Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(14)

They don’t, of course. Eteocles refuses to give up the throne, and Polynices declares war on his city (this is also the plot of Aeschylus’ play Seven Against Thebes. Thebes has seven gates to defend, so seven heroes march against it). Jocasta has stepped in to try and resolve the impasse, persuading her sons to meet and talk before all-out war destroys the city. She concludes her opening speech by begging Zeus to intervene and make peace between the two men.

But Zeus doesn’t hear her prayer and discussions between Polynices and Eteocles break down. Jocasta finally gives way to despair, saying: I have given birth to so many sorrows.14 The double meaning is evident. Jocasta takes her daughter Antigone with her to try to reason with her warring sons. But they are too late. The two men kill one another in single combat and Jocasta takes the sword which lies on the ground between them and drives it through her own throat.

Euripides’ version of Jocasta has a great deal more to say than Sophocles’ (and no one speaks in Homer’s version). She also has a lot more to do. Because she doesn’t die at the point when her maternal relationship with Oedipus becomes known, and because Oedipus stays in Thebes but behind closed doors, Jocasta acquires a political role. She negotiates with her sons like a high-level diplomat. Her role as their mother is not the only card she plays (she pleads with Eteocles to think what will happen to the young women of Thebes, for example, if the city loses the war he and Polynices are determined to have). And when she cannot save her boys, she takes her own life in a masculine way: she dies on the battlefield, using a sword picked up from between the bodies of her sons to end her life. This Jocasta is a very different woman from the one we thought we knew.

And it isn’t only Euripides who presents Jocasta in this light. He and Sophocles would almost certainly have known a work by the lyric poet Stesichorus which focused on a different part of the Theban story. This poem sadly doesn’t survive. Or at least it didn’t, until an incredible (and relatively recent) stroke of luck. At the turn of the twentieth century, Egyptologists across Europe were pursuing their mania for collecting relics and removing them from Egypt. Howard Carter may be the best-known in the UK, but in France, Pierre Jouguet and Gustave Lefebvre were accruing their discoveries at a new institute for Egyptology at the University of Lille. One of the objects they acquired was a mummy, packed into its case with cartonnage – strips of papyrus – to keep it from being damaged. Quite understandably, all interest was focused on the mummy, none at all on the packing material. So it wasn’t until 1974 that the scraps of papyrus were investigated, and read. They were covered in Greek writing, which included some poetry. And among the poems were 120 lines which scholars have identified as being a dramatization of the Theban story by Stesichorus of Himera, a lyric poet who lived about 150 years before Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannos.15 More excitingly still, they are lines which appear to be the voice of Jocasta. It seems tremendously appropriate that she was hiding in plain sight for over seventy years before anyone noticed.

This Jocasta is – as we will surely recognize from Euripides – hoping that prophecies which have been issued will not come true. But the plot seems far closer to Euripides than Sophocles: Jocasta is alive after her marriage has been uncovered as incestuous, and her sons are at war with one another for the throne of Thebes. She prays that, if the prophecies which have been spoken must come true, she will die before her sons fulfil their dark destiny. She even proposes a diplomatic solution to the problem of Eteocles and Polynices. One should keep the throne, she suggests, and the other should take ownership of all Oedipus’ gold and possessions and go off into exile as a rich man.16

There are two things to note about this: the first is that in every version of her story, Jocasta becomes a more complex, more rounded character with every word she says. In Oedipus Tyrannos, we get a fairly slender portrait of a woman whose life is entirely dictated by the decisions of men. In The Phoenician Women, we finally hear her talk about what that means and how it feels. And here, in the earlier fragment of the Lille Stesichorus, we have a strong political leader, negotiating with warring parties who happen to be her sons. This version of her (along with Euripides’ many echoes of it) informs the similar version of Jocasta we find in Statius’ Thebaid, an epic Latin poem – based on several Greek models – which was written in the late first century CE.

The second thing we might notice is how irrelevant Oedipus seems in consequence. The character who owned the stage in Sophocles is simply not important in this earlier speech by Stesichorus. In Oedipus’ absence, his wealth and throne are being divided between his sons in the hope of preventing a war. Jocasta seems not to consider his feelings or opinions: her regal power, and the political and military emergency, means she doesn’t have to. This is perhaps also why Oedipus doesn’t appear in The Phoenician Women until 200 lines before the end. When women take up space, there is less available for men. But it means we get a whole story instead of half of one. It scarcely needs saying that our understanding of the story of Oedipus is enriched when we know the story of Jocasta, and vice versa.

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But Jocasta can be hard to find. Her invisibility is only heightened by the absence of her in the visual arts, where we might expect to find vase paintings or sculptures of one of myth’s most notorious mothers. In fact, no certain image of Jocasta survives from the ancient world at all. There is only one vase which scholars have even sought to associate with a scene in Oedipus Tyrannos. The play was so celebrated in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE that it seems impossible that vase painters wouldn’t have wanted to reproduce scenes from it. And yet we don’t have any cup or vase which presents us with an unambiguous image from Sophocles’ masterpiece. The most common representation of Oedipus (and one which has proven inspirational to painters throughout history) is from his life before the events of the play, when he is answering the riddle of the Sphinx. A beautiful cup in the Vatican Museums from around 470 BCE shows this scene:17 Oedipus sits pensively, chin resting on his hand, legs crossed, pointed hat shielding his busy brain from the sun. In front of him, on a small pedestal, sits the Sphinx, tail winding out behind her, wings poised. She looks down at Oedipus, awaiting his answer. In some versions of the myth, when she does eventually receive his response, she throws herself off a cliff. Oedipus, we might note, is a dangerous man to play games with.