From Ancient Authors to a Modern Interpretation: An Analysis of the Wretched King Oedipus
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Authors
Muto, Alanna C.
Issue Date
2007
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
learned about the most famous author to pen the legend, Sophocles, and about
his three Theban plays that outline his detailed version of the tale. Yet his was not the first
version of the myth to appear; Homer appears among the list of authors who wrote about
the Theban king, first among many-though his account was the shortest to be found.
After Homer first penned the tale, so do did many others: Euripides, a contemporary of
Sophocles, wrote about Oedipus in his Phoinissai, Pindar mentioned him in his second
Olympian Ode, and Aeschylus told the tale in his own Oedipus trilogy of plays. Yet, of so
many authors, I could only choose a few. Therefore I chose Homer,
because he was earliest and Sophocles because his version of the myth is so well-known. Then, I chose two mythographers and a scholar, to round out my examination of the
myth-for they each offered a unique tale or an interesting additional detail to the Oedipus
myth. Thus, chronologically, I examined next the mythographers who, in a rather
humorous manner, were hard to place in the annals of history themselves: Apollodorus
and Hyginus, from whom little survives but somewhat truncated outlines of the tale. For
my last, I discovered a man who claimed Oedipus for Egypt, making the king an import
into Grecian lore. Here, Oedipus was the pharaoh Akhnaton, whose life did seem to
mirror the Theban king's in quite a number of places. Yet, despite the different time
periods and writers, Oedipus' tale did not change-his story never deviated from the sole
piece of information I knew at the beginning: he married his mother and killed his father,
(even if only symbolically as in Akhnaton}.
Description
iii, 81 p.
Citation
Publisher
Kalamazoo, Mich. : Kalamazoo College
License
U.S. copyright laws protect this material. Commercial use or distribution of this material is not permitted without prior written permission of the copyright holder. All rights reserved.