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93 CHAPTER 4 The House of Labdacus: On Kinship and Sacrifice Outside the ancient city, outside every closed city, the only road is the one that follows the scapegoat. —René Girard, Oedipus Unbound S ophocles’s three Theban plays—Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus—are not formally a trilogy. Sophocles wrote the plays across the span of his career and Antigone, whose dramatic action comes late in the chronology of Oedipus’s family, was likely written and performed a decade before Oedipus the King and over three decades before Oedipus at Colonus.1 As a consequence, the plays that comprise the Theban cycle are most often understood to share a familial narrative drawn from myths rather than a single artistic frame of reference. In Oedipus the King, Oedipus fulfills an oracle when he kills his father and marries his mother. In Oedipus at Colonus, a formerly disgraced Oedipus is rehabilitated; the gift of his body to Athens positions him within the cult of the hero. In Antigone, the story of Oedipus concludes with the death of Antigone, who has stood by her father but around whom coalesces a deadly violence that always besets the house of Labdacus. 94 Chapter Four I do acknowledge the reluctance of some scholars to view these three plays as a trilogy. Not only were they not composed in chronological order but also there are inconsistencies among the three tragedies in the portrayal of the main figures as well as in the narrative sequencing of events. At the same time, scholars frequently discuss these tragedies in relation to each other: Oedipus’s life and legacy feature in all three, and all exhibit overlapping themes and patterns important to Sophocles. In my discussion, “Theban cycle” functions as a critical heuristic, which facilitates an enhanced understanding of Antigone while also shedding light on the other plays, particularly Oedipus at Colonus. Common to the three tragedies is Thebes, a city born of autochthony and fratricide in the aftermath of the battle of the Sown Men who, according to myth, originated in the earth and emerged from it already fighting each other.2 Not only is Oedipus closely associated with Thebes but so also are his children/siblings: Eteocles, Polyneices, Antigone, and Ismene. In these plays, Thebes is more than the physical setting for dramatic action: it provides a topos for tragedy. As a consequence, when we encounter Thebes with Sophocles, we are caught up in fundamental questions of existence that revolve around individuals, families, cities, and the cosmos.3 But Thebes invites these questions not as a model for Athens but as the “anti-Athens.”4 Writes Zeitlin: Thebes, the other, provides Athens, the self, with a place where it can play with and discharge both terror of and attraction to the irreconcilable, the inexpiable, and the unredeemable, where it can experiment with the dangerous heights of self-assertion that transgression of fixed boundaries inevitably entails, where the city’s political claims to primacy may be exposed and held up to question.5 Thebes—fascinating and repelling at once—is a closed system defined by its secure boundaries.6 As a consequence, Athens should be safe from any dangers Thebes poses, and the audience that gathers on the southern slope of the acropolis in the theater of Dionysus should have no reason to fear that a dangerous contagion might rise from the skene to envelop them. Any malaise born of misdirected desire in Thebes should stay safely within that troubled city’s walls. The House of Labdacus: On Kinship and Sacrifice 95 But Oedipus is emblematic of the problematizing of Athenian security. Oedipus is an outsider to Thebes. Yearning for a place where he might be an “insider” and at home, Oedipus looks to Thebes. However, to his horror, Oedipus discovers that he has been too much “at home” in Thebes.7 What he perceives to be his first acquaintance with Thebes is, in fact, his second, for Thebes is the city of his birth. Oedipus’s exile from the city signals a key role that outsiders play in times of unrest: he is paradigmatically a scapegoat. As one who has caused a contagion to descend upon Thebes, destroying the safety of home that its inhabitants would find in it, he must be banished.8 However, banishment does not repair fault lines that have emerged in the topos of Thebes. Throughout the tragic plays that tell the story of Oedipus, Oedipus’s relation to...

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