Nostos, Domos, and the Architecture of the Ancient Stage

Karen Bassi *

Ancient Greek tragedy takes the majority of its plots from epic sources. It is for this and other reasons that by anachronism Plato calls Homer the “first teacher and leader of the tragic poets” (Republic 595c and 607a) and Aristotle calls him a “dramatizer [dramatapoiesas]” (Poetics 1448b38).¹ It may therefore seem strange to suggest that tragedy is more accurately described as epic’s other than as its offspring. This corrective challenges the notion that tragedy is the end product of a linear history, that is, a genre whose origins are predictive of its final form,² and suggests that tragedy’s reliance on the Homeric master plots emphasizes their generic differences in terms of poetic content and public context. One of the principal differences between the two genres is that of spatial orientation, or their respective localities of plot and performance venue. The epic narratives traverse a Panhellenic world that includes Troy and Ithaca but also Hades and the land of the Ethiopians, and epic performances were given throughout the Greek-speaking Mediterranean.³ In spatial terms, the conventional and proper place in the world for both epic hero and epic poet is not at [End Page 415] home. Consequently, homecoming is both fervently desired and persistently deferred in the epic narratives, where home signifies an idealized locus of political and familial identity, but not without the ambivalence that necessarily attaches to such idealizations.

While the plots of Attic tragedy call for diverse locales (e.g., Delphi, Egypt, or Troy), tragic performances were confined to theatrical venues in fifth-century Athens, primarily the Theater of Dionysus. Within this theatrical space, tragic plots played out in front of a façade—the skene, or scene building—whose principal architectural feature was a door or set of doors leading into an internal space that remained invisible to the audience. That space, sometimes, though not necessarily, the literal home of the hero, represents a fixed locale and a broadly conceived domestic space. Thus tragedy is epic’s other in the sense that it brings the hero home—where home is a spatial configuration that includes the skene, the Attic theater, and the city of Athens as the birthplace of tragedy—and makes coming home a source of tragic action. The location of home on a continuum of localities, ranging from foreign destinations in the context of historical narratives to utopias in the context of legendary or mythological ones,⁴ raises a number of questions. Where does home stand in relation to these other places as a defining feature of Western subjectivity? How might we plot the coordinates of a map on which the self is defined in terms of proximity to home? And finally, what are the boundaries (geographical, political, architectural, etc.) that distinguish home from everywhere else? These larger questions frame the concept of home considered as both a destination and a scene of domestic life in Greek epic and tragedy, with Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus constituting an exemplary case.

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Homecoming in the Epic. The heroes of Homer’s Iliad are defined by their presence on the plains of Troy and by their absence from home (Argos, Phthia, Ithaca, etc.). The significance of home as an always deferred destination in that narrative is confirmed by the Odyssey, the plot of which is principally motivated by Odysseus’s desire for nostos, or homecoming. In the Odyssey, moreover, homecoming means not simply a return to the hero’s homeland but a return to his own palace and immediate family, that is, to domestic life. Without worrying about which epic is the earlier, we can say that the Odyssey answers the Iliad both in terms of the relative chronology of [End Page 416] their plots and in terms of the meaning of homecoming. Returning home is a threat voiced by Achilles, Agamemnon, and Thersites in the Iliad (1.169–71, 2.114–15, and 2.236, respectively). However various the reasons for the threat, in each case it signals the possibility of a Greek withdrawal and defeat; nostos in the Iliad means a premature end of battle and of the narrative itself. In the mouth of Thersites, the ugliest and most dishonorable man in Troy (aischistos aner [2.216]), the threat to return home becomes part of a discourse of loss and submission.⁵ In short, going home in the Iliad is the antithesis of martial combat as the vehicle of heroic virtue.

As if to compensate for that negative Iliadic representation of nostos, it becomes an overdetermined thematic of the Odyssey, where the promise of Odysseus’s long-awaited arrival in Ithaca is represented by the event’s many rehearsals, which both anticipate and threaten to forestall his homecoming. These rehearsals, manifested in a variety of locales, are principally represented by Aeaea, Ogygia, and Scheria, where Odysseus makes temporary homes away from home with Circe, Calypso, and Nausicaa, respectively. The problem is that he may make one of these places his permanent home and will fail to bring closure to the conservative plot that ends with the resumption of his role as king, husband, and father in Ithaca. It is by virtue of these delays and rehearsals that the Odyssean nostos plot advances in ambivalence. Aeaea, Ogygia, and Scheria are not the only places where Odysseus is delayed on his journey, of course. But, unlike the lands of the cannibalistic Cyclopes and Laestrygonians or the sea caves of the monstrous Scylla and Charybdis, they are the homes of seductive females and therefore pose the most dangerous threat to Odysseus’s homecoming: the possibility that he may give up the attempt altogether. This possibility is the most dangerous of all threats in the narrative precisely because it is motivated by the hero’s own desire to stay where he is. These places are the sites of heterosexual female desire in the male imaginary and are coupled with the promise of immortality or its analog, a life of inactivity and forgetfulness. Their negative potential is expressed in an inertia that postpones and threatens to cancel the hero’s journey.⁶ In short, Odysseus’s implicit desire not to return home (or to forget home) is due to the presence of females who may take the place of Penelope.⁷

Classicists, following the work of folklorists, have long equated this inertia with a deathlike state and read the hero’s return home as symbolic of transcendence and resurrection.⁸ This reading is compelling and may be [End Page 417] readily applied to the Odyssey, where Odysseus, feared dead by his family, must go to the Underworld before he can reach Ithaca.⁹ In telling his account of this funereal journey to Alcinous and the Phaeacians (bks. 10–12), Odysseus describes how Circe instructed him to go to Hades and seek out the prophet Tiresias, who would tell him “the way to go, the length of [his] journey, and [his] nostos” (10.539–40). Tiresias prophesies the perils that Odysseus will encounter before achieving his “honey-sweet homecoming [noston meliedea]” (11.100). Upon their return from the Underworld, Circe calls Odysseus and his men “twice dead [disthanees]” (12.22) because, unlike the rest of mankind, they will suffer death a second time. That the map of homecoming in the Odyssey includes this interlude in the land of the dead seems to validate the notion of the hero’s return as transcendent. But does the Nekyia—the narrative of Odysseus’s journey to and return from Hades—unequivocally validate nostos? Is his return from the land of the dead emblematic of his homecoming and, simultaneously, of his revitalized manhood?¹⁰ And if we reject these commonly held assumptions, how are we to reevaluate the epic—and then the tragic—discourse of nostos?

When we understand homecoming as a dangerous proposal in the Iliad, the promise of homecoming in the Odyssey does not so clearly signify the transcendence of the hero. And Hades is not so simply the dark other side of home but, like those stops mentioned earlier, a rehearsal of home. In fact, the sojourn in Hades epitomizes the ambiguity that characterizes nostos. When Odysseus first tells his men that they must venture to the land of the dead, his words effectively equate that trip with going home: “You think that you are now going homeward into [your] dear fatherland, / But Circe has indicated another road for you, / [A road] into the house of Hades and revered Persephone” (10.562–64). There is a grammatical equivalence in these lines between going “homeward into [your] dear fatherland [oikonde philen es patrida gaian]” and going “into the house of Hades [eis Aïdao domous].” The two activities are obviously construed in opposition, but their shared grammatical construction (eis followed by the accusative) suggests a semantic equivalence by which going to hell is a substitute for going home. More generally, it suggests that a homeward journey leads inevitably to the house of death not as the result of heroism on the battlefield, but merely as the end of heroic existence.

In his commentary on book 11 of the Odyssey Alfred Heubeck concludes that “no other adventure is so dangerous or comes so near to the limits of [End Page 418] human experience” as Odysseus’s trip to the Underworld.¹¹ Hades is necessarily at the outer limits of human experience, but in the Odyssey it is a dangerous locale for the same reason that Aeaea, Ogygia, and Scheria are dangerous, namely, because the hero may want to stay there. It is true that Odysseus is not anxious to go to Hades (10.496–500) and that at the end of the story he is anxious to leave (11.632–35). But the episode comprises an entire book and is advanced by Odysseus’s intense desire to converse with his dead mother and the dead heroes in Hades. Both the length of the narrative and the quality of these encounters attest to the seductive quality of the Underworld, a seductiveness emphasized in the middle of the narrative (which occurs near the middle of the book) when Odysseus wants to go to sleep (11.330–31), but Alcinous begs him to continue (11.373–76):

This night is unutterably long; nor is it time to sleep in the palace.
But continue telling me about your divinely inspired deeds.
I could hold up until the bright dawn, if only you could bear to
Relate your sufferings to me in the palace.¹²

These lines emphasize the length of the story Odysseus is telling and both a need to keep the story going and (metaphorically) a desire to stay in Hades, where those physical activities that define and validate masculine subjectivity are necessarily forestalled. Circe calls the realm of Hades and Persephone a house or domos (10.492, 512), and it is figured as a domestic space in which the god and goddess of the dead play the role of a royal couple who rule over numerous subjects. While that is the same role played by Odysseus and Penelope in Ithaca, by Alcinous and Arete in Scheria, and by Helen and Menelaus in Sparta, it certainly cannot be argued that Hades is comparable to Ithaca, Scheria, or Sparta, since these are characterized as places of ease and comfort.¹³ But Odysseus’s desire to stay or linger in the house of Hades (both as narrator of and character in the story) can be explained in part as a function of its familiarity as a domestic space, illustrated most vividly in the appearance of his mother, Anticlea, together with the fourteen wives and daughters of other Greek heroes (aristeon alochoi esan ede thugatres [11.227]). The list or catalogue (11.225–333) is a familiar feature of early epic and didactic poetry, for example, Hesiod’s lost Catalogue of Women and the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad (2.484–877).¹⁴ But the significance of the catalogue of wives and daughters in Hades cannot be fully explained by appeals to convention. Rather, it suggests that the land of the dead is conspicuously a land [End Page 419] of women and that, by virtue of their feminine presence, going to Hades is a rehearsal of the return home.

