The Tetralogies of Aeschylus

OIDIPODEIA

The Art of the Prequel

I had a lesson in reconstructing the earlier stages of a pre-existing drama through watching Better Call Saul - the brilliant series written as part of the backstory for Breaking Bad. All the clues are there (In Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes) - you must unearth all of them, and on no account miss out or distort anything in the original - nor must you introduce anything that does not support the conclusion of the original. (We're slightly hampered here, because the conclusion of Seven Against Thebes is a textual minefield. I soon decided that the sentimental ending had to go - there's no role for the Sophoclean sisters.)

The Reconstruction

Imagining Aeschylus’ Oedipus Tetralogy

The tragic drama known The Seven Against Thebes ("Septem") – the title first mentioned by the character of Aeschylus in Aristophanes (Frogs 1021) – has been singled out ever since the Lenaia of 405 BC. It is obviously, despite its textual problems, one of Aeschylus' masterworks. But it doesn’t really make sense. Why must Eteokles face his bother Polyneices in a battle where they both die? Why is it good news that the city is saved? How did their own father come to utter the curse that has condemned them to such a death? It was of course, only one of the four plays of the tetralogy submitted by Aeschylus at the Dionysia in 467 BC, for which he won first prize. What was in the other three? If only we knew that, all might make perfect sense!

The Septem was the third play of the tetralogy, the concluding play of the trilogy. It was preceded by Laios and Oidipous, and followed by the satyr-play Sphinx, all three of which are lost. Some lost plays survive in fragments, through quotations in later authors, or from odd lines found on papyri, such as have been coming to light during the past century or so. For the lost plays of the Oidipodeia hardly anything survives.

Three random words from Laios : ἀράχνου of a spider”or “of a cobweb” (Hesychius); χυτρίζειν “to expose a newborn in a pot” (Scholiast on Aristophanes Wasps 289); ἀπάργματα “first-fruits”. A papyrus fragment (P Oxy 2256) tells us that Laios spoke the prologue.

From Oidipous, three lines, which translate as:
"We were coming on our journey to the place from which three highways part in branching roads, where we crossed the junction of the triple roads at Potniae." (Scholiast on Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannos 733, who compares the different settings for the murder of Laios in Aeschylus and Sophocles.)

For Sphinx there’s a mention, and a 3-line quotation in Athenaeus (15. 16):

And again, in the play entitled the Sphinx, he says-
“Give the stranger a στέφανος (garland), the ancient στέφος,
This is the best of chains, as we may judge
From great Prometheus.”

And the word κνοῦς in Hesychius, which he says is from Sphinx, and means “the noise of feet”. The scholiast on Aristophanes Frogs 1287 claims that an apparent piece of nonsense in Euripides’ parody of an Aeschylean chorus is from Sphinx:
Σφίγγα δυσαμεριᾶν πρύτανιν κύνα πέμπει
If has any meaning it’s something like “He sends Sphinx, dog president of misfortunes” (followed by tophlattothrat, tophlattothrat).

And that is all!

Some useful deductions do follow, however:
In Laios, the infant was exposed in a jar (not mentioned in Sophocles’ version). His death took place at Potniai (as we are also told in Septem), not where the road to Daulis joined the road from Thebes to Delphi. This is to my mind very significant. Potniai is a few miles south of Thebes on the way to Mount Kithairon, nowhere near Delphi. Perhaps for Aeschylus Laios was not on his way to Delphi to consult Apollo’s oracles, nor was Oedipus on his way to Thebes (having rejected a return to Corinth as a result of what he’s heard about parricide and incest). Aeschylus’ version may not be focused on Apollo, or oracles, at all.

Sophocles’ version of the story, Oedipus Tyrannos, is, I believe, so well-told that it eclipsed that of Aeschylus. That would seem to be a fact, however unfortunate. A sort of literary Gresham’s Law seems to have been applied! Otherwise there would surely be multiple references to the Aeschylean telling. 154 fragments consisting of one or more lines of Aeschylus’s 76 known dramas are preserved and the Theban story was revisited over and over again from Euripides to Statius’ Thebaid. No one seems to have been interested in the first two plays of his trilogy, although the Septem remained well-known, as one would deduce from the reference to Theban bravery in Frogs (1023). There could be two possible explanations for this situation. First, Sophocles’ version was the much same as Aeschylus’, but better told, more memorable, and Aeschylus was replaced by the “new, improved Oedipus 2.0” Or, secondly, Aeschylus' version was quite different, and Sophocles improved on it, to such an extent that his version became “the canon”, the real, true story. I incline strongly to the later: Sophocles knew and analysed Aeschylus’ play and improved on its weaknesses. What in his view might these weaknesses have been?

