Mysteries of Ancient Greece: Fate, Vengeance, and Transgression

By Mr Ghaz, December 11, 2010

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Mysteries of Ancient Greece: Fate, Vengeance, and Transgression

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Many of the heroes celebrated by Homer and Hesiod had their stories reshaped in fifth-century BCE Athens by playwrights. Audiences were able to watch characters struggle in vain to escape their fate. Other figures from Greek myth endured horrific punishments for having offended the gods.

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Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, produced in 458BCE, elaborates the tale of the return from Troy of Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks, and the bloody events which followed. In the first play, Agamemnon’s wife Klytaimnestra murders him in the bath. In the Libation Bearers, the royal couple’s son Orestes returns from exile and avenges his dead father by slaying both his mother and her lover Aigisthos. The final part of Aeschylus’s trilogy is the Eumenides, the “Kindly Ones,” a euphemism for the Furies who pursue Orestes for having spilt his mother’s blood. He seeks purification at Delphi, whence Apollo sends him to Athens to be tried at the homicide court of the Areopagos; when there is a hung jury Athene gives the casting vote in Orestes’s favor. Thus the cycle of vengeance called for by the ancient aristocratic code of honor is finally broken by the intervention of the modern, democratic institution of the law court.

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The enlightened city of Athens is also made to offer sanctuary to Oedipus in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Kolonos, but the main events of the hero’s terrible story are related in Oedipus the King. The myth is a parable of the inevitability of fate: believing him to be the child of the king and queen of Corinth, Oedipus flees to avoid the oracle’s prediction that he will kill his father and marry his mother. He travels to Thebes, where he marries the recently bereaved queen Jokasta, unaware that her dead husband Laios was the very man Oedipus had just killed in a roadside brawl. Thus Oedipus fulfills the oracle, because he is really a prince of Thebes, exposed at birth but rescued and removed to Corinth by shepherds.

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Sophocles’s treatment of the story, however, shifts the focus by starting when Oedipus is already king of Thebes. By this point in his career he has also won great respect for having solved the riddle of the Sphinx: “What goes on four legs in the morning, then two legs, then three?” The answer was “man,” who crawls as a baby, walks upright in his prime, and hobbles with a stick in old age. The play centers on Oedipus’ determination to root out the cause of the plague which is afflicting his people, which the oracle tells him is the pollution arising from the unpunished murder of Laios. Oedipus relentlessly uncovers the truth, and thus brings about the delayed realization of his own downfall. Oedipus finally asserts his own will by blinding himself and retreating into self-imposed exile.

Cautionary Tales

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Alongside the tales of warrior prowess and heroic honor, Greek myth has a number of stories which portray the other end of the spectrum: types of behavior which were liable to divine punishment. A major area of transgression involved offenses against various goddesses’ modesty. When Teiresias saw Athene bathing, for example, she struck him blind, but gave him some compensation in the form of prophetic powers (although in another version it was Hera who blinded him, for opposing her in an argument and Zeus who enabled him to foretell the future). Another frequent kind of transgression was the challenge to a deity’s area of powers, such as Niobe boasting about her children. Arachne presumptuously challenged Athene to weaving contests, of which she was transformed into a spider. The Thracian bard Thamyris also suffered a terrible fate for challenging the Muses to a singing competition: the goddesses agreed that he could sleep with each of them in turn if he won, but when he lost they struck him blind and took away his musical skills. Worse still was the Phrygian satyr Marsyas’s punishment for daring to compete with his pipes against Apollo’s lyre-playing: he was hung on a pine tree and flayed alive.

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Various other transgressors endured eternal punishments in the underworld. When Ixion attempted to rape Hera, Zeus tricked him into sleeping with a cloud fashioned in Hera’s form. The impregnated cloud gave birth to Kentauros, father of the race of centaurs, but Ixion boasted of his conquest, so Zeus tied him to an ever-turning wheel. The site of Ixion’s wheel was usually said to be Tartaros, where the giant Tityos, who had tried to rape Leto, could also be found, sprawled over two acres of ground with two vultures tearing at his constantly regenerating liver. In the underworld, Odysseus saw Tantalos, father of Niobe, who had once been a favorite of the gods, but offended them by serving up his own son Pelops in a stew to test their omniscience, or by stealing some of the gods’ ambrosia and nectar.

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His punishment was to stand for ever up to his neck in water, which would drain away every time he bent to drink, and to be surrounded by branches laden with fruit, which blew out of reach whenever he tried to pick them. The Odyssey also describes the fate of Sisyphos, who had incurred the gods’ anger by a whole series of offenses, including informing on Zeus when he had carried off the river-god Asopos’s daughter Aigina, and cheating death by tying up Thanatos, the personification of death, who had come to fetch him. To keep him out of further mischief, Sisyphos was condemned always to push uphill a great rock, which would roll back down again every time he reached the top.