Vicious, debased and blasphemous: Oxford academic uncovers scandalous side of Greek epic
This article originally appeared on Culture24.
An Oxford academic has uncovered a new, bloodier and far more scandalous side to Greek epic
A series of epic poems have been partially reconstructed by an Oxford academic © Courtesy Oxford University“There are no surviving papyrus fragments of these poems but we can still infer a lot from references in later works," says Professor Davies.
“In the case of the Thebais, we even have a few lines of the poem quoted.”
What this revealed was shocking; characters who, unlike the dignified, balanced, human heroes of Homer, were vicious, debased and blasphemous.
The dying warrior Tydeus bites the head of the man who killed him while another fighter, Capaneus, swarms up a siege ladder declaiming his superiority to the gods, only to be struck down by Zeus.
“These kinds of brutality and impiety are completely unknown in the Homeric epics," says Professor Davies.
"Although the Illiad and the Odyssey deal with war, pride and violence, no hero would commit an act of cannibalism, or defy the gods so crudely.”
Of course, Greek myth as a whole, especially 5th century BC tragedy, is full of such depravity. Who can forget Bellerophon’s fateful hubris in flying up to Olympus, Oedipus’ incest with his mother or Hercules murder of his wife and children?
Yet Professor Davies’s research shows this immoral behaviour reaches back beyond the time of tragedy to that of great oral poetry, and here the contrast between the acts of the Theban heroes and Homer’s is marked.
"Tydeus’ barbaric act and the straightforwardly bad behaviour of Capaneus may have been much more typical of early Greek epic as a whole.
"In fact, the Illiad and Odyssey, though preserved precisely because of their literary merit and humane treatment of war, may have been the exceptions and the other poems of the Epic Cycle the rule.”
- The Theban Epics is available now from Harvard University Press.
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