1 Laios' guilt. Laios was given no explanation by Apollo for not being allowed a family. No inkling of a reason is given in Septem merely that he was told three times. Euripides’ lost play Chrysippus developed the idea that Laios was punished for his homosexual rape of Pelops’ son, and later authors refer to Laios “inventing” paedophilia. Winnington-Ingram (Studies in Aeschylus CUP 1983) likes this idea: I don’t. One of the constant themes of Aeschylean drama is that mortals cannot be expected to understand why gods act as they do. They have objectives that are greater and more extensive that a single human lifespan. The gods exist as it were “outside time”. Apollo made it very clear what Laios should do (or rather not do). He disobeyed foolishly as Septem makes clear. As in Oresteia, Aeschylus is working through a huge and important theme: The Theban royal family is an obstruction to the long-term plan of the gods, to replace prioritising tribe, clan, family with prioritising the state, the polis. [Perhaps important to bear in mind that Aeschylus grew up under the monarchy in Athens: the evolution of democracy must have affected him profoundly as a young man.] After perhaps a “trial run” with Oidpodeia, Aeschylus makes his view of the relations between god and man much more explicit in his later trilogy. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra must both die to demonstrate how a polis-based legal system has to replace a family-based vendetta system. The Erinyes who embody automatic, mindless vengeance are disarmed and neutralised. So in Oidipodeia : Just as Orestes is placed in a position where he must trigger the gods’ plan by killing his mother, so Oedipus’ actions lead up to a position where he must trigger the fulfilment of the gods’ plan by cursing his sons, Laios’ grandsons. Clytemnestra’s death releases the Erinyes and so does Oedipus’s Erinys (which the name Aeschylus uses for the "curse" in Septem).

Therefore the Curse is the central act of the Oidipodeia , just as Orestes’ killing of his mother is of the Oresteia. And that is why a homosexual rape, whether a sin or not, is a distraction, a dilution of the focus of the three plays. And it’s not even hinted at in the Septem which is dominated by Oedipus’ Curse.

Sophocles eliminated the curse, or chose not to use it as part of his story. Instead, his emphasis is on Apollo and his oracles to Laios and to Oedipus. A thrilling chain of coincidence and masterly use of “irony” creates in OT a plot as gripping as any detective story: as has been pointed out, a detective tale with a unique twist, where the murderer is also the detective!

The story Aeschylus wishes to tell cannot compete on this level. Aeschylus needed all three plays to develop his grand theme of relations between gods and men, and of a family that must be destroyed so that the polis may thrive. Laios was told three times: if you deny yourself a family, you will save your city. He was a fool and chose otherwise. He destroyed his family but, once the family that should not have existed is destroyed, the city is saved. In Septem, after the sons’ deaths the messenger brings good news that the city is saved. Their deaths are seen as collateral damage.

2 Sophocles’ gradual revelation of the truth, where the characters and the audience have to work out as individuals what happened through a series of cunning clues, clues released in such a way that the audience is always ahead of the characters - though only just! - is a stunning literary achievement. No one notices the weaknesses in his plot at the time. Why would Oedipus kill an elderly man later on the same day as he’d just been warned he would kill his father? And then having been warned he'd marry his mother, go ahead and marry a woman old enough to be his mother? Obvious message for a bright chap (as Sophocles asks us to believe his Oedipus was): don’t kill anyone old enough to be your father- or marry anyone old enough to be your mother. I believe Aeschylus left no such gaping holes in his plot but it’s Sophocles who survives.
If, as I shall argue, Aeschylus used traditional tokens (as in Choephori) for this anagnorisis (recognition) scene, there can be little or no suspense (compare the straightforward recognition in Choephori with Sophocles' Electra). Everything would have happened in a rush, once the tokens are recognised. This does not matter to Aeschylus as the parricide, the incest, Jocasta’s death and the blinding are his way of building up to the uttering of the Curse. There is actually no logical reason why Oedipus should curse his sons! Hence the later far-fetched inventions about him being angry at being offered an inferior cut of meat, and such like. The emotional intensity must be so unendurable so that he cannot do otherwise than curse his sons. When, in quick succession, he learns he’s killed the king, the king was his father, his wife, the king’s widow, is his mother, his sons are his brothers: and the queen kills herself (as I deduce, using the same weapon he used to kill his father! Both parents’ blood stains the same sword), and dies in his presence: he completely loses control, he descends into divinely-inspired madness, just as will happen to Clytemnestra when she’s killed Agamemnon and Cassandra. The madness then fades as she realises the enormity of what she’s done and so with Oedipus. But he can’t retract a Curse (Erinys)once unleashed, as Septem makes very clear. It's not until he was thinking out the conclusion of the Oresteia, that a dramtic mechanism, and a theological explanation for stopping an Erinys became clear.

