Description: Marie Delcourt's brilliant study of the Oedipus legend, an unjustly neglected monument of twentieth-century classical scholarship published in 1944 and issued here for the first time in English translation, bridges the gap between Carl Robert's influential Oidipus (1915) and the work of Lowell Edmunds seventy years later. Delcourt studies the legend in its various aspects, six episodes that have equal weight and that stress the same themes: greatness, conquest, domination, the right to rule--all of them bound up with the idea of kingship. Together they form the biography of a Theban hero, the fullest account that has come down to us about the prehistory of sovereign power among the ancient Greeks.
Brief description: MARIE DELCOURT (1891-1979) was Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Liège for more than three decades and the author of many works, including translations, biographies, and studies in the mythology and religion of ancient Greece.
Review Quotes: "Marie Delcourt's book about the ritual origins of the Oedipus myth is a masterpiece. It reveals the archaic foundations of human societies and remains as enlightening and useful as it was when it first appeared seventy years ago."
--LUCIEN SCUBLA, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and author of Giving Life, Giving Death: Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Philosophy