That the private Greek household is space reserved for females is testified to by the presence of an andron, or “men’s room,” a special room set aside for men’s activities in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. I am not suggesting that Greek domestic space in the classical period was strictly segregated in actual social practice, but andron (from aner, meaning male) clearly implies that the rest of the house was considered women’s space, even though the uses of the andron remain obscure.¹⁵ In the Odyssey, the Mycenaean palace (called a megaron, doma, or domos) is the principal example of domestic architecture and is best represented by Alcinous’s palace in book 7. Providing every bodily comfort, including the finest food, wine, clothing, and furnishings, it is also presided over by a female. Athena tells Odysseus that he will first meet the queen, Arete, in the megaron (7.53), or meeting hall, of the palace and that she has been given pride of place among all women who “keep house [oikon] for husbands” (7.68). Athena says that if Arete is well-minded toward Odysseus, there is hope that he will come home to his “high-roofed house [oikon hupsorophon]” and to his fatherland (7.75–77). The Phaeacian palace is not represented as strictly divided into gender-specific spaces; Arete and Alcinous greet Odysseus together in the megaron. For just this reason, the queen’s presence is a defining feature of the Mycenaean palace as a place where strangers are cared for as they pass through on their way home. In general terms, the concept of home in ancient Greek culture cannot be imagined in the absence of females.

At first glance, the scene of domestic comfort in Scheria is in stark contrast to the scene of gloom and sadness in Hades. But the obvious differences between the two scenes only emphasize the conspicuous presence of so many females in Hades, Odysseus’s mother in particular. It is true, of course, that Odysseus converses with Elpenor, Tiresias, the shades of three famous heroes from the Trojan War—Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ajax (11.385–565)—and six legendary heroes (11.566–630). But these dead heroes are more like women than men, having entered a domestic or homelike space (a domos) from which they will never escape. The fact that Odysseus first sees the shade of Elpenor in Hades (11.57–80) brings the status of the dead heroes immediately into focus, for Elpenor died in a drunken fall from the roof of Circe’s palace (en megaroi [11.62]). Heubeck rightly comments on the “incongruity of Elpenor’s claim to status: his birth, station [End Page 420] in life, achievements, as well as the manner of his death, are profoundly unheroic.”¹⁶ As the most recent of Odysseus’s companions to have died on his way home, Elpenor epitomizes the loss of heroic virtues that death as a rehearsal of nostos signifies. The fact that he died by falling off the roof of Circe’s megaron is a parodic comment on the potential dangers of homecoming insofar as the house is effectively the agent of Elpenor’s unheroic death.

While the other heroes may have been great warriors in life, in death they are no less compromised than Elpenor. Odysseus says that they all died “on their way home [en nostoi] by the will of an evil woman” (11.384). Here a failed nostos in life becomes an achieved nostos in death and is explicitly connected with female desire or “will [iotes].” A hero’s death is ideally suffered in combat and at the hands of men, not by a woman’s will. As if to illustrate this point, Odysseus’s reference to the unnamed Helen (the “evil woman”) provides a transition to the story of Agamemnon’s homecoming, which immediately follows and includes a generalized condemnation of woman as the goal of homecoming (11.385–464). When Odysseus meets the shade of Agamemnon, he asks him if he died in any of the usual or expected ways, that is, at sea or in battle (11.399–403). Agamemnon responds by recounting his murder at the hands of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, his “accursed wife [oulomenei alochoi]” (11.410). Although the site of the slaughter was Aegisthus’s house, where Agamemnon had been an invited guest (oikonde kalessas [11.410]), Clytemnestra clearly bears the greater responsibility for the crime in Agamemnon’s view, as his concluding words to Odysseus, who, unlike himself, “will never be murdered by [his own] wife” (11.444), prove. Agamemnon’s confidence in this prediction is belied, however, by his earlier claim that Clytemnestra has “poured shame on the race of women yet to come, even on the woman who is virtuous” (11.433–34), and by his warning Odysseus to be on guard when he reaches Ithaca, especially with respect to what he tells Penelope (11.441–43). A cautionary tale, Agamemnon’s homecoming exemplifies the dangers inherent in the hero’s return to the domain of the wife. Aeschylus emphasizes this spatial specificity in his Agamemnon of 458 B.C.E. when he transfers the scene of the murder to Agamemnon’s own palace, where Clytemnestra has been awaiting his return.

In general, homecoming in both the Odyssey and the Iliad is antithetical to the epic ideology that defines masculinity in terms of the hero’s martial prowess. In the latter, that antithesis is manifested in the possibility of a [End Page 421] Greek defeat at Troy; in the former, it is manifested as the potential death of the hero upon his arrival home. In both cases, homecoming means a retreat from the life of heroic action. While Odysseus’s victory over the suitors at the end of the Odyssey may seem to argue against this conclusion, comparison with the Trojan War—which was also fought over a woman and to restore domestic and political order—demonstrates its diminished scale. The battle with the suitors is essentially a local dispute fought in Odysseus’s palace and, as such, is a poor substitute for a full-scale war between Greeks and Trojans. In short, Odysseus’s battle with the suitors paradoxically exemplifies the fact that homecoming achieved is a less than heroic event.

Hades, as the domain of women and out-of-action heroes, represents the most vivid rehearsal of homecoming in the Odyssey and, more succinctly, equates nostos with a kind of death. It is in this respect that Tiresias’s prophecy of an easy or feeble death (thanatos ablechros [11.134–35]) awaiting Odysseus after his return home must be compared with the prophecies about the death of Achilles in the Iliad (9.410–16). If Achilles stays in Troy and gives up his nostos, he will die in battle and win kleos or heroic renown; if he returns home, he will lose glory but win a long life and a swift death. As we know, Achilles’ threat to return home in the Iliad is eventually forgotten. He chooses kleos over nostos and thus establishes the precedent against which the prophecy of Odysseus’s nostos and easy death can be judged. In the Odyssey, the shade of Achilles laments that death is even worse than working as a hired man in life (11.487–91); it is at the opposite end of a continuum on which a heroic life is presumably best, but any life is better than death. The quality of Achilles’ death is not disputed, however; he won a glorious death in battle,¹⁷ unlike the easy and ordinary death predicted for Odysseus after he returns home. But in both cases, the hero’s desire for nostos and its possible fulfillment cancels, or at least compromises, his desire for kleos.

The possibility that Odysseus’s sojourn in Hades will permanently “delay” his homecoming as a result of his desire to stay in the Underworld is raised by the presence of his dead mother. While Odysseus’s journey to the Underworld is motivated in the plot by his interview with Tiresias, his meeting with Anticlea is not prepared for, and although she is able to tell Odysseus how things stand in Ithaca, Tiresias could presumably have given him that information. Moreover, her information is chronologically out of place in the narrative.¹⁸ But if Anticlea’s role as a provider of relevant information [End Page 422] is not a sufficient motivation for her presence in hell, how is it to be explained? Hers is the first shade Odysseus sees after his conversation with the recently dead Elpenor and before he meets Tiresias; following that interview with the seer, Anticlea is the first denizen of Hades he asks after. The scene between Odysseus and Anticlea is obviously expressive of an intense desire of mother for son and son for mother. She died, Anticlea tells Odysseus, because of her desire for him (sos pothos [11.202]), and his reciprocal desire is expressed in the three attempts he makes to hold her in his arms (11.204–14). On the surface, this interlude in Hades temporarily alleviates one of death’s cruelest consequences, the irrevocable separation of mother and son. At the same time, it represents a variation on the story of Demeter and Persephone, in which a mother loses her daughter to the Underworld; in a reversal of narrative elements, Odysseus goes to Hades to be reunited with his mother.¹⁹ But their reunion also represents the rehearsal of an alternative and subversive sort of homecoming—to the mother instead of to the wife. If Odysseus’s return to Penelope, and to his roles of husband, father, and king in Ithaca, epitomizes the normative meaning of nostos in the Odyssey, his journey to Hades represents a dark version of nostos as a return to Anticlea and his resumption of the son’s role.

The separation of mother and son is a distinctive feature of Greek legend, in which it is commonly understood to be motivated by the threat of incest.²⁰ Although not overt in the interchange between Odysseus and Anticlea, this threat is explicitly introduced by the presence in Hades of Oedipus’s wife/mother, Epicaste. The Catalogue of Women in which Epicaste appears is essentially a genealogy of mothers and their male children. Heubeck comments that “the lack of any direct connection between [their] stories . . . and the fate of Odysseus is a flaw in composition.”²¹ But this genealogical survey of mothers and sons coming right after Odysseus’s encounter with his own mother emphasizes the significance of a maternal presence in the Underworld. Its connection to “the fate of Odysseus” is realized in the sense that Hades—a land of females and feminized males—represents homecoming as a potentially incestuous return to the mother. According to Heubeck,

The description of Epicaste, wife of Laius, and mother of Oedipus, is the oldest identifiable version of the Oedipus legend, and contains all the central elements of the story: Oedipus’ murder of his father, marriage with his mother (generally called Jocasta in subsequent treatments [End Page 423] of the story), the discovery of the crime, and his mother’s curse and suicide. The account, which is probably based on, but does not enable us to reconstruct, a pre-Homeric epic, makes no mention of children born to Oedipus and Epicaste nor of any self-blinding or voluntary exile on the part of Oedipus.²²

After Freud it seems easy to make too much of the presence of Epicaste in Hades; she is, after all, only one of several mothers in the Catalogue. But she is also the only one among them to be called a mother (meter). The other women are called daughters or wives (alochoi, thugatres [11.227]), with their motherhood indicated only indirectly by verbs meaning “to give birth” followed by the names of their children. The passage that introduces Epicaste begins with the words “the mother of Oedipus [Metera t’ Oidipodao]” and ends with a reference to a “mother’s Furies [metros Erinues]” (11.271, 280). These two phrases frame the passage and emphasize Epicaste’s role as Oedipus’s mother; Laius is not even mentioned by name. Anticlea is likewise consistently called Odysseus’s “mother [meter]” in this Underworld scene, where Epicaste is rendered as the dominant figure in the Oedipus story, with the father’s murder by the son almost incidental to the mother/son marriage: “she married her own son; and after he murdered his own father, he married her” (11.273–74).

