In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (390-415), Apollo tells the Thebans that the safety of their city depends upon gaining control over the deposed king they expelled from the city. Though he still lives, Oedipus is already depicted as a numinous figure whose blessings and curses carry supernatural power, and whose approaching death sets in motion a conflict over possession of his relics. Sophocles recounts the establishment of the Attic cult at Kolonos, and makes the embittered Oedipus resolve never to be of aid to Thebes, but instead vow that if the Athenians protect him, they will gain a “great savior for the city” (459-60). Because of his horrific (though involuntary) crimes against his mother and father, Oedipus was traditionally associated with the Erinyes, chthonian spirits who represent the anger of the dead. Therefore, in the context of rivalry between Athens and Thebes, it is not surprising that claims to the Theban hero were put forward in Kolonos, a deme that possessed a venerable cult of the Erinyes under the euphemistic names of Eumenides (Kindly Ones) or Semnai Theai (Revered Goddesses). Oedipus came as a wanderer and suppliant of the goddesses, and it was in their grove that he mysteriously disappeared, joining his powers to theirs as givers of blessings and curses.
This concept of Oedipus as a suppliant was not the invention of Sophocles, but existed in an independent Boiotian tradition (Lysimachus FGrH 382 F 2), according to which the corpse of the hero was denied burial in Thebes. After burial and expulsion by a second Boiotian town, it was finally interred during the night at Eteonos, but in the morning, the people realized that the grave was within the sanctuary of Demeter. Consulting an oracle, they were told not to disturb “the suppliant of the goddess.” This story makes clear that even in death, Oedipus was a wanderer, and reflects a conception of the hero as a ghostly revenant whose sufferings will not let him rest in peace. Oedipus the polluted outcast and sufferer derived his powers as a hero from these very qualities. In a fragment of the poet Asios (West IE2 fr. 14), a similar ghostly hero rises from the earth to visit a wedding uninvited, “like a wanderer,” squalid and hungry. Such revenant heroes, who both suffer and cause suffering, represent a strand of folk belief that is usually suppressed in the epic and tragic genres.17
Revenant heroes were typically persons who died violently or in despair. The Delphic oracle regularly recommended the establishment of annual sacrifices to these restless dead, whose unappeased anger caused famines, illness, and other disasters. A particularly touchy group were the athlete heroes, legendary and historical victors at the Panhellenic games who were already good candidates for heroization because of their superlative physical abilities. During the fifth century, stories of anger and appeasement became attached to athletes such as Kleomedes of Astypalaia (fl. 496), whose fellow citizens tried to stone him, and Oibotas of Dyme, (fl. 756), who supposedly cursed the Achaians to three hundred years of athletic failure because they slighted him, their first Olympic victor.18 Another revenant was Polites, the hero of Temesa in southern Italy, who had once been a crewman of Odysseus. His spirit terrorized and killed the Temesans because they had stoned him to death for committing a rape. At the behest of Delphi, they agreed to placate him by giving him a maiden to deflower every year. This went on until the Lokrian boxer Euthymos arrived in Temesa and bested the spirit, who sank into the sea and never troubled the city again. Euthymos himself, who won multiple Olympic victories in the early fifth century, became an important cult hero in Lokroi.19
World History
