The seeds of Cadmus: Autochthony, miasma, nemesis and the tragic in the tragedies of the Theban cycle.

The royal lineage of the founder of the city of Thebes, the Tyrian Cadmus, is represented in seven tragedies written by the three Athenian tragedians whose works have come down to our time: Aeschylus, in The Seven against Thebes; Sophocles, in Antigone, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus; Euripides, in The Suppliants, The Phoenician Women and The Bacchae. The objective of this thesis work was to verify the presence of autochthony in these seven Athenian plays acclimated in Thebes, from the Theban myth of autochthony starring by Cadmus, and the influences on this tragic fate that desolated the successive generations of kings from the founder's oikos and his city. The autochthony is the noun that refers to the quality of autochthon assigned to that people inhabiting the same land since time immemorial, or in a mythical context, one who sprang from the earth. In both contexts, autochthony became a very important aspect of social and political organization of the Greek city-states, especially in relation to Athens. In this city, between the seventh and fourth century B.C., autochthony became an important criterion in the assignment of citizenship, besides being used as an ideological tool in the formulation of laws and in the conduct of domestic and foreign policy of Attica. In addition to these two concepts, the present investigation, however, pointed to a third sense in which autochthony set up as a 'sense of belonging' between autochthon and patris, characterized as a congenital connection, innate, emotional and mysterious which unites them unconditionally. This relationship between son and mother earth turned out to be something that has great influence in the shaping of the identity and in the both their lives. In the seven tragedies of the Theban cycle, such influences are evident in relation to the formation of collective identity and tragic fate that falls on Thebes during the domain of Cadmus' oikos represented on the course of the seven plays. Yet we verified that, in the case of Thebes, contrary to what is seen in the ancient Athenian history, autochthony is not represented in its positive values, but as the thread of a resulting curse of the nemesis of Ares, initiated by the actions of Cadmus which form the Theban myth of autochthony, and that befell the royal lineage of the founder and his city in the form of several killer actions. So autochthony became a miasma polluting the Theban soil, is transmitted to the descendants of the first king Thebes and condemns the city to the suffering and ruin uninterrupted until the founder's lineage comes to an end. Ultimately, it is apparent that the understanding of the reasons why Thebes suffers misfortunes followed passes through the joint reading of these seven tragedies of the Theban cycle that came to us, because only in this way is possible to see in full the saga of the oikos of Cadmus, which proved to be the protagonist of its own tragedy, which was not written as a play by the ancient dramatists, but reveals interspersed in the body of these seven tragedies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]