In spatial terms, Oedipus’s return to Thebes (en Thebei [11.275]), like Agamemnon’s to Mycenae, is the negative corollary of Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. But while these negative parallels may seem to validate Odysseus’s return to Penelope as a positive instance of homecoming achieved, they also support a less conventional reading. For if nostos can be defined as the male hero’s return to the female realm and places like Aeaea, Ogygia, and Scheria represent rehearsals of that homecoming in the Odyssey, Hades epitomizes all such rehearsals insofar as death means the decisive end of a life of heroic action. But more pertinent to this conclusion is the fact that Hades is the realm of wives and mothers, not that of marriageable or sexually available women—as Aeaea, Ogygia, and Scheria are. The presence of Anticlea in Hades makes its rehearsal of homecoming a regression; it is the homecoming of a hero who is once again a mother’s son instead of a husband, father, and/or king. Epicaste’s presence in Hades therefore signifies an elaboration of this regressive trajectory, since she is both mother and wife of the hero. As a constituent feature of the Oedipal plot, this dyadic female is in fact the [End Page 424] creation of nostos achieved—a homecoming predicated on the son’s murder of his father. If the Odyssey establishes the meaning of nostos through a series of rehearsals in which the hero is detained by marriageable females, Epicaste’s presence in Hades makes the achievement of nostos a cautionary tale defined by the competing interests of wives and mothers.

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Home on the Stage. Homecoming in the Odyssey is often specified as the return to a particular architectural destination such as the “high-roofed house,” as we have seen, with the palace or megaron of Alcinous representing the most elaborate example of such an architectural destination, although the domos of Hades, Circe’s megaron, and even Calypso’s cave can also be included under this rubric. All these destinations are rehearsals of the hero’s return to his own domestic space both because they initiate a time of relative inaction for him and because they are presided over by females. Their seductive qualities are in fact an extension of the seductive females who inhabit them and are part of the allure of home as an idealized locus. Conceptualized as a process (by such phrases as en nostoi) rather than an accomplishment, homecoming contributes to this idealization by positioning home as an always distant destination. References to home as a “high-roofed house” are frequently accompanied by appeals to the hero’s “fatherland,” or patris gaia, which work as compensatory references that counteract the other meaning of home, that is, home as the domestic and private dwelling place of wives and mothers.²³

Thus there are two destinations in the epic discourse of nostos. One is the transcendent home or homeland of the father, the hero’s return to which ideally means the perpetuation of paternal prerogatives guaranteed by social and political institutions; the other is the mundane and ephemeral home of the mother or wife, the hero’s return to which means the potential loss of those prerogatives—a loss equated with death. The former is a public form of return, the latter a private one. It can be objected, of course, that the home of the mother is no less figural than that of the father in the epic imaginary. The point of raising the objection is not to dispute its validity for epic, however, but to suggest that the distinction between these figural and mundane homes became a constituent feature of Greek tragedy as a performance medium. That is, the tragic skene comprises two related spatial and visual fields. As the façade in front of which the stage action takes [End Page 425] place, it represents the idealized and transcendent house of the father. As such, it is the visual manifestation of the hero’s return as a restorative public event. But the skene fulfills this function only as a façade behind which lies the hidden and private domain of the mother and/or wife.

While the tragic choruses often sing of distant geographical regions as they perform in the orchestra, the tragic action itself—by which I mean the plot enacted in the episodes—is essentially confined to the area in front of the skene; the choral flights only emphasize this restricted area of action. With its prominent central doors, the skene represents the façade or threshold of what is variously described as a palace, a hut, a temple, a tent, or a cave. But no matter what specific kind of dwelling it may represent, this façade is also commonly called the entrance to a “house [domos, oikos]” or a “roof [stege]” (as synecdoche for house) in the tragic texts.²⁴ This lexical variety seems to correspond to a distinction between the skene as a theatrical or architectural façade (roof) and a mimetic referent (palace, hut, etc.) and to suggest that the skene necessarily has this dyadic function.²⁵ But my general point is that the skene is conventionally referred to by terms that apprehend domestic spaces and that its theatrical effect was to create “a space that was private, hidden and unseen.”²⁶ In other words, the skene both creates and hides a domestic scene.

It is a commonplace of classical scholarship that within the fictional universe of a given drama, the orchestra represents a public space in which the chorus performs as a collective entity while the skene represents a private space in front of which the actors perform as individuals. This reading, in turn, is the basis of the prevailing generalization that Attic tragedy is about the “relationship of individual and polis.”²⁷ In this analysis, the actor represents the individual, while the chorus, which mediates between actors and audience, represents the polis. Whether explicitly or implicitly, such generalizations assume that the “individual” is the male citizen, since only he can have a functional “relationship” to the polis.²⁸ The critical discourses that pertain to the Greek theater, dominated by structuralist approaches, depend upon these architectural and political binaries: orchestra versus skene, public versus private, polis versus individual. These binaries are also presumptively gender-specific, as David Wiles notes: “The spatial opposition of orchestra and skene door articulates a conflict that is, in large measure, a conflict of male and female.” He goes on to argue that the “gendering of space” in the Oresteia “is typical of fifth-century Greek thinking. The woman is associated [End Page 426] with enclosed space in accordance with her sexuality (enclosed genitalia), her reproductive functions (the enclosing womb) and her economic role (within the oikos, the home), while the male is associated with the public space where, according to democratic ideology, his major role lay.”²⁹ This reading is both persistent and persuasive, although the exclusion of women from public spaces did not govern actual social relations in fifth-century Athens.³⁰ What Wiles describes in terms of theatrical space is also true for political and social space in Mycenaean palaces and fifth-century Athenian houses, namely, that domestic or homelike space is defined in opposition to public or open space and by a feminine presence.

Embedded in Athenian social space, the space of the Attic theater—configured in terms of the skene and the orchestra—created a visual regime in which what was seen and not seen on stage had ideological significance. Why was the performance space of the Attic stage divided into the skene and orchestra, and, more specifically, why did the skene represent the façade of an internal, private space? At first glance, the question seems to require a practical, historical, or an archaeological explanation. The practical explanation would be that the skene provided the actors with a place to change costumes or to remain hidden from the audience while offstage.³¹ But such needs do not necessarily explain the development of the skene and could have been served by other means. Nor can archaeology entirely account for the historical development of the fully dedicated fifth-century theater. The elements that came to constitute the skene are not easily understood, nor do we even know when it was first introduced. Wiles, following Oliver Taplin, concludes that “the skene was introduced shortly before or on the occasion of the Oresteia [458 B.C.E.]. In the Oresteia we see fully realized almost all the techniques, conventions and structural oppositions associated with the skene over the next forty years.”³² The scene building was a necessary adjunct to the dramatic script insofar as that script required actors to enter and exit a designated area (i.e., a palace, cave, tent, or hut). But this does not necessarily explain the relationship between the tragic script and the introduction of the skene. If the three plays of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (the Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the Eumenides) were the first to make full use of the skene, was it because its development anticipated plots that needed a scene building with central doors? Did it somehow predict the plot of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, with Clytemnestra murdering Agamemnon behind the skene doors, or did his plots necessitate the development of the skene? [End Page 427] This chicken-and-egg question illustrates the enigmatic process by which the use of the skene and the production of the tragic script became mutually reinforcing practices.³³ It also helps to focus attention on the skene as a conventional rather than a natural part of Greek tragic production. The development of the tragic script cannot be separated from the construction of an external façade that concealed but led into an internal space. Whatever the course of that development, the façade is constitutive of the tragic plot and of the meaning of Greek tragedy.

The private space into which the skene doors open is obviously not the bourgeois household, but that of an aristocratic or elite family whose threatened stability is a staple of the tragic plot. It is in this respect that Greek tragedy anticipated the contemporary, extended meaning of domestic by which affairs of state are analogically and euphemistically authenticated through assimilation with the affairs of the private household. In the context of individual tragic plots, this assimilation seems to validate the domination of the ruling house by equating the house with the city or state at large; if the house falls, the city suffers. But because tragedy was a product of the Athenian democracy, that assimilation also seems to further democratic ideology; aristocratic houses fall so that the democratic city–state—with its aggregate of lesser houses—may rise.³⁴ In either case, fifth-century Attic tragedy is a principal signifier of the complex nature of the private household in Athenian political discourse. Within that discourse, the private household can be conceptualized in terms of two spatial, temporal, and ideological formations. In spatial terms, the figural or transcendent house of the father remains an abstract and disembodied ideal. No one actually lives in this house, nor is it subject to decay. Rather, it stands for the timeless stability of the patriarchal line and, in doing so, necessarily denies the ephemeral and physical peculiarities of human existence. In the context of Athenian democracy, this figural house is exemplified by epic or legendary royal households and is both the source and the product of a nostalgic idealism. Tragedy, in turn, makes this figural house visible in the façade of the skene, behind which lies a domestic interior. The comings and goings (entrances and exits) from this hidden interior space constitute the tragic action while simultaneously disrupting the abstract timelessness and ideal impenetrability of the house of the father. This interior is the domain of the female, whose activities must be subjected to the discipline of the state. When what happens behind the skene is revealed on the eccyclema, or wheeled platform, [End Page 428] private affairs are brought out into the open where they can be controlled in the act of public scrutiny.³⁵ The use of the eccyclema thus testifies to the fact that Greek tragedy was produced out of a desire to see inside a private or domestic space and then to make what happened there public. Hidden behind the paternal façade of the skene, the private household was the mystified and disavowed subject of Greek tragedy.³⁶

The Oedipal ur-plot, that is, the plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, exemplifies this mystification and disavowal in the Greek theater—and in the histories of Western theater criticism and psychoanalysis. Aristotle instituted this tradition by making the play a principal text in the Poetics. When Freud refers to the same play in The Interpretation of Dreams and to Oedipal drives in psychoanalytic theory generally, his choice of exemplar cannot be detached from the authority of Aristotle. This does not mean that Freud necessarily knew the Poetics, but that his use of Sophocles’ play is in some measure attributable to Aristotle’s role in the formation of the Western literary canon.³⁷ In drawing our attention once again to the Oedipus plot, Freud is drawing upon established precedent. In light of its subsequent importance in the history of psychoanalysis, Freud’s return to that plot seems predictable, a predictability retrospectively reinforced by later structuralist analyses of Sophocles’ play.³⁸ But the intense scrutiny of Oedipus’s family relations (or of what Pietro Pucci calls Oedipus’s “parrincest”³⁹) is less a product of the ancient understanding of the play than it is an effect of the Freudian legacy. Aristotle makes very little of Oedipus’s family predicament in the Poetics, which analyzes the formal features of the dramatic plot and not the private motivations or activities of particular dramatis personae. In making the claim that the Oedipus Tyrannus exemplifies the best sort of tragedy in terms of its formal elements—kalliste tragoidia (Poetics 1452b32), Aristotle says virtually nothing about Oedipus’s patricide and incest. In fact, he seems to scrupulously avoid any mention of Oedipus’s unnatural acts.⁴⁰ In short, the Oedipus Tyrannus did not enter the history of literary criticism in such a way as to anticipate its role in psychoanalytic explanations of desire and sexual-object choice.⁴¹

