Theban Cycle

• 1. Introduction

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  The Theban Cycle is a collection of four ancient Greek epics, every one of them lost. What survives are fragments, echoes, a single complete first line from one poem, and the faint outlines of stories that shaped Western literature for millennia. The Cycle told the mythological history of the Boeotian city of Thebes, set before the events of the Trojan War and centered on the royal family that ruled there. The four epics were the Oedipodea, the Thebaid, the Epigoni, and the Alcmeonis, all composed in dactylic hexameter verse and believed to have been recorded somewhere between 750 and 500 BC. Who wrote them? In some cases, scholars cannot say. What exactly happened in them? For at least one, only a handful of lines remain. Yet these poems left a mark that outlasted the texts themselves. The questions worth asking are what these epics actually contained, how they diverged from the versions we think we know, and why their disappearance makes them harder, not easier, to understand.

• 2. A Sphinx That Devours

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  The Oedipodea is the opening poem of the Theban Cycle, and different sources attribute its 6,600 verses to Cinaethon of Sparta. Almost none of it survives. What does survive points to a version of the Oedipus story that differs from the one most people know, the tragedy written by the Athenian poet Sophocles in Oedipus Rex. In the Oedipodea, a fragment describes the Sphinx not as a gate-guardian with a riddle but as a force that, in the words of the surviving text, "devours great and small". The Sophoclean Sphinx sits at the entrance to Thebes and kills only those who cannot answer its question. The Oedipodean Sphinx is something broader and more indiscriminate. A second surviving fragment handles the incest at the heart of the Oedipus story differently too. In Sophocles, Oedipus's children are born from his unknowing union with his mother Epicaste, also known as Jocasta. In the Oedipodea, his children came from a separate marriage altogether. These two fragments are all that remain. Everything else about the poem, its structure, its other characters, its ending, is gone.

• 3. The Brothers and the Throne

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  Callinus, an ancient Greek elegiac poet, believed that Homer authored the Thebaid, and that view gained wide recognition in antiquity. Whether or not that attribution holds, the true identity of the Thebaid's author cannot be determined. The poem runs to 7,000 verses, also known under the titles Thebais or the Cyclic Thebaid, and it records the quarrel between the brothers Eteocles and Polynices, sons of Oedipus, that escalated into the war of the Seven against Thebes. After Oedipus left the throne, the two brothers divided their inheritance: Polynices took the material property while Eteocles claimed the royal title. That arrangement broke down. Polynices, in exile, traveled with a warrior named Tydeus to Argos, where Adrastus, king of Argos, provided troops to help him retake Thebes. Polynices and his six commanders attacked the city and failed. At the poem's close, both brothers die. The Thebaid almost certainly formed the basis for a later Latin epic of the same name, which describes this same struggle for the throne. That Latin poem was criticized in some quarters as exaggerated, yet it was read widely through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and prompted further literary creation.

• 4. Sons of the Fallen

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  The Epigoni opens with a single surviving line: "But now, Muses, let us begin on the younger men." That is the totality of verbatim text that remains from the poem's 7,000 verses, beyond the less than ten fragments that exist in total, only three of which are verbatim, amounting to four lines altogether. Scholars believe the Epigoni functioned as a sequel to the Thebaid. Presumably it narrated a second expedition against Thebes, mounted by the sons of the seven commanders who had failed in the first campaign, launched ten years after the original attack. In this second campaign, the sons succeed where their fathers did not. They capture the city and destroy it. The poem has been attributed to Homer, though some scholars reject that claim. It has also been attributed to Antimachus of Teos. Questions about its origin, its age, its internal arrangement, and its relationship to the Thebaid, the Alcmeonis, and the lost epics of the Trojan cycle remain unresolved. There is no prose summary to fill the gaps, unlike the poetry of the Trojan cycle, which at least left behind that kind of secondary record.

• 5. The Least-Known Epic

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  Only seven records of the Alcmeonis survive in all of ancient literature, making it the poem about which the least is known. Its length, its author, and even its date of composition are unknown. What can be reconstructed from those seven records is a story centered on a figure named Alcmaeon, who kills his mother Eriphyle because she arranged the death of his father Amphiaraus. The murder of Amphiaraus was itself told in the Thebaid. Alcmaeon's position within the Theban saga is significant: he is the son of one of the seven commanders who failed in the first assault on Thebes, and he is also counted among the Epigonoi, the sons of the seven who returned and destroyed the city in the second campaign. Whether the Alcmeonis properly belongs in the Theban Cycle at all remains a matter of debate, partly because of how little survives and partly because the poem's relationship to the other epics is unclear. Alcmaeon himself, however, is woven through both generations of the Theban story, connecting the failed war to the successful one.

• 6. Living in the Fragments

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  Sophocles wrote a tragedy called Epigoni, adapting material that almost certainly came from the Theban Cycle. That script has also been lost, and only fragments remain, a fate that mirrors the source epics themselves. The plot of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex may have drawn on the Oedipodea. Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles all converted elements of the Theban myths into plays, and those plays are still being performed. In 2002, the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus presented a production titled Theban Cycle, staging four interconnected Greek plays together: The Bacchae by Euripides, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus, and Antigone by Sophocles. The cycle of influence runs in all directions. The ancient epics shaped the classical tragedies; the tragedies survived; the epics did not. What remains of the Theban Cycle in the original is a collection of fragments, approximations, and attributions that scholars cannot fully resolve. The precise sequence of events across all four poems, and the handling of characters and plots within them, is difficult to reconstruct and in some cases impossible. The first line of the Epigoni calling on the Muses to begin with the younger men may be the single most intact piece of the whole enterprise.