Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian drama

Froma I. Zeitlin

For the Athenian society, Thebes is limited to the stage of the
Dionysos theater, in which is normally represented by the front of a house
or palace. This can represent Thebes as much as any other location where
dramas take place.
The city is known better when the play starts and not only for its
name or from any other architectural features, but from what over and
over again the tragic poets cause to transpire there as they treat the
different myths that share a common terrain in Thebes. When speaking of
this place one must include as well the myth of the god Dionysos himself,
the son of Zeus and Semele, who returns home to claim recognition of his
divinity and to establish the cult of his worship in his native city.
One must look at Thebes as a topos in both senses of the word: as a
geographical locale and as a concept or formula, or as a commonplace
(Gemeinplatz). That is, through the specific myths associated with Thebes
on the Athenian stage, certain clusters of ideas, themes and problems recur
which can be identified as proper to Thebes. All these elements attest to a
certain unifying tendency which allows each myth and each version of that
myth its own autonomy, but brings them all together as a coherent and
complex ensemble. Through this we can see the ideological uses of
Athenian theater as it portrays a city onstage that is meant to be
dramatically other than itself. Thebes provides the negative model to
Athens manifest image of itself with regard to its notions of the proper
management of city, society and self and supplies the radical tragic terrain
where there can be no escape from the tragic in the resolution of conflict.
A continuacin the author presents the city through some tragic
plays from authors as Aiskhylos, Euripides and Sophokles and sketches out
what Thebes is and what it might mean in its dialogue with the city of
Athens, whose theater invents its imaginary space and for that she uses
Oidipous as a guide.

Oidipus at Thebes

In one sense one might describe the career of Oidipous as a search
for a home, or better said as a place where he might truly belong. He
discovers that he has found his true home in Thebens, but also discovers
that he has been only too much at home. Even if the story is told
differently by different authors, he ends far away from Thebes in the town
of Kolonos. Later he is offered to return home, but refuses, as no one from
Thebes has the power or desire to promise him a place at home in the
house or inside the city, despite pretenses to the contrary. They would
rather give him a place on the border of the citys territory where he would
be at home but actually not at home. For Oedipous, the supplications of
Kreon and Polyneikes to come home are a sham since they desire only to
gain domination over his person and this for their own political ends. But it
may also be true, as Kreon claims, that the patricide can never be
repatriated.
Thebes is the place that makes problematic every inclusion and
exclusion, every conjunction and disjunction, every relation between near
and far, high and low, inside and outside, stranger and kin. Thus the person
of Oidipous perhaps crystallizes in purest form the city of Thebes itself.
Finally, he will break the symbiotic relation between himself and his city
when goes to the new territory of Athens to which both his destiny and
choice have assigned him. And by the same logic, Thebes is therefore the
only possible place for his birth.
Then the author uses Euripides Bakkhai to see whether one can find
relation between Oedipus the king and Dionysos the God.
As Oedipus, Dionysos at Thebes is at home and not at home, a
stranger who comes from elsewhere, a child of Thebes returning home to
the place of his birth in order to assert his identity and claim his patrimony.
The diference is that Dionysos, as a god, asks for his honor, and not for the
political kingship. The difference between mortal and immortal makes the
difference between them: disaster for Oedipus and success for Dionysos.

Foundation: Incest and Autochthony.