Aristotle’s apparent lack of interest in Oedipus’s family or parental relations may be understood partly in terms of what might be called the politics of parenthood in the Greek mythological tradition and in Athenian civic discourse. The dangerous liaison of mother and son—a liaison dangerous to the father, that is—figures prominently in the myth of divine succession in [End Page 429] Hesiod’s Theogony. Threatened with the ascendancy of his son, the father violently mocks, reverses, or appropriates the mother’s role: Uranus stuffs his children back into Gaia, while Cronus swallows his own children; in retaliation, Cronus castrates Uranus with the help of Gaia, and Zeus defeats Cronus with the help of Rhea, his mother, and Gaia, his grandmother.⁴² In this tradition, the claims of paternity are explicitly threatened by those of maternity, and the mother–son relationship is the source of physical and political damage to the divine father. In the plot of Oedipus Tyrannus, the mother and father at first conspire against the son when they send him away from home to be exposed on Cithaeron. The old myth survives in a new form, however; for if Laius’s death is not the result of a maternal plot, it is the means by which mother and son are reunited.⁴³ Another way to state the matter is to say that, by giving the formal elements of the Oedipal plot (muthos) primacy over its narrative content, Aristotle neutralized the relationship of Jocasta and Oedipus that Sophocles had foregrounded by not bringing Laius on stage as a dramatis persona.

In fifth-century Athenian civic ideology, the mother’s role as the physical source of her son’s identity is displaced by institutions (i.e., education and the law) that underwrite a socially and legally constructed confidence in the father–son relationship by attesting to the child’s true or paternal identity.⁴⁴ The father and the state or polis are the arbiters of (male) citizenship and social status in Athens, while the mother and the home are the potential sources of foreign or barbarian intrusion into Greek civic space.⁴⁵ The role of the Athenian state as an omnipotent and protective father is a version of what Benedict Anderson calls the “remarkable confidence of community in anonymity,” whereby fatherhood is part of the political imaginary of Athens.⁴⁶ But this anonymity is more accurately described as a displacement of family identity and allegiance by those of the state. Pericles’ famous funeral oration in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War transfers the responsibilities and privileges of the dead soldiers’ parents to the city. If those parents should have more children, Pericles says, they will benefit the state; moreover, the state will raise or “nourish [threpsei]” any children who are orphaned by the war (2.44–46).⁴⁷ As Mark Golden asserts, Athenian children were considered “the children of the polis, not the family’s alone,” and certainly not the mother’s alone.⁴⁸ In its allegorical role as parent the Athenian state superseded the interests of the private family—primarily the interests of the mother—and took on the task of disciplining its citizens as [End Page 430] though they were children. The wartime situation of Athens in the fifth century made its citizens subject to military discipline in particular. Tragedy, which is arguably its most conspicuous cultural product, incorporated this process of domestic appropriation as a feature of individual plots, the architectural design of the stage, and the dramatic festivals as the occasions on which tragedies were presented to the public. The war orphans mentioned by Pericles were paraded in armor before the citizens of Athens as part of the City Dionysia; they were also given the right to a seat of honor (proedria) during the tragic performances.⁴⁹ The dramatic festival was thus an occasion not only for the presentation of the plays, but also for the representation of the city in its role as the father of citizen–sons.

The cultural and civic environment in which the Oedipus Tyrannus was produced and the political disavowal of domestic life as a significant feature of that environment are helpful for understanding the play itself and, in retrospect, Aristotle’s narrowly formal analysis of it. The physical relationship between mother and son, at once inevitable and prior to the disciplines of education and the law, was a potential source of violence and transgression against the father. This potential is graphically illustrated in the mythological tradition, as we have seen, and implicitly guarded against in the civic rhetoric of parenthood. Within this context, the son’s return to the mother and to the birth home is conspicuously transgressive because it reverses and therefore negates the effect of a civic discipline that requires the son’s separation from the mother. This may explain why the play’s formal analysis in the Poetics and its psychological and structural analyses in subsequent centuries do not insist on the fact that Oedipus’s predicament is primarily a consequence of his nostos, that is, on homecoming as the kernel of the Oedipal plot.⁵⁰ To elide the trajectory of the Oedipal nostos is to preserve a patrilocal imaginary and to shore up the fantasy of the father’s authority in the face of patricide. In an anti-psychoanalytic reading of the Oedipus plot, Golden notes that the “combination of father-killing and mother-incest is unique and, even in Oedipus’s case rivalry over Jocasta is not the motive for Laius’s murder. . . . Oedipus literally goes to great lengths to avoid killing the man he thinks is his father and arguably marries his mother, quite unwittingly, only because she comes with the territory, the city of Thebes.”⁵¹ Such literal understandings of the Oedipal plot seem too simple. But at the same time Golden’s statement that Jocasta “comes with the territory” epitomizes the point I am trying to make. If the Odyssean nostos plot includes the son’s [End Page 431] temporary return to the mother as a rehearsal of homecoming to the wife, the Oedipal nostos plot is a condensed version in which a son comes home to a wife who is also his mother. Like Odysseus’s nostos, that of Oedipus is emplotted along a trajectory that brings him into contact with females who threaten to delay or nullify his homecoming. The Sphinx is an Oedipal version of those monster–women who pose an overt physical threat to Odysseus on his journey.⁵² But the Odyssean Nekyia, in which Tiresias serves as a model for the seer in Oedipus Tyrannus, is also the locus classicus of the hero’s nostos as a potential return to the mother. What distinguishes Oedipus’s nostos from Odysseus’s is, of course, the murder he commits along the way. In its various registers, Laius’s murder is not only the fulfillment of Apollo’s oracles, but also psychoanalytic dream material and an example of tragic irony. More immediately, it is the means of Oedipus’s homecoming, one that is predicated on both the failure of the institution of fatherhood (with its legal, social, and political protocols) and Oedipus’s overdetermined physical relationship with his mother.⁵³ The patricide and incest are the objects of retrospective discovery in the plot, but the murder of Laius is prospective in the course of Oedipus’s nostos, as it anticipates and enables his return to Jocasta. Since Freud, Oedipus Tyrannus has been about father–son competition over the mother, but the sociospatial trajectory of the epic nostos plot is the mechanism of that Oedipal competition.

Sophocles does not show us Oedipus’s return to Thebes, of course. As the play’s spectators we see him neither on the road from Delphi nor at the crossroads along the way.⁵⁴ He makes his first entrance through the doors of the skene—here representing the doors to his home and palace—after he has killed Laius, become king, and married Jocasta.⁵⁵ As a dramatic situation, Oedipus’s predicament is a function of spatial orientation before it is a function of unconscious sexual desires. As the first event of the play, his entrance is circumscribed by the combined temporal and spatial conventions of the Greek theater. These limit the plot to events that take place within a single day, as Aristotle recommends (Poetics 1449b13–14), and in a single location. Characters do make journeys from distant locales to the site of the dramatic action, but not before the eyes of the spectators. They enter and exit through the eisodoi or side entrances of the performance space, as Creon does when he comes to give Oedipus the news from Delphi (87). The tragic action in Oedipus Tyrannus (as in other plays), taking place before the doors of the skene, foregrounds the situated nature not only of the tragic plot but [End Page 432] also of Greek tragedy as a performance medium.⁵⁶ In short, the skene is the focal point of the Oedipal nostos. The fact that Oedipus does not know he has come home to the house in which he was born, just as he does not know that Jocasta is his mother, only enhances the visual impact of his first entrance through the skene doors.

The play opens with the language of the state-as-parent when Oedipus enters and addresses the priest and citizens, who sit before him in supplication as “children [O tekna]” and “young offspring [nea trophe]” (1; cf. 142). When he becomes king of Thebes, Oedipus becomes the parent or, more accurately, the father of the Thebans, a father who vows to punish Laius’s murderer and to fight in defense of Laius as if he were his own father: hosperei toumou patros, / hupermachoumai (264–65). By virtue of these vows, Oedipus assumes the role of a son who is trying to assume the role of a father who can no longer fight in his own defense. The qualifying phrase “as if he were my father” only emphasizes Laius’s absence and Oedipus’s doomed attempt to take over his role. For Oedipus’s public, political, and juridical role as father/state fades from view in the course of discovering his private and decisive role as Jocasta’s son. In scenic terms, this transformation is signified by Oedipus’s exits and entrances through the skene, variously referred to as a stege, an oikos, and a domos. These terms seem to be used interchangeably, that is, apparently without discrete referents in the text. However, doma (with omega) is the preferred term for an ancestral house. It is used both of the House of Cadmus (29, 1226) and the House of Polybus (1395), as well as the Temple of Apollo (71).⁵⁷ In this way, the figural house of the father seems to be kept lexically and conceptually distinct from the space behind the skene, a distinction that reinforces the sense of the father’s house as always existing outside the bounds of space and time.

This reinforcement depends upon the son’s physical return to the house of the mother, which then brings the plague to destroy (phthinousa) the fertility of the crops, the cattle, and the women of Thebes (25–27; cf. 172–73). These three commodities constitute the wealth of the polis and of the House of Cadmus; the last in the list refers to offspring (tokoisi) in general but more exclusively to the production of sons, since these are the offspring that matter (as legitimate heirs). As the consequence of Laius’s murder (100–107), the plague takes the place of a political solution in Thebes. When Oedipus suggests that bribery is a probable motive for the murder, Creon, admitting that such suspicions were current at the time, says that the Sphinx [End Page 433] had caused the Thebans to neglect undertaking any investigation (124–31; cf. 566–67). These references to the insufficiency of a political or judicial inquiry, with the implication that such an inquiry is customary, emphasize the difference between the plague’s indiscriminate attack on all living things and a form of legal or state-sanctioned punishment limited to the perpetrator(s) of the crime. In more general terms, a political response subject to state control has been displaced by a physical force over which the state is powerless. The failure of its political institutions is thus the proximate cause of the destruction of Thebes and the House of Cadmus, while the plague is its immediate cause. But the plague, of course, is only the public version of Oedipus’s private ills and, like his sexual relationship with Jocasta, is a physically manifested consequence of Laius’s death. Together the plague and the incest demonstrate how the mother–son relationship is inimical to the father–son relationship as the effect of sociopolitical institutions and disciplines.

