Download Origins: Thebes an Anti-Athens

Origins: Thebes an Anti-Athens : !
In Euripides Ion, the problematic aspects of birth from the soil were avoided:!
• violence is transformed into reunion and love !
• barrenness and sterility into continuity and a
flourishing lineage, Creusa and her
descendants eventually populate all of Greece and the islands. !
!
Darlinghurst graffiti!
©HardieBoys
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jlpt/3799557419/sizes/l/in/photostream/
http://www.keiointernational.com/exchange/diary4/
/
Remains of the Cadmea destroyed by
Alexander the Great, 335 BCE!
http://jackiabroad.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/delphi-greece-and-surrounding-area.html
Thebes a mirror of Athens: !
1. Thebes had a fortified acropolis, the Cadmea and a lower city !
!
2. Like Athens, the Thebes of myth and tragedy was ruled by kings whose ancestors emerged
from the earth and the Theban people were descended from them. !
!
3. There is divinity in the Theban lineage, however it is not as direct as the Athenians who were
engendered from Hephaestus semen. !
!
4. There is a problem of continuity and survival of the autochthous lineage. As with Kekrops and
his daughters, there were no survivors to continue the line of Amphion and Zethus, builders of
the walls of Thebes.!
!
5. The Thebans also have a tradition of an autochthonous child who, like the daughters of
Erechtheus, voluntarily sacrifices himself for the sake of the city: Creon s adolescent son
Menoeceus. !
Froma I. Zeitlin, 1990. Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama , in J. Winkler and F. I. Zeitlin (eds.),
Nothing to Do with Dionysus? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, Princeton U.P, 130-67.!
!
------------------, 1993. Staging Dionysus Between Thebes and Athens , in Masks of Dionysus , in T. Carpenter and C.
Farone, Cornell U.P., 147-82!
Thebes an Anti-Athens : !
The tragedians represent Thebes as a city :!
1. that fails move past its origins, repeating them over and over !
2.
3.
that originated in violence which it cannot escape. !
that fails to establish regular heterosexual marriage and reproduction .!
4. that fails to establish legitimate and stable rule!
5. that fails to establish ordered relations between the generations and between the sexes!
6. the dramatists never depict the establishing of civic institutions such as law courts at Thebes!
or!
7. alliances with other cities!
!
Dionysus and Maenads !
Amphora, ca 500 BCE!
https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/
prec/www/course/mythology/
0700/dionysus.htm
Dionysos, the dangerous god of wine, wet, wild and fertile nature, the god, as I said last time, of altered states
of consciousness; the god of the drama; the god of masks, illusion and changed identity !
Death of Pentheus. !
kylix, ca. 480 BC. !
https://www.kimbellart.org/sites/default/files/tms/AP2000_02_MAIN_VIEW2_1.jpg
Αpollo and Artemis
killing the children of
Niobe.
calyx krater. 450 BCE
!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/
27906589@N05/5224478999/sizes/l/in/photostream/
©License All rights reserved by La Fuente Egeria
Dirce tied to a bull by Zetes and Amphion!
Roman wall painting, Pompeii ca 60–79 CE !
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zetoyanfion.jpg
Cadmus Kills the Dragon
of Ares!
Calyx-Krater!
C4th BCE. !
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kadmos_dragon_Louvre_N3157.jpg
The surviving spartoi (sown men):!
Oudaios, Chthonios, Echion, Pelor, Hyperenor. Great Yarmouth sand sculpture festival, 2006!
Image©TheScian.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/63965847@N00/212326297/sizes/z/in/photostream/!
The Line of Cadmus
Amphion and Zethus
Cadmus
Autonoe
Zeus Ino
Aristaios Semele
Actaeon
Harmonia
Athamas Polydoros
Dionysos
Amphion and Zethus
Nycteis
Labdacus
Echion
Pentheus
Laius abducts Pelops son Chrysippos
Laius
Agave
Menoeceus!
Jocasta
Oedipus
Creon
Adrastos
Argelia
Polyneices
Thersandros
Eteokles
Laodamas
Antigone
Ismene
Menoeceus!
Birth of Dionysus. !
Proto-Apulian
volute krater !
5th - 4th BCE. !
image source:
http://poster.4teachers.org/
imgFileWizard/46541.jpg
Maenad/ Bacchante. !
white-ground kylix,
490–80 BCE.!
One struck with her thrysus and
cold fresh water leapt forth.!
Another touched her fennel staff to
earth and up flowed springs of
wine.!
Those who longer for milk dug with
bare fingers and it came welling up.!
Pure honey began to flow from their
ivied wands.!
If you had been there and seen!
What I have seen,!
you d supplicate and pray to
Dionysos, not condemn him !
