Thebes I: Foundation
from HanaPee's otroliga podcast
Thebes, in central Greece, had its own distinctive foundation myths, which combined divine origin, autochthony and immigrant stories. There are several myths of foundation: the walls were built by sons of Zeus, while the territory was laid out by Cadmus, a refugee fromAsia Minor, who peoples Thebes with the offspring of the Spartoi (‘the Sown Men’), warriors who grow from the ground when Cadmus plants the teeth of a monstrous snake. Featured in several Athenian tragedies, Thebes has been seen as a displaced location on which Athens enacts dangerous and confrontational ideas. This lecture investigates this idea by looking in detail at the anarchy wrought by Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae.
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