The house of the father, as the spatial metaphor for those institutions and disciplines, cannot be subject to physical destruction, at least not before it has been transformed into some other place. And so the House of Cadmus is transformed into the house of death, as the priest describes it in the opening scene (27–30):

         the fever-flaming god,
the most hateful plague, has swooped down on our city,
and because of it the House of Cadmus [doma Kadmeion]
    is emptied; while black
Hades grows rich with groans and lamentations.

The literal meaning of these lines is obvious: the plague is killing the Thebans. Described as an emptying out of the House of Cadmus and an enrichment of Hades, the plague creates a metaphorical equivalence between the two. Hades, like the House of Cadmus, is more than a spatial referent; it names its principal male inhabitant as well, one who “grows rich [ploutizetai]” while his counterpart, Cadmus, grows poor in the implied extension of the metaphor.⁵⁸ As an effect of this equivalence, what amounts to the death of the House of Cadmus is an architectural metaphor rooted in the absence/death of the father (Cadmus and Laius). But in this staged environment, the skene is the physical correlate of these spatial and architectural referents as the façade in front of which the priest makes his speech and to [End Page 434] which his architectural allusions implicitly point. In short, the skene is the visual manifestation of the House of Cadmus transformed into the house of Hades. This is the house to which Oedipus must return since, as a patricide, he can never return to the house of the father (i.e., to the House of Cadmus and Laius). He returns therefore to the house of Jocasta. Not only is she the principal inhabitant of the house behind the skene, but she is also the one who controls access to it: she instructs Oedipus and Creon to go inside the house in the midst of their quarrel (637), and the Chorus asks her to take Oedipus inside once Creon has left the stage (678).⁵⁹ No longer the wife of Laius, Jocasta inhabits this house in the role of Oedipus’s mother, for which her role as his wife is only a temporary and compensatory aberration. The transformation of the House of Cadmus into the house of death is thus part of the fantasy of death as a return to the mother, but now visually manifested in the tragic façade.

Oedipus’s last exit into the skene occurs just at the moment he is revealed to be the child of Jocasta and the murderer of Laius (1182–85):

Oh, oh! All has been made clear
O light of day [O fos], you are now the last I can look upon,
I who was born from, and lived with,
And killed those I should not have.

Oedipus’s address to the “last light” he will look upon emphasizes the darkness of the house he is about to enter and the blindness that will soon make his life like death. The deathlike atmosphere of the mother’s house has already been expressed in Tiresias’s vow to “hide in silence [ego sigei stego]” (341) the answers to the questions Oedipus asks him about Laius’s murder. Here the verb stego (meaning “to hide” or “to cover”) points to the stege as the place where those answers are already hidden in silence, namely, the place where Oedipus was born and now sleeps with Jocasta. At the end of the play, when the Messenger comes to announce Jocasta’s suicide and the blinding of Oedipus, he will be explicit about what the skene hides (1223–30):

O you who are especially honored in this land
What deeds you will hear of, what things you will see, what
Grief you will feel, if you as native Thebans [eggenos]
Feel respect for [entrepesthe] the House of Labdacus.
I think that neither the Ister nor the Phasis River [End Page 435]
Can wash and purify this house [tende ten stegen]
Of the evil things it hides [keuthei], and will soon bring into the light [eis to fos fanei]
Whether they were done willingly or unwillingly.

The blinded Oedipus will soon enter through the skene doors as visual proof of the evils hidden within. But it is the house itself that both hides these evil things and will bring them “into the light.” In this passage, the House of Labdacus refers once again to the figural house of the father, to the house that can still command the respect of native-born Theban elders. Conversely, the stege, which cannot be washed clean or purified, is the personified agent of concealment and revelation singled out by the emphatic use of the demonstrative pronoun (tende).⁶⁰ This deictic reference to the stege focuses attention on the crucial relationship between knowing and seeing (or not seeing) in the Oedipus precisely because we cannot see the hidden space to which it points. While this problematic is embodied in the figures of the blind Tiresias and the self-blinded Oedipus, it is most conspicuous in the always visible façade of the skene behind which lies the private space of Jocasta and Oedipus, the hiding place of the “terrible deeds [deina drasas]” (1327) committed by son and mother.⁶¹

After Jocasta makes her final exit into the skene (1072), the Messenger reports that she ran to the bedroom, hurled herself on her marriage bed—numphika leche (1242–43)—and committed suicide by hanging.⁶² Oedipus’s entrance onto this scene is described with a mixture of sexual and architectural metaphors (1255–62):

He moved wildly about asking us to give him a sword,
In search of a wife who is no wife, and a mother’s
Double field [diplen arouran] that begot himself and his children.
Some divinity led him on in his raging;
For it was none of us who stood near him.
Shouting terribly, as though someone beckoned him,
He rushed upon the double doors [pulais diplais],
Wrenched the hollow bolts from their foundations, and burst in on the stege.

The “double field” of Jocasta’s womb is explicitly equated with the “double doors” that Oedipus must break open in order to enter the room, and the transgressive relationship of mother and son is laid open, so to speak, in [End Page 436] the double metaphor of fields and doors.⁶³ In this equation, Jocasta’s role as wife is subsumed under her double role as mother; “a wife who is no wife,” she is a mother twice over—an emphasis effected by means of the spatial lexicon of the stage. The description of this internal scene turns the play inside out so that the double doors leading to the scene of incest are made visible in the double doors of the skene. The Messenger’s speech is delivered in front of the skene doors, to which he implicitly points when he makes reference to the pulais diplais within. Behind all these doors lies the body of Jocasta, who, like Anticlea in the Odyssey, has died as the result of her son’s homecoming. Of course, Anticlea died because Odysseus did not come home in time, while Jocasta dies because Oedipus did, but this difference only masks the essential similarity between the two nostos plots. The Odyssey provides a model of homecoming in which the hero must be recognized as a mother’s son, with his return prefigured as a kind of death. In both cases, the mother’s presence in a house of death signifies nostos in its elemental form, namely, as the son’s return to the mother.

At the end of Oedipus Tyrannus, Creon, echoing Jocasta, tells Oedipus to “go inside the house [ithi steges eso]” (1515; cf. 1429), to which Oedipus replies that he must obey, but only on the condition that Creon make him an outcast, or apoikos, from the land of Thebes: ges m’ hopos pempseis apoikon (1518). This is the same punishment—exile—that Oedipus had decreed for accomplices to Laius’s murder when he commanded the Thebans to drive such persons from their homes (ap’ oikon [241]).⁶⁴ Apoikos usually refers to a colonist or settler, but it literally means someone who is away from his home or household (apo + oikos). It is not the technical term applied to exile as the penalty for homicide, which is fuge (literally “flight”); these “exiles” are called fugades, the term Oedipus uses at 309.⁶⁵ The technical term is also used when Oedipus expresses his fear that Creon is plotting his death or exile in a coup d’état (olethron e fugen ek tesde ges). Thus, while Sophocles clearly knows the technical term for exiled political plotters and homicides, he does not use it in reference to Oedipus’s self-imposed banishment (1340–46 and 1410–12). The Messenger first refers to that banishment when he warns the Chorus of the blind Oedipus’s imminent exit from the skene (1287–91):

He is shouting for someone to unbar the bolts [kleithra] and reveal him
To all the sons of Cadmus, his father’s killer,
His mother’s—it is unholy for me to say, [End Page 437]
He says that he will cast himself out of the land [ek chthonos], and no longer
Remain as a curse upon the house [domois].

In these lines, Oedipus’s vow to cast himself out of the land (chthon) is more narrowly localized when he shouts for someone to unbar the bolted doors of the skene. His self-imposed exile is thus not simply the fulfillment of his edict as a form of punishment. It is the fulfillment of his desire to escape or be liberated from the house of the mother (the oikos) so that no curse remains on the house of the father. The use of chthon for “land” here (instead of ge, as at 1518) clearly associates the space behind the skene with the Underworld and its chthonic deities; it is the funereal house of the mother for whose death Oedipus is unwittingly responsible. Does the audience hear him shouting offstage while the Messenger is speaking? This is unlikely.⁶⁶ Rather, the Messenger’s report of that shouting emphasizes the fact that the skene blocks the audience’s ability to both see and hear. The Messenger serves as a mediator between the action purportedly taking place behind the skene and that which takes place in front of it. This act of mediation exemplifies how the skene represents public life as the obligation to hear and see what goes on in front of it in contrast to private life, represented as the inability to see and hear what goes on behind it.

