This research examines how sibling relationships function in the action of Euripides' The Bacchae and Sophocles' Theban plays, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. The research will set forth the pattern of ideas surrounding the structure of sibling ties in the plays and then discuss how development of the relationships over the course of the action affects or is affected by the meanings that emerge in the plays.
To see how sibling relationships function in the plays under consideration, it may be useful to examine the mythic context in which the plays emerge. The presence of gods and goddesses in the unfolding action positions the plays as cosmological treatments. In these plays, there is a dynamic interaction between the human presence in the cosmos and the eternal cosmic presence of the gods that has the effect of constructing the dimensions of human reality. As Eliade puts it, in the "archaic world . . . every act which has a definite meaning . . . in some way participates in the sacred" (28).
The fact that the gods declare themselves to be stakeholders in human experience means that virtually any moment of human time or any human choice can be penetrated with cosmic significance, and human action frequently has a double effect in the Theban plays of Euripides and Sophocles. The quality of relationships between and among brothers and sisters demonstrates how human priorities and attitudes interpenetrate cosmic ones and construct for the human beings involved situations and experiences laden with irony and pointing toward tragedy.
Kitto uses the term Dikê to describe the Greek idea of the universe as "a cosmos, an ordered whole, a balance of opposites. . . . Dikê is the force which, in the long run, preserves the balance" (Kitto 25-6), however much it may have been upset by human action. In the Theban plays of Sophocles and Euripides, to the degree human priorities fail to take sufficient account of cosmic...