Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(12)

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Why has it been so easy for audiences to overlook the terrible fate which befalls Jocasta? We’re encouraged, certainly, to focus on Oedipus: he has more than five times as many lines as any other character in the play. And the character who has the second-largest number of lines isn’t Jocasta, it’s Creon. In this 1,530-line play, Jocasta has just over 120 lines: not even a tenth of the whole. So perhaps it’s inevitable that we respond more to Oedipus’ predicament. Also, he is still alive at the end of the play. His face (or theatrical mask, as it would have been in fifth-century BCE Athens) is a ruin of blackened sockets and pain. Jocasta’s hanging takes place offstage, so we aren’t made to confront the horror of what has happened to her in quite the same way.

This strange fate of Jocasta’s – to be overlooked, even as she is demolished by the same destiny that overtakes her son – is one which seems to follow her through history. But it didn’t begin like that. In her earliest incarnation, we meet her when she is already dead. In Book Eleven of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus visits the Underworld. He needs to consult the now-dead Tiresias about his best route home, and while he’s there he sees a parade of the famous dead. Among them is kalēn Epikastēn, beautiful Epicaste, the mother of Oedipus.8 She committed a grave act in ignorance, Homer tells us. She married her son. The whole story takes Homer ten short lines to explain: Oedipus killed his father and married her. The gods immediately made these things known to men. Oedipus lived in Thebes among the Cadmeans, suffering greatly at the hands of the gods. She went down to Hades, having fastened a noose to the lofty roof, overwhelmed by grief, leaving many sorrows behind for him.

The differences between this earliest extant version of the myth and the Sophocles version are important. Firstly, Jocasta has a different name: Epicaste isn’t a variant spelling. It’s definitely the same woman, though, as we can see from the description of what happened to her. But then the story deviates from the version we know: the gods make things known aphar – ‘immediately’.9 In Sophocles’ version of the myth, Oedipus and Jocasta have four children before their incest is revealed. The Oracle had told Oedipus he would produce incestuous offspring when he went to consult Apollo at Delphi all those years earlier. But this is obviously not part of the story Homer is telling: here, the revelation takes place as soon as Oedipus and Epicaste are married. There is also no mention of Oedipus being blinded, or banished: he remains living among the Cadmeans (a poetic word for Thebans: Thebes was founded by Cadmus). Epicaste hangs herself, as in Sophocles, and Oedipus is left with a raft of sorrows. Brief as it is, the story is told from both perspectives in roughly equal amounts; it starts and ends with Epicaste.

The issue of whether Oedipus and Jocasta/Epicaste have children has provoked debate for millennia. Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, doesn’t believe that Oedipus and Jocasta had children together, quoting the above passage from Homer to back up his argument.10 Rather, he says, the children’s mother was a woman named Eurygeneia, the daughter of Hyperphas. This is made quite clear, Pausanias adds, by the author of the Oedipodeia. Sadly, for those of us who would like to know more about this version of events, the Oedipodeia – an epic poem about Oedipus written around the same time as the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed – does not survive. But still, we can glean from Pausanias (who, living in the second century CE, could presumably lay his hands on a copy) that Oedipus and Jocasta marry, have their incestuous relationship revealed immediately, or near enough, and then Oedipus goes on to remarry and father children with a second wife.

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If the story shifts as it does between Homer and Sophocles, what are the elements that remain intact in both? Son kills father, mother and son marry, the true nature of their relationship becomes known, mother hangs herself. But even those stark details don’t hold up in every version of the myth. When Euripides takes on the story of Jocasta in his Phoinissai – The Phoenician Women – in 409 BCE, he presents us with yet another variant. The play is set some time after the revelation that Jocasta and Oedipus are mother and son, and it begins with a long speech by Jocasta. So right from the outset, we can see a crucial difference between Euripides’ version and the overlapping versions of the story in Sophocles and Homer: in Euripides, Jocasta doesn’t die when the truth about her marriage is revealed. She doesn’t hang herself, she continues to live in the royal palace of Thebes. Her sons, Polynices and Eteocles, are heirs to the throne. Their response to Oedipus’ disgrace and self-blinding was to lock him away in the palace as a prisoner and hope everyone would forget about him. Their mother, on the other hand, has remained a valued member of the royal household. The Phoenician Women was produced about twenty years after Oedipus Tyrannos was performed at the Dionysia, and Jocasta’s opening monologue therefore serves a dual function. It sets the scene for the play we’re about to watch. But it also jolts us into acknowledging that the story we’re watching now isn’t quite what we thought it was (Euripides makes a habit of this, as we’ll see later, with Medea).

Jocasta begins by telling us the backstory so we know where we are now. She starts with Laius. He and Jocasta were childless, she explains, so he went to consult the Oracle at Delphi. Apollo was quite certain and specific about Laius’ prospects of fatherhood. Have a child, and he’ll kill you, and your whole house will run with blood.11 Pretty unequivocal advice, we might think. But Laius disregarded it when he was drunk. Realizing his error, he arranged for the child to be exposed on the mountains, but servants of Polybus (the king of Corinth) found the baby and gave him to their queen, who tricked the king into believing the child was hers.