Classics and the Western Canon discussion

7. The Theban Wars
Eteocles and the exile of Polyneices to Argos
The sons of Oedipus have a falling out over who would rule Thebes and Eteocles ends up ruling while Polyneices goes into exile in Argos. In Argos Polyneices gets into a fight with another exile, Tydeus from Calydon. Adrastos, the ruler of Argos decides to marry his daughters off to the exiles because one had a boar on his shield and the other had a lion on his shield, fulfilling a diviner’s prophecy. Adrastos seizes the chance to assist Polyneices in attacking Thebes.

Prelude in Argos: Amphiaraos and Eriphyle
Amphiaraos, brother to Adrastos and former Argonaut is persuaded to join the campaign against Thebes by his wife, Eriphyle, who was bribed into doing so by Polyneices’ gift of a necklace and robe. Another reason to beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Eriphyle must have been very convincing because Amphiaraos was informed by his diviner father, Oicles, that he would not survive the campaign. However, Amphiaraos would get his revenge by commanding his sons to kill Eriphyle and mount their own campaign against Thebes when they came of age.

The advance against Thebes and stationing of the champions
Tydeus challenges the Thebans to single combat and wins several battles. He is also victorious against 50 Thebans who try to ambush him; only one of the 50 escapes or is spared. Seven attacking heroes and their men were met at each of seven gates by seven Theban defenders and their men.

Excursus: the earlier history of Teiresias
We are given some accounts of how Teiresias gained his powers of divination. Interestingly, in settling the argument between Zeus and Hera on which gender gained the most pleasure from sex. For Teiresias answer, ten to nine in favor of the men, Hera blinded him and Zeus granted him the gift of prophecy and a long seven generation life.

The Theban victory and its aftermath
On Teiresias prophecy of victory, Menoiceus, the son of Creon, offers yet another human sacrifice by taking one for the team commits suicide in front of the gates of Thebes. Eteocles and Polyneices kill each other in single combat. The remaining seven heroes are killed, some deaths are more gruesome than others. Amphiaraos falls into a chasm produced by a thunderbold from Zeus and becomes immortal and Adrastos survives as foretold. Creon takes control of the Theban throne and buries Antigone with her brother Polyneices when she defies Creon’s order to throw out the Argive dead and not bury them.

The Epigoni and the Second Theban War
The sons of the fallen from the first attack against Thebes become known as the Epigone and attack Thebes again. This time they win, and Amphiaraos’ sons do not kill their mother Eriphyle because she agreed with the second attack, but a note indicates account in which her son, Alcmaion did kill her before leaving. This time they are successful and the Thebans flee the city and settled in Thessaly.

The later history of Acmaion
In this account we are told Alcmaion killed his mother, Eriphyle, after the capture of Thebes upon learning of the necklace and her part in talking Amphiaraos into the first failed attack. Of course the killing of a blood relative, despite being in accordance with one divine entity, is still open for retaliation by other divine entities, especially the furies. The necklace and the robe used to bribe Eriphyle continues to cause problems and a complicated story of revenge. Alcmaion ends up buying his own daughter as a servant without realizing it.

8. Arcadian mythology (the Pelasgids)
Lycaon and his sons
We are given a possible reason for the flood. Zeus was angered by Lycaon’s 50 sons who attempted to feed a disguised Zeus the entrails of a slaughtered child. Once again impiety is to blame for natural disasters.

Callisto and the birth of Areas: early Arcadian genealogies
We are given the story of Callisto ending with Areas, her son by Zeus and her death, becoming the constellation called the Bear. Auge, a descendant of Areas is raped by Heracles, nursed by a doe, adopted by Teuthras, eventually succeeding him as King of Mysia.

Atalante
Atalante was exposed, but nursed by a she-bear and became a hunter. This is the same Atalante that the Calydonian boar hunters came to blows over. Eventually she rediscovers her father who convinces her to marry. She will only marry someone who can beat her in a race. After many suitor’s had tried and died, Melanion beats her in a race by dropping apples from Aphrodite which delay Atalante as she stops to pick them up. Later while hunting, the couple are turned into lions by Zeus for having sex in his sanctuary. I guess that is better than having sex and being killed by a serial killer.

We get yet another story of cannibalism and its divine consequences. Why do stories of cannibalism pop up so much in Greek Mythology? Is cannibalism frequently mentioned in mythology because it was problem, or was it just because it was a rare but shocking taboo?

