Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(13)

It’s interesting just how much more focus there is on the feelings of women in this speech than in any earlier version we have. Euripides was an astonishing writer of women. He wrote more and better female roles than almost any other male playwright who has ever lived. Which is all the more remarkable when we remember that the actors playing female roles in the Athenian theatres would have been young men, and the audience may very well have been all-male too, at least at the Dionysia when these plays were first performed. It’s not just that women in Euripides’ plays have agency and make decisions which advance the plot (although they do), it’s also that he writes them with a rare insight into areas which simply don’t feature in men’s lives in the same way. The Oedipus story which Sophocles gives us can be read almost as a parable for male anxiety (this, surely, is part of what made it so fascinating to Freud, who liked to theorize about men because he found women such a puzzle). Laius is terrified of being overpowered by his son (the fear of literal or metaphorical castration at the hands of sons is a theme throughout Greek myth, as we saw in the last chapter, with Ouranos, Kronos and Zeus). Polybus is terrified of not having a male heir and so is willing to take an abandoned child and call it his own. The secrecy which he and Merope maintain over this adoption is part of the problem: if they had been honest with Oedipus about his origins, he might never have left Corinth to consult the Oracle, and then fulfilled his awful destiny. Oedipus’ paranoia and swiftness to anger are revealed early in the play: Creon and Tiresias aren’t conspiring against him, as he initially believes, but his fear that they seek to undermine him is genuine and crippling. We can easily believe this man was provoked to a lethal fury by Laius’ obnoxious driving when they met at the crossroads (Oedipus Tyrannos must be the earliest example of a tragedy caused by road rage).

At every stage in his Sophoclean story, the destiny Oedipus tries to avoid is brought closer by the actions of men, well-meaning or otherwise: Laius who fathers him and can’t kill him; the shepherd who won’t kill him; the Corinthian messenger who saves him; the drunk man who tells Oedipus he’s adopted; Polybus who lies about the adoption; Laius again, who antagonizes him and assaults him; Tiresias who always knew the truth but refused to divulge it. And underpinning the whole thing, an anxiety which was prevalent throughout the ancient world, as we can see from the laws which restrict women’s behaviour and movement: who is the father of this child? No one ever really knows except the mother.

And no one thinks to ask the mother how she feels, until Euripides comes along and gives Jocasta the opening monologue of The Phoenician Women. And the rawness of her pain is almost tangible even years after the events. Laius fathered her son while drunk, and when he realized he’d ignored Apollo’s advice, he pierced the baby’s ankles with a metal pin and handed him over to servants to abandon him on the mountain. This is all the information we need to make sense of the story (it’s pretty much what we get in Sophocles). But Euripides gives Jocasta more to say. The shepherds don’t give her child to Polybus, the king. Rather, she says, they take the baby to the queen (Euripides doesn’t name Merope, but let’s call her that) and she passes the baby off as her own. Just this small detail gives us a huge insight into Merope’s life. She and her husband have clearly been trying and failing to conceive: she wants a baby, and for that baby to be thought of as her own child. She and Polybus presumably have sex – because he believes Oedipus is their son – but are not sufficiently close for him to be surprised when she claims to have given birth with no warning. Not only is there a physical gap between them (most people would notice if a woman who had never looked nine months pregnant suddenly produced a child, particularly if they were married to that woman), there is also an emotional gap: Merope and Polybus both wanted a child, it seems, but she can only have one if she lies to him. Presumably, unlike in Sophocles’ version, he didn’t want to adopt.

And look at the language Jocasta uses to describe what happened: She nursed the child my labour pains produced.12 The physicality of the two women – of Jocasta’s body being wrenched in pain, of Merope’s body producing milk for a child she hadn’t given birth to – is devastating. Jocasta’s terrible loss, the agony of being deprived of her newborn son, is not forgotten, even decades later. Because how could it have been? And how can we blame Merope for anything when her body was crying out for the child she unexpectedly acquired? Do the Corinthian servants know of her desperation? Is that why they bring the child to her rather than Polybus?

Jocasta hurries through the description of Oedipus killing Laius. Why drag it out, she asks. Pais patera kainei: ‘son killed father’.13 And then she goes on to explain that Creon, her brother, had been so keen to get rid of the Sphinx (who was outside Thebes making a nuisance of herself) that he had offered Jocasta in marriage to whoever solved the Sphinx’s riddle. It’s all very well making this kind of blanket offer, but you certainly open yourself up to the risk of having to marry your sister off to a much younger (and, as it transpires, related) man. Creon is another name in the list of men who – for good reasons and bad – have caused Jocasta and Oedipus untold grief.

But there are two more names to add to the list in this Euripidean version of Jocasta’s story: the sons she bore to Oedipus, Polynices and Eteocles. As soon as they are old enough, the shame they feel for their father’s crimes means they decide to lock Oedipus away, a prisoner in his own palace. He is so incensed by this that he issues the unholiest of curses upon them, praying that they should turn on one another. To try and avoid this curse (these sons have apparently learned nothing from their father’s attempts to evade his destiny), the two young men decide that Polynices should go into voluntary exile for one year while Eteocles has the throne. At the end of a year, they will swap.