story links us back to Oedipus' foot defect and the foot
defect typically, in mythology, is tied to a background of autochthonous birth,
A pure connection to the land. So what Sophocles has done, extremely
skillfully in tying these two things together, is to take some piece of
Oedipus' past that is a purposeful intervention by his father in order to try
to kill him. In other words, the misfiguring of his
feet. And link it to another way of talking
about Oedipus' own background. That misfiguring of the feet, yes, can be
an emblematic of the father's attempt to kill him and brush him aside.
Or it can be emblematic of Oedipus' own connection to Cithaeron, his own special
rebirth, and the ability to over. Overcome the problems in his own life.
He's now is going to belong in a special way to this land.
This earthborn connection is going to give him a certain kind of rootedness that,
despite his own father's attempts to erase his connection to Oedipus, Oedipus is
still going to survive and grow on from those.
In fact, if his own father had not tried to ostracize him, put him out for lost on
the hillside. Oedipus would not have been reborn and had
this special connection to Cathyron. Now, the connection has, that a sadness to
it, in addition to sense of rebirth from the womb of capyron in the sense that he
is now from nowhere. He's literally from a trackless hillside.
He doesn't belong to people anymore. He's a singleton growing out of the earth.
What's his background. What's his connection.
What's his name. What do all these things do for him.
None of them leads back to anything of linkage.
Instead the only thing that has ground truth so to speak for Oedipus anymore is
this autochthonous connection to Cithaeron.
The Giving us this iteration of a deep connectiveness has a sad kind of pathetic
quality to it. All that Oedipus has left is the.
Barren wasteland and the I idea that he's abandoned.
Autochthonous birth, has, in some sense, though, always, this sense of removing a
person from genetic lineage, from genealogy.
Where did you come from? Well, who knows what people were in my
background. I came from the land itself.
That fantasy of not having. Any lineage, any parents.
To just sort of have emerged up out of nothingness is has a certain appeal for
people with very complex family backgrounds.
There's a, and a kind of ultimate escapism I think built into this idea of Oedipus,
that yes indeed [inaudible] is my background.
His family connections are so messed up and compromised, he turns his back on them
and now claims a special linkage only to that hill.
Eventually all this though the attempt to turn back on things and claim a connection
to a land gets very complicated. And suggest, in Sophocles own way I think,
the complexity of human's claim, to deep conection to with the land, and instead I
think, underwrite or at least, keeps in front of us, the ideal that we as human's
are mostly, just, pretty much, always, going to be, wanderers.
What connection to the land do we have, well, we're sort of stuck, with
connections, to each other, the only way to get away from that, is to, become, an
escapist in Oedipus' horrible, horrible