The foundation of the city is based on the myth that says that Kadmos
slew the dragon of Ares and sowed the crop of Spartoi from the dragons
teeth. They in turn slew one another, except for five who survived as the
first autochtonous inhabitants of the city. Kadmos, for his part, married
Harmonia, the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite and after he gave his own
daughter agave to Ekhion, one of the earthborn, and another daughter,
Semele to Olympian Zeus.
The troubles in Thebes started at the very beginning both for the
stability of the city and for that of the self, where autochtony, Dionysos and
ultimately Oedipus rule. Harmonia, has her name indicates, is the logical
outcome of a union between the two antithetical principles of Ares and
Aphrodite (war and love). In Thebes, Harmonia is only a euphemizing and
illusory hope. The autochthony as a myth of origins in Thebes has two
stages. In the first, it has affinities with incest, given the analogy that
obtains between mother and earth. In the second, it leads to violence
among kin as fractricide and patricide.
In the Euripides version of the Aiskhylean Seven against Thebes, he
situates the struggle between the sons of Oidipous in the widest context of
the citys history. He contraposes the sons of the incestuous union against
Menoikeus, Kreons, the last surviving descendant of the Spartoi. In this
play, Euripides makes clear that both sides must die, each because of an
anterior fault of another generation. The curse of the family and the wrath
of the dragon. They are both drawn together into an intimate association
through the figure of Jocasta, who is in this play the mother of her sons as
well as foster mother of Monoikeus. Its important to say that Dionysos
plays aswell a role in this drama. At the moment when the city and the sons
of Oedipus prepare for deadly battle, Dionysos faces his ambiguous
opposite in Thebes in the figure of the god Ares and the dividing line
between them loses strength as Ares assimilates the language and gestures
of Dionysiac celebration. One must not forget that even those happy
pleasures, however, have their sinister side. We can see that in the prior
role in the misfortunes of Thebes that Dionysos played. The god presided
over the very begetting of Oedipus. It was at a Dionysiac revel when Laios,
after he had to much wine, coupled with his wife and transgressed the
prohibition of Apollos oracle that forbade him to engender children.
Thus Euripides late contribution to the Theban tradition in the
history of the Athenian theater draws all the various strands together and
plays them off one another in ways that are distinctively his own. It is a
minor, but significant detail in the play that Tiresias makes his appears in
the Theban scene and says that he came not from the nearby altars, but
from Athens, where the procured the success of the city in a battle. His
prophecy from this piece no longer concers the house of Laios, but rather
demands the patriotic sacrifice of Menoikeus to save the ciaty. He got this
model from Athens. This kind of sacrifice can be seen in one of the
Euripides earlier plays.

Thebes as the Anti-Athens

As a topos, for Athens, Thebes has a very important role on the
dramatic stage. It functions in the theater as an anti-Athens, an other place.
If one says that the theater in general functions as an other scene where
the city puts itself and its values into question by projecting itself upon the
stage, we can say that Thebes is the perfect representation of the other
scene , as Oedipus is the paradigm of tragic man and Dyonisos is the god of
the theater.
The dramatic relation of Athes is twofold. Firstly, within the theater
Athens is not the tragic space. Its rather the scene where theater can
escape the tragic. But Thebes is the obverse side of Athes, the shadow self
of the idealized city on whose other terrain the tragic action may be pushed
to its furthest limits of contradiction and impasse. In other words, Thebes
provides Athens, with a series of bad examples that instruct the spectators
as to how their city might refrain from imitating the others negative
example.

Self and society

After we take a look back at the Thebes, after all these plays, we can
say charachterize it as the place either of impresonment or exile, as the city
of negation and death. After all he has been through, Oedipus is called in
Oedipus Tyrannos by the chorus a equal to nothing. In a parallel story in
Antigone, Kreon discovers the same thing: he is no longer a self, but a
nothing. It is interesting that after all, the city remains still intact. One may
ask why, but the answer is easy. It remains so for Athens and its tragic
stage. It is essential for Athens that Thebes remain intact as a theatrical
enclosure so that within its closed confines yet another play can be staged.
For the tragic poets, Thebes represents the paradigm of the closed
system that protects its psychological, social and political boundaries, even
as its towering walls and circular ramparts close off and protect its physical
space. It is a city that is unable to incorporate outsiders into its system and
locked into the priority of blood relations of the genos. The most
conspicuous symptom of this maladaptive system is the problem of
marriage in this city, the institution that regulates relations between non-
kin and circulates women as signs to be exchanged between men.
The autochthony and incest of the city might suggest a fundamental
cut between city and family. After analyzing some plays one can say that in
one sense they do. A hidden analogy connects family and city, since each
reproductive model (autochthony, incest) looks back to a single
undifferentiated origin, and each holds out the ideal of a self-referential
autonomy.
A typical Theban scenario shows us a king who at first governs, but
the pressure of events reveals him as one who confused the relationship
between ruler and city and identifies the state with himself. In each case,
the true imperative is the desire to rule, to exercise single hegemony over
others and to claim all power for himself. The desire for kratos and
arkhe is a prominent motif in every Theban play. When the ruler
confronts himself with the limitations he has never acknowledged, he
discovers that he cannot rule himself and he must surrender the political
kingship he has craved. That Thebes is the paradigmatic home of tyrants
can be attributed perhaps to the fact that incest and patricide are seen as
the typical tyrannical crimes.

