THE THEBAN SAGA 403
- There are several variants of the riddle and its answer. The shortest (Apollodorus
3. 53-54) is given here. - Cf. Lowell Edmunds, Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and Its Later Analogues (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), a survey of the many versions of the myth.
Two modern novels are of merit: Oedipus on the Road (1990), originally in French by
Henry Bauchau, recounting the journey of Oedipus, blind and bleeding, from Thebes,
with his daughter Antigone and a shepherd-bandit named Clius, though an imagi-
native, geographical and spiritual landscape; and Emmeline (1980) by Judith Rossner,
a powerful retelling of the Oedipus legend, set in the eastern United States in the
mid-nineteenth century. - In the intervening four years Athens had surrendered to Sparta and her allies at the
end of the Peloponnesian War; the "long walls" between the city and its port had
been pulled down. The democracy had been replaced by an oligarchy led by a com-
mittee of thirty, itself soon replaced by the restored democracy. - The transformation of the Erinyes ("Furies") into Eumenides ("Kindly Ones") is the
climactic theme of Aeschylus' Oresteia (see Chapter 18); Aeschylus brings the god-
desses to Athens where they take up their new home. - In lines 1284-1345 of his speech, Polynices names the Seven against Thebes. We trans-
late a similar passage from Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes on pp. 396-397. Another
catalog is given by Euripides in the Phoenissae (1090-1199), where a messenger re-
ports the failure of the attack on Thebes. - For a psychoanalytic interpretation, a good place to begin is with Oedipus: Myth and
Complex, A Review of Psychoanalytic Theory, by Patrick Mullahy (see the Bibliography
for Myth and Psychology on pp. 32-33 and 402). Mullahy discusses Sigmund Freud,
Alfred Adler, C. G. Jung, Otto Rank, Karen Horney, Eric Fromm, and Harry Stack
Sullivan. Of related interest is a study of the use of myth (with emphasis upon psy-
choanalytic interpretation) in the works of William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S.
Eliot, and W. H. Auden: Lillian Feder, Ancient Myth and Modern Poetry (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971). - The legends contained in the lost epics (with the titles of Oedipodea and Thebais) are
discussed by G. A. Huxley, Greek Epic Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1969), chap. 3. - The herald's description of Eteoclus (son of Iphis), whom Aeschylus names as the
third hero in place of Adrastus, is omitted. For other catalogues of the Seven in Eu-
ripides and Sophocles see note 6 in this chapter. - Antigone, as the symbol of individual conscience against the unjust laws of the state,
has inspired many literary and musical works. See George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984).