![]() ![]() ![]() Some 250 years or so separate Sophocles from Homer and while Sophocles has the mother named Jocasta rather than Epikaste, he agrees with Homer that she married her son, and hanged herself when the truth came out also that Oedipus prior to this marriage had murdered his father. Far and away the best known version of the myth - the version from which, for instance, the founding fathers of psychoanalysis and structuralism, Freud and Lévi-Strauss repectively, drew their seminal studies - is that of Sophocles, in his play Oedipus Tyrannus, or Oedipus the King. Oedipus' name is now a household word and these scanty appearances in Homer cannot have had anything to do with that. In the Iliad there is a single, glancing reference to Oedipus in Book 23, which only confirms the Odyssey version of Oedipus continuing to rule after the gods' revelation. The gods soon made this known, whereupon, while Oedipus continued to rule at Thebes, Epikaste hanged herself. Epikaste tells him how, "in ignorance", she married her son, shortly after Oedipus had killed his father. His single appearance in the Odyssey is in Book 11, where Odysseus visits the Underworld, and there meets, among others, the spirit of the departed Epikaste, the mother of Oedipus. Remember what happened to Agamemnon …".Īt home Odysseus' son Telemachus is - somewhat slowly - growing up, and he is enjoined: Odysseus, too, is on his way home from Troy and he is repeatedly warned: That is to say, the myth is not given as simply a piece of story-telling, but it is told by one of Homer's speakers in such a way as to make a point, to direct his listeners to some present course of action.Īn obvious example is the story, referred to repeatedly in the Odyssey, of how Agamemnon, the Greek commander-in-chief in the Trojan War, returned home after the War and was immediately murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her paramour Aegisthus, and how in due course Agamemnon's murder was avenged by his son Orestes. Second, when Homer gives at any length a myth from outside his main storyline, he gives it paradigmatically. Let's look at just two aspects of what this means.įirst, Homer gives one version of the myth, but we very commonly find different versions elsewhere – there is no single, canonical version of any Greek myth. Odysseus and Euryclea by Christian Gottlob Heyne Homer's epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey are our earliest surviving Greek literature, and our earliest sources for the Greek myths. ![]()
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