3 Jocasta. For Sophocles she’s hardly a character at, all not really much more than plot device. She is needed to recount the events of the family’s past, but says nothing of what they meant to her as a woman and mother. Even when she kills herself, we don’t really know what her motivations are. Sophocles let’s us assume we know. But Aeschylus’ Jocasta must have been a central character in both the opening plays of Aeschylus' Oidipodeia, as Clytemnestra was to become in Oresteia a decade later. It is essential for her to be a fully-developed character. What did she feel about Laios’ decision not to breed? Was she complicit in the cover-up? How did she feel when her baby was taken off to die? How did she subsequently cope with a life of abstinence? What did she feel about her husband after her child was killed on his orders? What was her reaction to the news of Laios’ death? What was it like for her with a new vigorous young husband? How did it feel to have children at last?

And connected to her feelings: why was Laios on his way to Mount Kithairon when he was killed? Did Jocasta know why? Did she approve?

And if we understand Jocasta, and her feelings, and why she killed herself, can we begin to comprehend Eteocles’ misogyny in Septem? His antipathy to feminine emotion? It’s not explained in Septem but if we’d seen the first two plays, it might not have needed explanation.

4 Oracles. Aeschylus never mentions oracles in Septem. I think it’s a reasonable assumption that he didn’t mention them in Laios or in Oidipous. Laios does not consult the oracle of Apollo: Apollo simply tells him three times. There’s no need to assume that he didn’t like what he heard the first time, and went back hoping for something different! Aeschylus does not concern himself with how Apollo communicated. And once the god has made himself clear, he has no need to intervene any further. All is set up. Either Laios does what he’s told and the city is saved. Job done. Polis triumphs over oikos. Or he doesn’t and the consequences will become clear. The same consequence takes longer; time does not matter to the gods. End result job done, polis triumphs over oikos.
But Apollo’s oracle is Sophocles’ main plot device. Without the oracles which seem to have no moral, political or religious significance there would be no plot.

5 Polybus and Corinth. Sophocles makes Oedipus’ back story more interesting by his journey to Corinth, his worry at the allegation that he’s not Polybus’ son, and, of course, by the interplay between the two shepherds, and the remarkable but unnoticed coincidences that make the plot effective. But, again, Aeschylus’ mind is on more important matters than making the drama exciting. He needs no more than to opt for simplest narrative to explain Oedipus’ early life. He was abandoned on Kithairon. He was found on Kithairon. He grew up on Kithairon. Why make it more complicated? Oedipus has to kill his father before returning to Thebes.

6 The Sphinx. Both dramatists need a reason to lure Oedipus back to his home city. The Sphinx and her riddle is that device. Neither of them needs to explain in detail why the Sphinx is terrorising Thebes. For Sophocles not only does she attract Oedipus, but also provides an unconvincing (?) explanation for the non-investigation of a king’s death. The Septem tells us of little beyond her cannibalistic tendencies. She must have figured more prominently in Oidipous but how?

Sources

There are two types of source that matter.
1 Sources earlier than 467 BC, which could have influenced Aeschylus. Most obvious is Homer, Odyssey 11. 271 ff. from which Aeschylus could have learned:

Oedipus had a mother, called Epicaste (I like the idea that Aeschylus called his queen by that name, and that Sophocles first called her Iocaste)
She married Oedipus in ignorance.
Oedipus killed his father, and possibly “stripped him of his arms” which is what the word Homer used for kill (ἐξαναρίζω) means in the Iliad (6.30).
The gods revealed the truth through a cruel plan.
Epicaste hanged herself
Oedipus continued as king of the Cadmeians, suffering remorse and tormented by the Erinyes of his mother.

