Landscape & Exile

The vultures circled over Apollo's shrine at Delphi.

Below them, bare mountain spines sliced the eastern Mediterranean. 

Unlike the fertile river valleys of ancient Egypt and Babylon, one third of Greece was naked rock on which nothing could grow or graze. The mountains gifted Greeks limestone and marble, from which they carved out their gods and built their temples. The mountains also ringed the horizons of Greek city-states, making each lowland settlement a separate world.

Theseus’ Colonus didn’t actually exist for Sophocles in the 400s BC. Rather, it belonged to the mythical past of the Bronze Age, when gods had walked on the “unspoiled earth: its mountains were arable highlands and what is now stony fields was once good soil. And the earth was enriched by the annual rains, which were not lost, as now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea” (Plato, The Critias). 

Compared to the "Fair Colonus," Mount Cithaeron might be more familiar to Sophecles’ contemporary audience: the no-man’s-land of Greece, where cursed children, like Oedipus, were left to die (but saved by shepherds). Across similarly harsh landscape, under the inexorably dry sunlight, the gods-forsaken outcasts, like Oedipus, were wandering in exile. 

Resources were scarce, and there were always men who had to leave home. If not on exile to brood on their wrongs, then perhaps as colonists in search of new sites – maybe across the sea, like Oedipus’ ancestor, the founding king of Thebes.

On the other hand, what Sophocles conjured up was not only nature’s bounty, but also Athens’ past glory and prosperity. (Continue: City-states, Wars, and Heroes)

However, something held constant for the Greeks since then. Everywhere the Greeks settled, all around the the Mediterranean sea, they plowed the land for grain and planted the two symbols of ancient Greek civilization: the olive and the vine. (Continue: Greek Wine, Theatre, and Sophocles’ Trilogy)