In the internal world of the plot, the blindness that Oedipus inflicts upon himself with his mother’s brooches is the most graphic expression of the maternal/funereal associations of the space behind the skene, for his self-mutilation expresses his desire not to see his dead parents in Hades when he dies (1369–86). He does not know with what eyes he can look upon them: ouk oid’ ommasin poiois blepon (1371). When he expresses the desire to make himself deaf as well, he does so by associating his body (demas) with his house (domos).⁶⁷ At 1388 the verb meaning “to shut up” (apokleio) is related to the noun meaning “bolts” (kleithra) at 1287, indicating that whereas Oedipus had wanted to unbolt his house, he now wants to put bolts on his body: “If there were a means of blocking up my ears / I would not have held back from shutting up [apokleisai] my miserable body [demas], / So that I might be both blind and hear nothing” (1387–89). Oedipus would make his miserable body a locus of sense deprivation, a place in which both seeing and hearing are “blocked up.” By extension, this metaphor makes the domos, whose doors Oedipus wishes to unbolt, a place where seeing and [End Page 438] hearing are blocked, most conspicuously from the audience in the theater. Perhaps Oedipus’s body is likened to the domos because both are places where Oedipus “lived” as the child of Laius and Jocasta. “Shutting up [his] body” is equivalent to remaining in the house of the mother (as a thematic function of the plot) or behind the skene (as a visual function of the set). But the skene must be unbolted, the doors opened, in order for the audience to see and hear Oedipus, that is, in order to be fully engaged spectators and auditors (at least in principle). Oedipus need not be able to see, but he must be able to speak and hear in order to continue his role as a dramatis persona. Why else has he been prevented from puncturing his ears with Jocasta’s brooches? The answer to this gruesome question is that Oedipus cannot block off his hearing and still participate in the dialogue of the play’s final scenes; only after his last exit into the skene will there be nothing more for him to hear. Aristotle regarded hearing as more necessary than seeing (opsis) for the audience’s appreciation of a tragedy, and he illustrates this point with reference to Oedipus Tyrannus: “For even without seeing how the plot is arranged [onstage], it is possible for one who hears the sequence of events to both shudder with fear and feel pity from what happens in the plot. These are the very things that someone who hears the Oedipus story (or plot) would experience” (Poetics 1453b1–7).⁶⁸ Sophocles seems to anticipate Aristotle’s audiophilia when he introduces but then denies Oedipus’s desire to make himself deaf. My point, however, is that Oedipus’s blindness and desired deafness doubly thematize the deathlike darkness and silence of the house of Jocasta, relative to which the spectator/auditor is positioned.⁶⁹

Oedipus’s loss of sight and desired loss of hearing are also part of the play’s discourse of banishment or exile, as these are coextensive with his desire to leave his house and homeland. He asks Creon to drive him out of the land as quickly as possible and to send him where he will be “greeted by no one [fanoumai medenos prosegoros]” (1437). To be an exile is to endure one’s forced removal from the sites of paternal power and prerogative, to be, in effect, a nobody. Oedipus invokes this loss in his edict of exile when he refers to his power and throne (krate te kai thronous) and to the line of descent from Laius through Agenor to Labdacus (236–37, 266–68). These references to his kingship both authorize Oedipus to issue the edict of exile and represent what he stands to lose as its object. But Oedipus’s self-imposed flight from Thebes also represents an anti-nostos that ironically reenacts and reverses his flight from Corinth (which he had believed to be his home). In spatial [End Page 439] terms, the Oedipal plot is a series of comings and goings to which “homecoming” and “exile” (as a state-mandated punishment) can only be applied as euphemisms. Their effect is to control the map of Oedipus’s wanderings by making them part of a rational narrative.

Oedipus’s anti-nostos finally ends in his divinely orchestrated death, as presented many years later in Sophocles’ posthumously produced Oedipus at Colonus (401 B.C.E.). In that play, argues Wiles, Oedipus’s “final exit towards his secret tomb is an exit in to the skene,” for “Sophocles is able to use the skene in a flexible way, allowing the audience to envisage an outdoor space behind the skene, because he is working within a performance tradition accustomed to using the skene to symbolize the House of Hades, the place of darkness. The chorus pray to the ‘unseen goddess’ and to the ‘chthonic goddesses,’ imbuing the skene with female associations appropriate to the Semnai and to Demeter.”⁷⁰ Although the claim that Oedipus makes his final exit through the skene doors is subject to debate (there being nothing to preclude his exiting through one of the side entrances, or eisodoi), there is some internal evidence to support Wiles’s assertion. Just prior to his final exit in the Colonus (1549), Oedipus makes an address to the last light he will look upon (O fos), similar to the one he makes in the Tyrannus (1183) just before he exits through the skene to discover Jocasta’s suicide (O fos). Because there can be no doubt that this address in the Tyrannus precedes Oedipus’s exit through the skene, we can speculate with some assurance (though not with absolute certainty) that it also precedes his last exit through the skene in the Colonus.

In the Colonus (as in Sophocles’ Philoctetes) the skene represents a natural façade rather than a man-made one. There is no reference in the play to a palace or any other built structure. As a result, the plot advances by means of an architectural tour de force. By convention and in practice, the theatrical scene building with its central doors is a man-made façade leading into a man-made space; in the Colonus, however, that façade is “made up,” so to speak, as the entrance into a space of nature, although the visual means of that transformation are uncertain.⁷¹ The play also engages in a sort of verbal camouflage of the visual route by which Oedipus goes to his mysterious death. What is certain is that the use of the skene as a mimesis of nature only intensifies its essentially architectural (man-made) form. Oedipus’s final exit into the skene in the Colonus, then, suggests that the tragic hero’s death is always associated with a domestic space, even—perhaps [End Page 440] especially—if he has tried (like Oedipus) to escape it.⁷² Thus Oedipus’s anti-nostos is emblematic of the ambivalence inherent in the idea of nostos as it begins in epic and ends in tragedy.

The meaning of Greek tragedy is generated out of a desire to see behind its façade, that is, to see behind the skene. Freud’s fascination with Oedipus—and with Oedipus Tyrannus as an object lesson in the way “we may all of us well seek to close our eyes to the scenes of our childhood”⁷³—points to the role played by the tragic skene in answering to that desire. And we can extend Freud’s insight to the social, political, and architectural aspects of the ancient theater wherein the self-blinded Oedipus becomes the symbol of a state necessarily defined in opposition to domestic or private life and of a state-sponsored entertainment (tragedy) aimed at keeping that life behind the scenes. As part of a patriarchal system, Greek tragedy worked to validate the figural and transcendent house of the father, in opposition to the private household of wives and mothers, as the space into and out of which the tragic heroes exited and entered. The skene is consequently the source of the extreme spatial relativity of the terms “exit” and “enter” in Greek theater. While this relativity is necessary to all contiguous spatial configurations, its dramatic form makes visible the interplay of desire and denial that characterizes the Greek discourse of nostos. The hero’s exit through the skene marks his exit from both the scene of the tragic spectacle and the power of public acclaim and scrutiny.

What then are the social, political, and ideological forces that in subsequent centuries have lifted the façade of the ancient skene to reveal the domestic scene within? As a distinctly European genre, domestic tragedy, with its intimate views of the interior of the bourgeois household, is founded on this spatial inversion. No longer a distant or disavowed destination, the inside of the domos helps to define the bourgeois family as always already at home and in the house. No matter how one explains this dramatization of private life, the spatial transformation upon which it depends illustrates how the architectural history of the dramatic stage is part of the political history of domestic life.

Karen Bassi, Associate Professor of Classics and Pre- and Early-Modern Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of Acting Like Men: Gender, Drama, and Nostalgia in Ancient Greece (1998). Her current work concerns the concept of home in ancient Greece and the trope of the eyewitness in Greek historiography.

Notes

* I wish to thank Harry Berger, Jr., Julie Carlson, Charles Chiasson, Leslie Kurke, Deborah Lyons, Dolores Pratt, and Yopie Prins for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

1. See also Aristotle’s comparison of the epic and tragic genres at Poetics 1449b16–20.

2. Cf. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London, 1972 [1969]), 12, on the notion of “continuous history.”

3. The indebtedness of Greek lyric poetry to Homeric themes and the Homeric lexicon attests to the widespread dissemination of the epics: “Tyrtaeus sang of political and military themes in elegies no less ‘Homeric’ than those of his contemporary Callinus—a measure of the extent to which the Ionian epics had by now [7th c. B.C.E.] created among the Greeks a cultural unity which transcended dialect and ethnic rivalry”; Early Greek Poetry, ed. P. E. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox, Vol. 1, Pt. 1 of The Cambridge History of Classical Literature (Cambridge, 1989 [1985]), 89. Many states in antiquity claimed to be the birthplace of Homer. For a late and parodic example, see Heliodorus An Ephesian Tale 14, where Kalasiris claims that Homer is an Egyptian by birth.

4. Utopias are often places where family ties are severed. According to Tomas Hägg, Iambulus (100 B.C.E.) “tells of the utopian life on a group of islands in the Indian Ocean near the equator . . . where the inhabitants live without family ties in an almost communistic labour-sharing society”; The Novel in Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983), 117.

5. See Karen Bassi, Acting Like Men: Gender, Drama and Nostalgia in Ancient Greece (Ann Arbor, 1998), chap. 2.

6. The Sirens (12.165–200) pose a double threat. On the one hand, they threaten to forestall the hero’s nostos with their “honey-voiced song [meligerus]” (12.187). On the other hand, they threaten his life. These enchantresses represent the isomorphism between staying in one place (marked as feminine) and death. As Charles Segal notes, in Singers, Heroes, and Gods in the Odyssey (Ithaca, 1994), “Were he to heed [their song], he, too, would be frozen into a sterile past, one of those rotting skeletons on the island. Thus his task is not to listen but to ‘pass by’” (102). Segal calls the Sirens’ song a perversion of “true heroic song,” the task of which is to immortalize the fame (kleos) of the heroes (104–6). As a perversion of or substitute for true heroic song, the Sirens’ song also casts suspicion on the efficacy of heroic kleos, which, as a report of heroic action, is always after the fact. In other words, the desire to preserve past events is always already an admission of their ephemerality.

7. See Teresa de Lauretis, “Desire in Narrative,” in Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington, 1984), 103–57, esp. 109. Cf. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 2d ed., trans. Laurence Scott (Austin and London, 1968 [1958]).

8. See Douglas Frame, The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic (New Haven and London, 1978), esp. chap. 3, on the return of Odysseus. See also Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods, esp. chaps. 2, 3, and 4.

9. See, for example, Sheila Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey (Princeton, 1987), 14 n. 23; and Frederick Ahl and Hanna M. Roisman, The Odyssey Re-Formed (Ithaca, 1996), 29.

10. See Frame, Myth of Return, chap. 3, esp. 37, where his analysis of the theme of return entails an association of nostos (taken to mean a return from death) with nous or noos (thought). In this formulation, the physical return of the hero is coextensive with his return to the thoughts of others.

11. Alfred Heubeck and Arie Hoekstra, A Commentary on Homer’s Odyssey, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1989), 2: 75.