No exposure, no Sphinx, no riddle, no blinding.

There are known to have been a number of epic poems, contemporary or even earlier than Homer which treated of the Theban legends. Unfortunately we have not the slightest clue to what they actually contained, which has not interfered with scholarly speculation, attempting to reconstruct them from later material. But they cannot, alas, help us with Laios or Oidipous

2 Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos and sources based on it- which becomes the canonical version of the story. Again not much help, except negatively: if we assume Sophocles was deliberately trying to be different from Aeschylus. If Aeschylus called her Epicaste, he called her Iocaste. If Aeschylus had the murder at a place where three roads meet at Potniai, S has a completely different place where three roads meet. Not really likely to produce anything totally convincing!

3 Sources that could be based on Aeschylus’ tetralogy. Particularly worth considering are sources that do not follow the Sophoclean precedents. These could be possibly be fruitful:

Laius and Jocasta conceived Oedipus in a drunken fit (Euripides Phoenissae 1- 87). This is also a possible interpretation of Septem 756-7 ("Insane, uncontrollable passion drew the pair together")
Oedipus, blinded, lives on in the palace cursing his sons. Jocasta remains as queen mother. (Euripides Phoenissae, final scene)
Eteocles refuses to honour agreement with his brother to share kingship of Thebes. (Euripides Phoenissae 504ff) No reason for their quarrel beyond the curse is suggested in Septem
Laios married a daughter of Menoeceus called Jocasta by some and Epicasta by others. (Apollodorus 3.5. 7-9)
Laios got drunk and had intercourse with his wife (Apollodorus ib)
Oedipus in a chariot fell in with Laios in a chariot in a narrow lane. (Apollodorus ib)
Hera sent the Sphinx, who sat on Mount Phikion and devoured Thebans who could not answer her riddle ("What has one voice and is four-footed, two-footed then three-footed?"). Her last victim was Haemon, son of Creon. (Apollodorus ib)
Hera sent the Sphinx from Ethiopia to punish Laios for abducting Chrysippus from Pisa [home of his father, Pelops]. Laios was the first homosexual. Chrysippus killed himself. (Peisander according to the scholiast on Euripides Phoenissae 1760).
Teiresias tried to persuade Laios not to go to Apollo, as the gods hated him, but to sacrifice to Hera, the goddess of marriage. (Peisander ib)
After Oedipus solved the Riddle, the Sphinx threw herself off the citadel. [Strange death if she had the wings of a bird, as he states!] (Apollodorus.ib)
After Jocasta hanged herself, Oedipus was driven from Thebes. He cursed his sons because they refused to help him. He came to Colonus with his daughter Antigone, sought sanctuary in the precinct of the Eumenides. He was kindly received by Theseus, and died soon thereafter.(Apollodorus ib).
Oedipus killed Laios “at the crossroads” [sc on the way to Delphi] after his driver struck him with a whip. Oedipus buried both, but took the reins, and Laios’ sword and belt. He gave the chariot to Polybus, after his return to Sicyon [not Corinth]. (Peisander ib.)
[After solving the riddle and marrying his mother] he went with Jocasta to Kithairon to sacrifice. On the way back they passed the crossroads where Oedipus had killed a man. He told Jocasta about it and showed her the belt. She was disturbed but said nothing as she did not know he was her son. [?incompatible with killing L on the way to Delphi] (Peisander ib)
Later an old herdsman came from Sicyon and told them Polybus and Merope were dead, and how he had come to give Oedipus to Merope. He showed them the swaddling clothes and pins used to cripple him, and asked for a reward for saving Oedipus’s life. So everything became clear. (Peisander ib)
After Jocasta’s death and the blinding, Oedipus married Eurygane and had four children. (Peisander ib)
King Laios and his wife Epicaste did not have children. He went to Delphi and the oracle told him his child would kill him and marry his wife. After this, as soon as his son was born he exposed him on Kithairon where herdsmen of Polybus found him. His feet were swollen because of the swaddling clothes, so Polybus named him Oedipus. Grown up, Oedipus was going to Orchomenos to look for horses, when he met Laios and Epicaste in a chariot on their way to Delphi, where Laios was a sacred ambassador. Laios’s herald ordered Oedipus out of the way, and Oedipus responded by killing him and Laius with his sword. Oedipus fled to Kithairon, where Epicaste and her servants failed to find him. He returned to Polybus in Corinth with the horses, and the mules that had been pulling Laios’ chariot and considered him his father as he’d always done. (Nicholaus of Damascus)
Oedipus did not not have children by Epicaste [citing Homer Od. 11 as evidence]. The four children’s mother was Euryganeia [citing the epic Oidipodeia as evidence]. Polyneices voluntarily withdrew from Thebes while Oedipus was still alive and reigning because of his father’s curses. Eteocles invited him back after Oedipus died, but they quarrelled and Polyneices returned to Argos. Adrastus, his father-in-law and king of Argos gave him an army, but he failed to take Thebes, and the two brothers killed each other in a duel. Laodamas, son of Eteocles, became king with Menoeceus , son of Creon as regent. (Pausanias 9.5. 1-13)
Periboea, wife of king Polybus found the child as she was washing garments at the shore. As she and Polybus were childless, they agreed to adopt him and called him Oedipus because of his pierced feet. (Hyginus, Fabulae 66-7)
The Sphinx was laying waste to the fields of the Thebans. She told the king, Creon, that she would not stop unless someone solved her riddle. A proclamation was made throughout Greece offering the kingdom and Jocasta in marriage to whoever solved it. Many came and were devoured, but when Oedipus solved it she leapt to her death. (Hyginus ib)

