Sibling Relationship Portrayed in Ancient Greek Plays

Kitto uses the term Dik? to describe the Greek idea of the universe as "a cosmos, an ordered whole, a end of opposites. . . . Dik? is the force which, in the long run, preserves the balance" (Kitto 25-6), however much it may have been upset by man achievement. In the Theban plays of Sophocles and Euripides, to the degree human priorities disregard to take sufficient account of cosmic forces, they can be said to have dislocated the cosmos. But as the cosmic agent of balance, Dik? cannot tolerate such dislocation.

Nor, of course, can the individual perfections who balk for specific cosmic forces, which is what the plays are all about. Thus in TB Dionysus explains that Thebes, which under Pentheus has suppressed ritual acknowledgment of Dionysus, " essential learn in full / This less(prenominal)on, that my bacchanalian worship is a matter / As yet beyond her knowledge and d hold" (Bac. 66-8). One reason Dionysus has been slighted is that the daughters of Cadmus have more or less trivialized him.

My m new(prenominal)'s sisters said--what they should have been

To say--that I, Dionysus, was not Zeus's son;

That Semele, being with child--they said--by some mortal,

Obeyed her father's prompting, and ascribed to Zeus

The wrong of her virginity; and they loudly claimed

That this lie was the sin for which Zeus took her life (Bac. 27-33).

The federation of the sisters to explain away Dionysus's birth in purely human terms counts as

Pentheus has suppressed the irrational, joyous, and frantic in Thebes in favor of a dour, moralistic rationality. Kitto, who explains Dionysus's prologue as articulation of several miracles (the eternal flame burning where lightning struck, the vines developing over Semele's tomb, the wholesale drawing-away of the women from Thebes to Mt. Cithaeron), characterizes this as a rejection of Dionysus by his own kinsmen. In response, Dionysus has bewitched the women of Thebes, including Cadmus's daughters, into a kind of demonic self-will and dispatched them away from their domestic responsibilities to "their holy place" (Bac. 59). The women have hardly the vaguest notion of what has happened to them, only when they are irresistibly drawn to Bacchic practices.

The Chorus of Asian women, comprising Dionysus' entourage, celebrates the "mystic rites" involving worship of Dionysus as the "god of joy" (Bac. 80, 190).

The emotional hazards of failing to act on have it off that is felt emerge later in Antigone. By the magazine Antigone has been condemned, her attitude has hardened toward Ismene, who suddenly wants to be a vox of burying Polyneices: "Never share my dying, / don't lay claim to what you never touched. / My death will be enough" (Ant. 615-17). Antigone's position is to permit cosmic forces that mandate respectful burial of the dead in service of the soul, not an authoritarian might-makes-right construct, which can only be inferior to cosmic authority. She softens toward Ismene in the moments before she is led away, but the divide between the sisters is real. "Your wisdom appealed to one world," she tells Ismene, "mine, another" (Ant. 628). This "other" is the higher law of cosmic order. Of the children of Oedipus, only Antigone understands the demands of that order.

Autono? joined them, and the whole maniacal horde

At the very moment that the action of Oedipus at Colonus is moving toward universal witness of the sanctification of Colonus, Polyneices and Etiocles are eng
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