12. On this “intermezzo,” see ibid., 2: 97. Long believed to have been an interpolation or the work of the last “editor” of the Odyssey, it is now accepted as authentic. (Appeals to interpolation generally validate unity and consistency as guarantors of the superior textual tradition.) In addition to its importance as a delaying technique, the interlude also alludes to the relationship between sleep and death: the verb heudein is used at 11.331 (cf. 11.374), but Odysseus refers to sleep as hupnos at 11.379, Hupnos and Hades being twin brothers in the mythological tradition (Iliad 14.231); here the story of the sojourn in Hades is made an implicit substitute for sleep.

The phrase “in the palace [en megaroi]” is somewhat ambiguously placed in line 376. Most obviously, it correlates with the same phrase in line 375 and means that, although it is not time to sleep in the palace, it is time to tell stories in the palace. But sufferings in this megaron can also refer to those in the megaron of Hades and to the story of Agamemnon, who tells Odysseus what happened to him at the hands of Clytemnestra eni megaro at 11.420. In any event, the repeated reference to a domestic space and the possibility of sufferings in that place prefigure those that Odysseus will face in his own megaron.

13. Sparta is described at Od. 4.37–75; the Phaeacian court at 7.81–132.

14. Odysseus uses the same phrase when he leaves off the Catalogue of Women at Od. 11.328 as the narrator does when he introduces the Catalogue of Ships at Il. 2.488: “I could not tell the whole number or name them all.”

On catalogues in ancient Greek literature, see O. K. Armayor, “Herodotus’ Catalogues of the Persian Empire in the Light of the Monuments and the Greek Literary Tradition,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 108 (1978): 1–9; C. R. Beye, “Homeric Battle Narrative and Catalogues,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 68 (1964): 345–73; and M. W. Edwards, “The Structure of Homeric Catalogues,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 110 (1980b): 81–105. The Catalogue in the Nekyia has seemed to some scholars to be “forced,” “artificial,” “inauthentic,” and out of place. See the overview of Heubeck and Hoekstra, Homer’s Odyssey, 2: 91.

15. On the andron, see Michael H. Jameson, “Domestic Space in the Greek City–State,” in Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Study, ed. Susan Kent (Cambridge, 1990), 92–113, esp. 99–100; and “Private Space and the Greek City,” in The Greek City: From Homer to Alexander, ed. Oswyn Murray and Simon Price (Oxford, 1990), 171–95, esp. 188–90. The Athenian house seems to have included both men’s living quarters (andronitis) and women’s living quarters (gunaikonitis), as in the fourth-century description of Euphiletus’s house by Lysias (1.9). These quarters were not restricted to either gender, however; see Gareth Morgan, “Euphiletos’ House: Lysias I,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 112 (1982): 115–23. Only the andron—perhaps an aristocratic institution—marked out an exclusively male space, or at least one from which women were excluded in principle, if not in fact. As a room in which social interaction with men outside the family probably took place, the exclusion from it of the women of the family would have been appropriate. At the same time, a room that excluded females supports the notion that the rest of the house was defined by their presence. Jameson (“Private Space,” 191) concludes: “The andron was an enclave within the largely female space of the private house where representatives of other oikoi were admitted.” See also Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Hestia–Hermes: The Religious Expression of Space and Movement in Ancient Greece,” in Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London and Boston, 1983 [1965]), 127–75.

16. Heubeck and Hoekstra, Homer’s Odyssey, 2: 81. Cf. Segal, Singers, Heroes, and Gods, 40–41.

17. Achilles’ glorious death is described in the so-called Second Nekyia at Odyssey 24.36–97, where the presence of his mother, Thetis, is conspicuous. On the debates regarding the “authenticity” of this passage, see Heubeck and Hoekstra, Homer’s Odyssey, 3: 356–58.

18. See ibid., 2: 88, on lines 181–203.

19. The oldest and best-known version of the Demeter myth is found in the “Homeric Hymn to Demeter,” which probably dates from the archaic period. The myth represents Persephone’s return to Demeter from the realm of Hades as a restoration of fertility and life. On the “Hymn,” see The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays, ed. Helene P. Foley (Princeton, 1993).

20. See André Green, The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, 1979 [1969]), 196–97.

21. Heubeck and Hoekstra, Homer’s Odyssey, 2: 91. It can also be noted that none of the women mentioned in the Catalogue speaks for herself, a silence that gives pride of place to the mother as the one woman with a first-person voice in Hades.

22. Ibid., 2: 93–94.

23. See Od. 5.42; 7.223; 14.319; 15.129; 17.539; and 23.259.

24. See David Wiles, Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning (Cambridge, 1997), 161 and n. 5; and Ruth Padel, “Making Space Speak,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, 1990), 336–65, esp. 348–49. See also Margarete Bieber, The History of the Greek and Roman Theater (Princeton, 1961), 64–65, on the types of dwellings represented by the skene in the extant corpus of Greek drama.

25. The technical terms associated with the roof of the skene are episkenion (for a building on the roof) and distegia (for an upper story), although it is uncertain when these terms first came into use. Throughout the fifth century, and especially in the plays of Euripides, the roof of the skene was where the dei ex machina seem to have alighted; see Bieber, Greek and Roman Theater, 67 and 76–77; see also Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, 180–83. Given the technical meaning of distegia and the importance of the roof as a theatrical element, references to the skene as a stege in a play are arguably metatheatrical.

26. Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, 161. On the architecture of the ancient Greek theater and the skene in particular, see Bieber, Greek and Roman Theater, 59–72.

27. Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, 92.

28. See John J. Winkler, “The Ephebes Song: Tragoidia and Polis,” Representations 11 (1985): 26–62. Winkler argues that, whether or not women were in the audience, the “notional” spectator in the Theater of Dionysus is male.

29. Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, 84; see chap. 2 more generally for his assessment of the architectural evidence. Padel (“Making Space Speak,” 344) also notes that “the two important interiors spectators had to imagine for themselves, women and house, were in Greek societies (as in others) bound closely together in male perceptions.”

30. See David Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1991), 148–70.

31. This is the assumption of Padel in “Making Space Speak,” 341.

32. Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, 161; and see chap. 2 for a discussion of the archaeology of the Theater of Dionysus. See also Bieber, Greek and Roman Theater, 57–60.

33. See Oliver Taplin, Stagecraft of Aeschylus: The Dramatic Use of Exits and Entrances in Greek Tragedy (Oxford, 1977), 452–59. A skene is not easily attested for what are believed to be the earliest extant tragedies by Aeschylus (i.e., Suppliants, Seven Against Thebes, Persians, and Prometheus Bound), but Taplin offers a well-supported argument that the three works of the Oresteia were probably “among the first ever to be played before a skene” (458). Although Taplin suggestively concludes that the introduction of the skene emphasizes the significance of the house in the “poetry and imagery of the plays” (mentioning several relevant passages from the Agamemnon [459]), he does not speculate about the basis for the innovation except in terms of Aeschylus’s “adaptability and inventiveness as a dramatic artist” (458). For my purposes, the reference to the door of the skene as the “gates of Hades” by Cassandra at Agamemnon 1291 (also mentioned by Taplin) is significant, appearing as it does in this context of the skene’s earliest well-attested use. See also Oliver Taplin, “Aeschylean Silences and Silences in Aeschylus,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 76 (1972): 66–69, where he argues that the opening scene of the lost Aeschylean Myrmidons is set in the interior of Achilles’ tent. This would mean that before the introduction of the skene, plays may have been set in interior spaces, which would make our need to explain the introduction and dominance of the skene as a device that conceals interior scenes even more immediate. Cf. Wolfgang Kullman, “Die poetische Funktion des Palastes des Odysseus in der Odyssee,” in The Homeric Oikos, ed. Machi Paisi-Apostolopoulou (Ithaca, 1990), 41–55, esp. 52.

On the early Aeschylean context of the skene, see also Mark Griffith, Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound (Cambridge, 1983), 30–31. Cf. Bieber (Greek and Roman Theater, 60): “In the beginning the skene was a mere adjunct to the area of action. But it became more and more important when the importance of the chorus parts diminished.” According to this logic, a focus on the actions of individual dramatis personae was accompanied by the skene’s transformation “from a temporary building, a tent or log cabin, to a permanent stone building, beginning in the period of the peace of Nicias (421–415).” This parallel development seems self-evident, but there is no necessary correspondence between a greater emphasis on the dramatis personae and the development of a permanent skene. The hypothesis that it was developed precisely to accommodate the return and murder of Agamemnon in the Agamemnon is compelling, however.

34. For differing views of this hypothesis, see Richard Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City–State (Oxford, 1994); and Mark Griffith, “Brilliant Dynasts: Power and Politics in the Oresteia,” Classical Antiquity 14 (1995): 63–129. Cf. Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, 1994), whose discussion of early modern domestic tragedy introduces the concept of “political patriarchalism, which in the late sixteenth century first analogized the household’s structures of authority with those of the state and then adapted domestic strictures to impose political obligation. The political branch cannibalized domestic ideology in order to advance the doctrine of royal absolutism” (11). As I will argue, Athenian tragedy developed in a similar political environment.

35. On the use of the eccyclema, see Wiles (Tragedy in Athens, 162–65), who declares that “the eccyclema should not be conceived as revealing a hidden interior beyond and outside the public circle, but as restoring the wholeness symbolized by the circular dancing of the ten democratic tribes. To put the matter another way, the erection of the skene was predicated upon the possibility of its removal” (162). This understanding of the skene is suggestive, but what the eccyclema emphasizes is perhaps more the presence of the skene than the possibility of its removal. See also Bieber, Greek and Roman Theater, 76.

36. See Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality (New York and London, 1996), on Freud’s notion of disavowal as “a process which allows both denial and acknowledgment to operate simultaneously” (33).

37. Freud was familiar with Aristotle’s De divinatione per somnum, to which he refers in the first chapter of the Interpretation of Dreams. It should perhaps be stressed that when he refers to the myth of Oedipus he means the version preserved in Sophocles’ play.

38. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology (New York, 1963), 206–31. See also Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge, MA, 1981), esp. chaps. 2 and 7.

39. Pietro Pucci, Oedipus and the Fabrication of the Father: Oedipus Tyrannus in Modern Criticism and Philosophy (Baltimore, 1992).