Antigone

From its breakdown of the differences that result from the complex
interplay of incest, autochthony, patricide and tyranny, Thebes provides a
continuing legacy on all the characters in its city who prodeictably act out
their allotted roles. This play confers an excellent case in point, as Kreon
himself has not directly participated in the muddled and accursed history
of the family of Laios. Yet he and Antigone, the two antagonists of the play,
divide between them the marked features of the Oidipean family, both
masculine and feminine.
When Antigone refuses to accept differentiation between the two
brothers, one loyal to the city and one not, she manifests the Oidipean
equalization of everything that is ones own, and insists on the absolute
principle of family union even in death. Kreon on his part, continues in his
own drama to play out yet another version of the self-destructive impulses
of the very family to whose place ha has succeeded. He insists as well on
rigid antitheses and lives by military standards of absolute obedience to the
city, only to find that he balance will shift to his detriment from the public
to the private sphere. He tempts his son to repeat Oedipus patricidal crime
and drives his wife, Eurydike to imitate Jokastas solution of suicide.
Paradoxally also insists on the absolute unity of the family when he denies
to any of its members the right to differ from himself. Thereby he doubles
the disaster by simultaneously cancelling out the future of the family of
Oedipus and that of his own. The initial zeal of Kreon is to distinguish
between friend and foe, insider and outsider and in the process he proves
to confound the most significant difference of all. The difference between
life and death, when he tombs Antigone alive and keeps the dead unburried
above the earth. This is in the end what brings the disaster upon himself
and even if he is still alive he is not truly alive, but only a breathing corpse.
If one goes a little further and sees the whole picture can see that
when Kreon refuses to honor the rights of the dead he offends against the
entire cultural order, against the gods as well as against persons and the
collective of the city.
For Antogone, the death is the timeless eternity, the absolute
principle to which she gives her undivided commitment and she therefore
privileges it over mortal life since she understands the perfect meaning of
death. For Kreon the opposite holds true. We might say that for Kreon the
life and death comprise an uninterrupted continuum, by which principle
the unrelenting hostility that existed during life is prolonged indefinitely in
death. The issue of burial is central to Thebes. It is the focal point at which
the two coordinates of space and time converge and whose symbolic value
refers us back to the critical problems raised by incest and autochthony.
The conclusion to Antigone makes it clear that no future time opens
out in Thebes. Genos (family) and gone (generation) have become a
contradiction in terms, although they have the same root. Kreons
undervaluation of death and Antigones parallel overvaluation of it direct
our attention to the most recurrent and most negative feature of Thebes,
which manifests itself in the dimension of time.

Repeating the past


The time in Thebes has a strange role as the linear advance of the
narrative events turns out in the end to be circular. It returns always and
again to its point of departure. For that reason thebes is the place where
the past inevitably rules, continually repeating and renewing itself.
When we look from this perspective, we may say that Thebes is a
world that obeys the law of the Ethernal Return in contrast to one where
history can unfold into differential narrative for the future. The autocratic
prestige of both autochthony and incest in Thebes claims power over each
character of each generation.
The workings of time are really significant for the house of Laios,
where the oracles have a continuing role and make that the future must
fulfill an end already predicted in the past.
Oidipous has become the master of time, of past, present and future,
precisely because he knows the power of linear time over and and over
human affairs. He can distinguish between the time of the gods, which is
ageless and deathless forever, and allmastering time, which turns
everything upside down.