…!
!
At the appointed time, the women
whirled their thrysoi for the revels to
begin, calling on Bromios
[thunderer], Iacchos son of Zeus .
At this cry, everything that lived, all
the beasts and all the mountain,
went wild with divinity. And when
the women ran, everything ran with
them. 700ff.!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Mainade_Staatliche_Antikensammlun
gen_2645.jpg
Bacchae!
They swooped down on our grazing cattle, !
not with weapons of iron, but with their
bare hands. You would have seen one
woman, by herself, with just her hands,
tear in two a young udder-gorged,
bellowing heifer while others were
dismembering full-grown cattle,clawing
them to pieces. You would have seen ribs
and hooves scattered everywhere, flying
through the air, and scarps smeared with
blood hanging in the fir trees…. 730ff !
Images from the Bacchae,!
National Theatre, 2002!
directed by Peter Hall!
image source:
http://microsites.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?
lid=1191&dspl=images&imgid=1923
PENTHEUS: It seems to me I see two suns blazing in the
heavens and two cities of Thebes, each with seven gates.!
You lead me forward, so it seems, as a bull with two horns
upon your head. Were you all this time an animal? For now I
see a bull. 917ff. !
Follow, I shall take you safely there; another shall
bring you back. !
PENTHEUS . . . She who gave birth to me.!
DIONYSOS You'll be set apart, remarkable to all. . .!
PENTHEUS It is for that I go.!
DIONYSOS You will be carried home—!
PENTHEUS You speak of pampering me—!
DIONYSOS In your mother s arms...!
PENTHEUS Utter luxury...you will spoil me !
DIONYSOS Spoil you, indeed...!
PENTHEUS I go to my reward... 964ff!
image source:
http://microsites.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?
lid=1191&dspl=images&imgid=1923
His mother, like a priestess with a victim, was the first to
begin the slaughter. She fell on him, and he, desperate for
wretched Agave to recognize him, tore the headband from
his hair, and touching her cheek, shrieked, Its me, Mother.
Pentheus your son, the child you bore to Echion! Pity me,
spare me, Mother! !
I have done a wrong but do not kill me. But she was
foaming at the mouth, her eyes rolling in frenzy. She was
mad stark mad, possessed by Bacchos; what Pentheus
said was nothing to her. Seizing his arm and planting her
foot against his ribs, she tore the arm out of the shoulder
socket—not by her own strength but the god made it come
away easily in her hands.!
http://sunnysideup2006-7.blogspot.com.au/2007/09/
contemporary-masks.html
DIONYSOS: Upon you, Agave, and on your sisters I pronounce this doom: !
you shall leave this city in expiation of the murder you have done…!
[He turns to Cadmus.]!
!
You, Cadmus, shall be changed to a serpent, and your wife, !
the child of Ares, immortal Harmonia, shall undergo your doom, !
a serpent too. With her, it is your fate to go on a journey in a cart!
drawn on by oxen, leading behind you a great barbarian host.!
… so huge its numbers cannot be counted. 1335 !
You shall ravage many cities; but when your army!
plunders the shrine of Apollo, its homecoming!
shall be perilous and hard. !
!
Yet in the end the god Ares shall save Harmonia and you!
and bring you both to live among the blest. !
So say I, born of no mortal father,
1340 !
Dionysos, true son of Zeus. If then, when you would not, !
you had understood your mortal natures !
the son of Zeus would have been your ally.!
You would now be in blessedness.!
!
…!
!
CADMUS: We have learned. But your sentence is too harsh.!
!
DIONYSOS: I am a god. You outraged my divinity.!
!
CADMUS: Gods should be exempt from human passions. http://www.mvdaily.com/articles/2002/06/bacchae1.htm
Dionysus blurs all boundaries and dissolves all rigid oppositions: master/servant, male/female,
human/animal, hunter/hunted, rational/irrational, human/god, nature/civilization.
2. The violence in the play is an externalization of the internal, psychological violence in the human
characters. Dionysus is a catalyst for human beings to enact their true natures.!
1.
3. The wearing of women s clothing dramatizes the regressive and neurotic elements already
present in Pentheus character.
4 What we witness in this play is Pentheus psychological disintegration into psychosis:!
(a) Dionysus triggers/releases in Pentheus his own uncontrollable, repressed desire to see his mother
and aunts (and the other Theban women) in sexual and drunken abandon . (b) Once Pentheus succumbs to his repressed neurotic desire to see the women, he regresses still
further to an infantile desire for the "softness" and "luxury of being held in his mother s arms (968-70). 5. Ultimately, Pentheus' physical dismemberment is an enactment of/ symbolic of his psychological
disintegration.
!
Euripides Bacchae
structure
messenger
messenger