Clearly these “deviations” from the Sophoclean version could have evolved for numerous reasons. A later writer might simply have used their own imagination or ingenuity to “improve” the story. Some may derive from readings and interpretations of various Oidipodeia epics: only Pausanias specifically refers to this. There may have orally transmitted versions, of which we can know nothing at all or even if they existed. And many of these retellings are years or even centuries away from the tragedians of the fifth century. Apart from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides (Only Euripides' Phoenissae survives, but Aristophanes has Aeschylus mock the opening of his Oedipus: “ A happy man was Oedipus at first” , Frogs, 1182) many other poets will have written plays based on the Theban stories. I feel sure there must be vases illustrating episoded in the Oedipus story - but apart from the innumerable versions Oedipus and the Sphinx ( not obviously based on a 5th century literary source) but I've not tracked any down so far.

Among the available texts would most certainly have been Aeschylus’ Laios and Oidipous. The art of the storyteller, though, has always been to combine elements to construct a narrative which reflects the teller’s interest in the story being told. It would be improbable that no later writer had read Aeschylus’ tetralogy. It would be equally improbable that he had only read Aeschylus!

My principles in trying to rewrite the first two plays of the tetralogy were these.

Keep it simple. Avoid the sort of complex narratives preferred by Sophocles and, especially, Euripides. Always use the most economical explanation.
Keep characters as few as possible. Only two actors were available to Aeschylus.
See the three plays as acts to develop a unified and coherent theme: to tell a single important, weighty story. Laios: the father’s mistake/sin The city is threatened; Oidipous: the son’s mistakes/sins arising from the father’s actions; Septem: the grandsons’ fate resulting from their father’s Curse. The city is saved. And the satyr play, Sphinx, tells the omitted incidents concerning Oedipus and the riddle, but in a comedic way.
The characters are larger than life they suffer more intensely, more passionately than ordinary mortals. Laios, Epicaste and Oidipous must measure up to Eteocles in the extant Septem, and to Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Danaus.
The characters act as if independent of the gods (as Agamemnon and Clytemnestra do, as Eteocles does). But they are forced to learn that the gods are in charge. The world is not controlled by random fate, or by human ambition.
The chorus leader is often the third actor. Interaction between chorus and character is very important.
A reversal, change of mind, Aritotelian peripeteia is an essential plot ingredient: Laius changes his mind and sets off for Kithairon; Oedipus tells Epicaste about the killing of Laios; Eteocles realises he can’t escape the Curse.
Actual physical items are important to the plot: the pot, the sword and belt, the baby clothes, the spikes, the “iron” in Septem. Aeschylus likes such things: the purple robes in Agamemnon, the tokens in Choephori..
Irony! Incessant nudges to those in the audience who “get it”.
Evocation of the natural world through description and imagery. Kithairon. The state as a ship. Weather.

PITY & TERROR