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Summary

The story of Oedipus and his children was the most famous legendary cycle of ancient Greece after the Trojan cycle. It inspired ¨¡schylus a cycle known as the Theban tetralogy, made up of three tragedies : Laius, Oedipus and The Seven against Thebes, and a satirical drama : The Sphinx, of which only The Seven against Thebes is still extant ; it also inspired several tragedies to Sophocles, of which Oedipus Tyrannus, Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus are still extant, and to Euripides, including a lost Antigone and the extant Phoenician Women and Suppliants; Oedipus is mentioned only twice in Plato's dialogues, both times in the Laws.

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Notes

Thebes was the largest and richest city of Boeotia, owing to the fertility of its territory. In mythological traditions, it was founded by Cadmus, a Phoenician, son of Agenor, king of Sidon (or Tyre, in Syria), himself the son of Poseidon and a descendant of Zeus and Io through his mother Libya. Cadmus had a sister named Europa who was abducted by Zeus under the guise of a bull (Zeus brought her to Crete and, from her, had three sons : Minos, Sarpedon and Rhadamanthus). Agenor then ordered Cadmus and his brothers Thasus , Phoenix and Cilix to go search for their sister and not come back till they had found her. Each one took a different road and, unable to find her, they kept going, founding city after city along their way. These wanderings led Cadmus in Crete, Thera, Samothrace, Rhodes and in many other place. Cadmus was eventually ordered by the oracle of Delphi to stop searching his sister and found a city where, upon following a cow, the animal would stop of exhaustion. The cow he thus followed stopped at the location of what became Thebes. In order to cleanse the cow before offering it in sacrifice to Athena, Cadmus sent some of his companions draw water from a neighboring spring. But there, they were killed by a dragon. Upon seeing that, Cadmus fought and killed the dragon and Athena, appearing to him, suggested that he sow the teeth of the dead animal. As soon as he had done this, armed warriors sprang from the earth. Feeling threatened by these men, Cadmus threw stones in the middle of them. Not knowing where the stones came from, the "sowed men" (the Spartoi, as they became called) killed each other, except for five of them, one of whom, Echion, later married Agave, a daughter of Cadmus. To expiate the murder of the dragon, Cadmus had to serve Ares for eight year, and after that, with the help of Athena, he became king of Thebes and Zeus gave him Harmonia, the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, for wife. All the gods attended the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia, where the Muses sang, and they brought gifts to the bride, including a wonderful dress weaved by the Graces (Charites inGreek), daughters of Zeus, and a golden necklace made by Hephaistus (which would later play a role in the expedition of the Seven against Thebes, in the time of Adrastus, king of Argos).

[Herodotus, in his Histories, V, 57-58, credits Cadmus and his Phoenician companions with introducing many new techniques in Greece, including the alphabet (and indeed, the Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician alphabet, which is the first known alphabet, that is, a writing system based on letters representing elementary sounds rather than ideograms, like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, or syllables, like the Cretan Linear A and B writing systems that preceeded it ; this alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians around 1100 B. C. and introduced in Greece probably around the end of the IXth century B. C. or beginning of the VIIIth ; the main innovation of the Greeks with respect to writing was to add letters for vowels to an alphabet which, like today's Hebrew or Arabic alphabets, included only consonants).

Plato too alludes to the story of Cadmus in several places : at Menexenus, 245d, he mentions the offspring of Cadmus as not being genuine Greeks ; at Laws, II, 663e, he mentions the story of "the Sidonian" and the sowing of the teeth as an example of how easy it is to make people believe a worthy lie, in keeping with what was said at Republic, III, 414b, sq about the noble lie, with a reference to the same "Phoenician story" ; the story of the sowed men fighting each other is behind Plato's reference to "Cadmeian victories" at Laws, I, 641c to show the ill effects of pride in victory ; then, in the Ph¯do, Socrates compares Simmias and Cebes, who are Thebans, to Harmonia and Cadmus respectively, when moving from the answer to Simmias objection of the soul-harmony to the answer to Cebes' objection (Ph¯do, 95a). ]

Cadmus and Harmonia had several children : Polydorus, a son, and four daughters, Autonoe, Ino, Agave and Semele. Semele was loved by Zeus and, when Hera learned that she was pregnant, filled with jealousy, she suggested Semele to ask Zeus to appear to her in all his glory. Zeus, who had promised her to do all she would ask, showed himself amidst lightnings and thunderstorms, which Semele couldn't bear and which caused her death. Zeus immediately removed the child she was bearing (she was in her sixth month of pregnancy) and sewed him in his own thigh, until the time of birth came and Dionysus (the "twice-born") was born in perfect health. Zeus entrusted the baby to Hermes, who gave him to his mother's sister Ino and her husband Athamas, king of Coronea (or Orchomenus) in Boeotia, and brother of Sisyphus, king of Corinth. But Hera, still jealous, struck Athamas with madness, so that he killed one of the sons he had had from Ino. Ino herself, rendered mad by this, killed her other son, Melicertes, by plunging him into a pot of boiling water, and then, killed herself by jumping into the sea, somewhere between Corinth and Megara, with the body of her dead son, and thereafter became a marine goddess under the name Leucothea ("the white goddess"). According to some traditions, the Isthmian games, that were celebrated near Corinth, were instituted by Sisyphus in honor of his nephew Melicertes.
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Pasolini: 1967