Although it is not covered in Apollodorus, there was an explanation offered in the larger tradition for exactly why Eriphyle was so "persuasive."

At the time of her marriage, Amphiaros had sworn that she would have the deciding voice in any dispute between her husband and her father. Once Eriphyle is bribed to side with Adrastos, Amphiaros is trapped by her decision.

I found this in "Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece," an academic book which free in Kindle format, but not entirely user-friendly: https://www.amazon.com/Swearing-Ancie...

By the way, the necklace involved is supposed to have been a wedding gift from the gods to Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, at her marriage to Cadmus, the founder of Thebes. It was made by Hephaistos, who, despite being the greatest of all smiths, was not a good choice: Harmonia was the offspring of his adulterous wife and her lover. The necklace brought grief and harm with it, although not at once, and not always to its owner.

There is an interesting description of the necklace in the "Thebaid," a "Silver Age" Latin Epic by Statius, which retells the story of the Seven Against Thebes at considerable length. Any owner studying closely the decorations described there should have been moved to give to their worst enemy, just on general principles.

I have thought for years (and once posted online) that Harmonia's necklace may lie somewhere behind the Nauglamir, the cursed necklace in "The Silmarillion," which carries destruction with it, along with its centerpiece, a Silmaril recovered from Morgoth, the original Dark Lord. (And no, I'm not going to do a plot summary.) Tolkien was a good Latinist, and probably knew the Thebaid at first hand.

The epic was popular in the Middle Ages, and it was a great favorite of C.S. Lewis. It seems to sunk into relative obscurity in modern times, with only a couple of translations, one in a strange choice of verse form, the other (for the Loeb Classical Library) in rather dull prose.

There have been several prose and verse translations of the "Thebaid" in recent decades, most recently by A.S. Kline into verse. This is available free on-line: https://www.poetryintranslation.com/k...
There are Mobi (Kindle) version, e-pub (Apple Books), PDF (the largest file), and Word versions which can be downloaded.

While reading Apollodorus, I am awed by the breadth, detail, and interconnection of the Greek mythological corpus. Maybe three out of four stories were new to me, I suppose because the surviving dramas didn't call on them. Do we have anything like it? Maybe if you combined the subset of classical myth that is still well-known with Bible stories, Arthurian legend, Robin Hood, Dante, and Shakespeare, you'd get a similar number of stories, but not nearly as well integrated.

Not only that, but nearly every name is unique. No John XXIII or Henry VIII here.

So far as English goes, you are probably right.

Although I would throw in the vast mythologies manufactured for comic books, some fractions of which now have iconic status in the broader culture, and can be tossed into television dialogue without fear of completely baffling the American general audience. (Judging from on-line queries at the time, European dubbings of "Buffy the Vampire-Slayer" had some trouble with "Buffy, its the Bat-signal!" "you were bitten by a radioactive spider," and Xander's Jimmy Olsen jokes referencing the 1950s Superman TV show.)

However, the long-term cultural impacts of some other bodies of literature that might be mentioned never matched that of the classical sources, notably as conveyed through Virgil and Ovid, which were familiar to the educated elite through the nineteenth century.

If we look at post-Classical Europe as a whole, the vast medieval European Arthurian literature, mainly in French, but also Middle High German, Dutch, and several other languages, would have to be taken into consideration, alongside the relatively meager offerings traditionally available in English (some of the longest have been translated from French only recently).

Unfortunately for this purpose, much of it soon became very obscure in its own linguistic traditions -- France didn't had a Malory to abridge the very long romances, and certainly not a Tennyson. And Germany had Wagner, who messed up the Arthurian connections of Tristan and Parzival no end (besides misspelling the latter's name).

Of course, a lot of the Arthurian literature consists of variants of the same tale-types, and even just redactions of the same events, so I wouldn't insist on comparing it.

One might also count in the less extensive, but still large, Carolingian Cycle (Charlemagne and the Paladins of France), also found in several languages (even Middle English). And if one includes the later, long, Italian Romantic Epics, "Orlando Innamorato" and "Orlando Furioso," it managed to survive as "polite literature" into the nineteenth century. These days, the only thing people are likely to have come across is the very early, and in some ways atypical, "Song of Roland" (= Orlando).