40. See, for example, Poetics 1452a24–26 and 1460a27–31, where mention is made of Oedipus’s mother in the context of the discussion of peripeteia or reversal of the situation, and the murder of Laius is mentioned in the context of what is alogos or irrational in the structure of the plot, respectively. For a summary of Aristotle’s references to the Oedipus Tyrannus, see The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, ed. Sir Richard Jebb (Cambridge, 1958), xvi–xvii; and Charles Segal, Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge, Twayne’s Masterwork Studies 108 (New York, 1993), 19–20.

41. Cf. Pucci, Oedipus and the Fabrication of the Father: “It is a fact that most humanist and academic critics have paid little attention to the specific crimes into which Oedipus unwittingly falls. . . . Indeed, for many critics the rejection of the psychoanalytic reading of the play has meant a relative indifference to the specific nature of Oedipus’s transgression of the family’s bonds” (2); and Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 84–258: “In the major genres the private life of an individualized person was only externally and inadequately arrayed, and, therefore, in forms that were inorganic and formalistic, either public and bureaucratic or public and rhetorical” (110).

42. Hesiod Theogony 156–60, 459–62, 174–82, 466–506.

43. In Oedipus Tyrannus Jocasta repeats the oracle from Apollo: “I will not say / That it was from Pheobus himself, but from one of his servants, / And it said that Laius would die at the hands of his child, / A child who would be born from me and that man” (711–14). By speaking the words of the oracle and displacing its authority, Jocasta implicates herself in the prophecy and, as a consequence, in those well-known stories of fathers who died as the result of a mother–son plot.

44. The problem of paternity is overtly expressed in Attic comedy, such as Lysistrata, where mothers testify to false births or falsify the identities of their children’s fathers. On the female as the source of the child’s physical or bodily dispositions, as opposed to mental capacities, see G. E. R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore, and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1983); and Elizabeth Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 108–31. On the institution of male citizenship in Athens, see Cynthia Patterson, Pericles’ Citizenship Law of 451–50 B.C. (Salem, 1981).

45. Cf. Pucci, Oedipus and the Fabrication of the Father, 118; and Bassi, Acting Like Men, chap. 5.

46. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), 36. Anderson makes his claims for the modern nation–state, but the conditions he cites here as leading to the “origins of nationalism” as a modern phenomenon were arguably in place in fifth-century Athens. On Athenian “civic ideology,” see Simon Goldhill, “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” in Winkler and Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do with Dionysos?, 97–129.

47. There is corroborating evidence that such war orphans were indeed supported, if not raised, by the state; see Goldhill, “Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” 101–6. Cf. W. K. Lacey, The Family in Classical Greece (Ithaca, 1968), 73–99, on the political and economic links between the household or oikos and the city. The significance of Pericles’ speech does not depend on its historical veracity, however, but on the fact that Thucydides presents it as emblematic of Athenian values during the fifth century.

48. Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens (Baltimore and London, 1990), 40. Golden also remarks here, “On the ideological level, the land of Attica is sometimes described as mother, the political community as mother or (more frequently) father of all Athenians.” Whether the state is referred to as a mother or a father, the political appropriation of the rights and responsibilities (and the lexicon) of parenthood essentially negates the mother’s role as the arbiter of private or domestic life.

49. See Goldhill, “Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” 101–6; and Sir Arthur Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1988 [1968]), 59, 67, and 268, with notes.

50. In “The Structural Study of Myth,” Lévi-Strauss makes no mention of the return of the hero as a significant feature of the Oedipus myth. The importance of the act of returning home is also commonly elided in the abstract and utopian concept of the “spiritual” return of the hero; see Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1954 [1949]); and Frame, Myth of Return.

51. Golden, Children and Childhood, 105–6. On “antipsychological” interpretations of Oedipus Tyrannus, see Charles Segal, “Time and Knowledge in the Tragedy of Oedipus,” in Sophocles’ Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 138–60, esp. 140.

52. Soph. OT 390–98. See Segal, “Freud, Language, and the Unconscious,” in Sophocles’ Tragic World, 161–79, esp. 171–72.

53. Cf. Lévi-Strauss (“Structural Study of Myth,” 179) on what he calls the “overrating of blood relations.”

54. The image of the crossroads is figured as a symbol of the female genitalia; see Pucci, Oedipus and the Fabrication of the Father, 118 and n. 27. See also Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Vol. 5 of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York, 1965), 433–35. Freud interprets dreams about landscapes as “disguised dreams of sexual intercourse with the dreamer’s mother” (433). This symbolic understanding of the crossroads becomes particularly suggestive when it represents a stopping point on Oedipus’s nostos as well as the scene of competition between father and son.

55. This is the standard understanding of Oedipus’s entrance and is supported by the priest’s statement at line 32 that he and his followers have come as suppliants to Oedipus’s “hearth [ephestioi].” See Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, 178.

56. Cf. Wiles (Tragedy in Athens, 66), who argues that “in tragedy the focus was not the hypothetical stage but the centre point of the orchestra.” The focal point of the performance space oscillated, however, between orchestra and skene, that is, between the performances of choral odes and episodes.

57. In the Iliad, doma is often modified by the adjective patroion, meaning “paternal,” at 21.44, and it is also used for the houses of the gods at 2.13. In Oedipus Tyrannus doma is used for the stage house of Oedipus by the Chorus (531) and by the Corinthian Messenger (925). In these examples, however, the term is used by nonelite speakers referring to distinguished dwelling places. Oedipus uses it to refer to the internal stage house when he asks Jocasta, “Why have you called me here from the house [tonde domaton]?” (951). But the effect of its usage here is to put pressure on the stability of the ancestral or paternal house (of both Labdacus and Polybus) at the moment when Jocasta has called Oedipus out to give him the news of Polybus’s death. In other words, Oedipus gestures toward the ancestral doma just when its very meaning is in question. The Messenger, who refers to the House of Labdacus as a doma at 1226, uses stege two lines later to indicate more directly the interior of the skene from which the blinded Oedipus will soon exit. Likewise, while the Chorus refers to the house from which Oedipus enters at 531 as a doma, Oedipus refers to it as “my” stege (emas stegas) at 533 when he accuses Creon of being Laius’s murderer and asks how he has the audacity to come to his (Oedipus’s) house. In general, the domestic lexicon of the play seems to distinguish between the doma as the figural house of the father and the stege as the house behind the façade of the skene. It also seems to be the case that here and in Greek generally oikos refers to the mundane, physical household overseen by women. For example, in Semonides’ infamous seventh-century B.C.E. poem about the various types of women in the world, the horse–woman does not even throw the filth out of the oikos; Iambi et Elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, Vol. 2, ed. M. L. West (Oxford, 1971/72), 99–104.

58. Hades is also euphemistically called Plouton, the “wealth giver.”

59. Jocasta tells Oedipus to go into the oikos and Creon to go into the stege at 637: ouk ei su t’ oikous su te, Kreon, kata stegas. Cf. Jebb, ed., Oedipus Tyrannus, ad locum, who comments that in this passage domos refers to the king’s palace, while stege refers to the house of Creon, “who is not supposed to be an inmate of the palace.” The Chorus uses domos in requesting that Jocasta take Oedipus inside at 678. Cf. Aeschylus Agamemnon 905–11, where Clytemnestra forces Agamemnon to walk on purple tapestries as he enters the doma to meet his death.

60. The form of the demonstrative pronoun used in this case (hode) is equivalent to the Latin hic and “points with emphasis to an object in the immediate (actual or mental) vicinity of the speaker, or to something just noticed. In drama it announces the approach of a new actor”; Herbert Weir Smyth, Greek Grammar, rev. Gordon M. Messing (Cambridge, MA, 1956), 1241.

61. See Froma I. Zeitlin, “The Artful Eye: Vision, Ecphrasis and Spectacle in Euripidean Theatre,” in Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, ed. Simon Goldhill and Robin Osborne (Cambridge, 1994), 138–97, esp. 185–88, for a relevant and enlightening discussion of Oedipus’s confinement to and entrance from the house in Euripides’ Phoenissae, where the house is “implicitly a house of Hades” (188). See also Segal, “Time and Knowledge,” 142–45.

62. See Nicole Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge, MA, 1987 [1985]), on the deaths of women in Greek tragedy.

63. Doublings are common in the play, occurring eleven times. For example, Jocasta asks about the double meaning (dunamin diplen) of the Corinthian Messenger’s report at 938 and laments her double bed (eunas diplous) at 1249, while the Chorus comments on Oedipus’s double evils (dipla kaka) at 1320 (cf. 1280–81).

64. See Dracon’s Law on Homicide (621/0 B.C.E.), in Charles W. Fornara, Archaic Times to the End of the Peloponnesian War, Vol. 1 of Translated Documents of Greece and Rome, ed. E. Badian and Robert K. Sherk (Baltimore, 1977): “Even if without premeditation [someone kills someone, he shall be exiled]” (18).

65. Cf. OT 468, 623, and 823–24.

66. Such shouts would obviously interfere with the Messenger’s ability to be heard by the audience. Lowell Edmunds, in Theatrical Space and Historical Place in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (Lanham, MD, 1996), discusses Antigone’s reference to the sound of the nightingales singing in the grove of the Eumenides in the Colonus (42).

67. I am not relying on the fact that the audience would hear an echo of domos in demas, although “words similar in sound are drawn together in meaning,” as Roman Jakobson noted in “Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA, 1960), 350–77; quotation from 371. Jakobson’s formulation relies on the proximity of the words in question, however.

68. On opsis in the Poetics, see my introduction to Acting Like Men; and Edmunds, Theatrical Space, 15–20.

69. On the metatheatrical effect of Oedipus’s blindness in the Colonus, see Edmunds, Theatrical Space, 39ff.

70. Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, 146, 166. Cf. Froma I. Zeitlin, “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama,” in Winkler and Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do with Dionysos?, 63–96; and Padel, “Making Space Speak,” 346 (both of which are discussed by Wiles in Tragedy in Athens, 166–68). See also Edmunds, Theatrical Space, 76–77.

71. As Edmunds notes (Theatrical Space, 39), “The facade of the wooden stage building (skene) in front of the Long Hall may or may not have had painted scenery representing the grove of the Eumenides; it had an opening into the interior of the grove.”

72. See Wiles, Tragedy in Athens, 166; see also 164, for his discussion of Sophocles Ajax 859–65, where Ajax calls on the light of the sun (Ō fengos) at 860, just before his final exit.

73. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 297.