The ‘Phoenician Maidens’ and the ‘Suppliants’
The homicide-problems of the Phoenissae and of the Supplices may be simultaneously discussed, as both these dramas are concerned with the war of the Seven against Thebes. The dramas correspond in their general atmosphere and in regard to the problems which they present with the Septem of Aeschylus or the Antigone of Sophocles. We also find an incidental reference[164] to the punishment of Oedipus which recalls the Oedipus at Colonus and the King Oedipus of Sophocles. Euripides, in his account of the conflict which took place between Polyneices and Eteocles and of the war between the Argives and the Thebans is, from a legal point of view, more satisfactory than his brother dramatists, inasmuch as he makes a clear distinction between the different aspects of the problem of burial in both cases. Polyneices may or may not have been a fratricide and a traitor,[165] but the Argives at least were legitimate belligerents. In the Antigone these two issues seem to have been deliberately confused. The burial of the Argives was a question for Greek international law, the violation of which brought down upon the offenders the anger of the gods. The burial of Polyneices was a more delicate question, upon which the gods might adopt divergent attitudes. Teiresias, in the Antigone, does not differentiate very clearly between the religious aspects of these two problems. The gods were angry—about that there was no doubt. But might not this anger have been mainly, if not entirely, due to the non-burial of the Argives? Here are the words addressed by Teiresias to Kreon[166]:
And this evil state
Is come upon the city from thy will:
Because our altars—yea, our sacred hearths,
Are everywhere infected from the mouths
Of dogs or beak of vulture that hath fed
On Oedipus’ unhappy slaughtered son.
Kreon is unmoved by this declaration, which he regards as the outcome of bribery and political corruption.[167] But Teiresias now utters words which strike terror into Kreon’s heart[168]: