222 JOHANNES J.L. SMOLENAARS
famous vase from Volterra (LIMC V2, 1990, 458, nr 26). Unfortu-
nately, no texts dealing with Jocasta’s fate in this play are left, and
since in Seneca’s play Oedipus’ blinding is performed by himself, not
by others as in Euripides’, we should not necessarily infer from Jo-
casta’s suicide in Seneca’s play that she also killed herself in Eurip-
ides’.^13
Whereas these plays and other writings deal with the discovery of
the truth about Laius’ death, and Oedipus’ (self-)blinding and Jo-
casta’s death as its immediate consequences, other poets (and some-
times the same ones) developed a very different storyline concentrat-
ing on Jocasta’s attempt at reconciliation before the war between her
sons began.^14
The story of the ‘Seven against Thebes’ is well known since
Homer, but Jocasta’s attempt, absent in Aeschylus’ Septem, first oc-
curs—as far as we can tell—in the Lille Papyrus discovered in 1976
(P.Lille 76; fr. 222b PMGF). This lyric version of the Oedipus legend
is ascribed by most scholars to Stesichorus (640–555). The fragment
contains a dialogue between the seer Teiresias, who foretells the frat-
ricide, and Jocasta, who wants to prevent it. In any case, this storyline
presupposes that Jocasta, unlike in Homer and OT, lives on after the
anagnorisis and after Oedipus’ self-blinding. This drastic change in
the treatment of the Theban legend is first staged by Euripides in his
Phoinissai, and later also by Seneca in his Phoenissae.^15 In Euripides’
Phoinissai^16 Jocasta lives on after Oedipus has blinded himself. When
her sons, Eteocles and Polynices, start to quarrel about the throne of
13 Robert 1915 in ch. VII points at other striking variations in the paradoxogra-
phers, such as Oedipus’ blinding already in his youth by Polybos and Jocasta killed by
her son; see Töchterle 1994, 10, n. 2.
14 For a full discussion of this scene in Statius see also my commentary (1994) on
Thebaid 7.470–563 and Appendix VIb.
15 For a full discussion of Stesichorus’ lines, see Hirschberg 1989, 9–17; Bremer
1987; Hutchinson 2001. For Statius’ imitation of Euripides, see Reussner 1921;
Hirschberg 1989, 9–17 and my (1994) Appendix VIb. The reconciliation-scene is
pictured on a Roman sarcophagus dating from the end of the second century AD; see
LIMC s.v. Iokaste p. 684. LIMC assumes from the presence of Oedipus, Antigone and
a soldier accompanying Eteocles that here not the duel but an earlier meeting, perhaps
in Thebes, is pictured. This is correct; the scene pictured on the sarcophagus is similar
to Eur. Phoin. 452–587 and Statius Theb. 7.452–587. Statius has doubled the scene;
Jocasta makes a second attempt in Theb. 11.315ff.
16 For a discussion on the date of this play see Mastronarde 1994, 11–4, who con-
siders one of the years 411–409 the most likely.