Trojan War Wednesday: "Men Are Such Fools"
Author Notes for the 6th Installment of RAGE!
Author’s Note:
I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy in the following tale:
When a son was born to the King and Queen of Thebes, the royal couple consulted a seer to learn the boy’s fate. They were horrified to discover that their new son was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Desperate to avoid such a scandal, they ordered that the boy should be killed. However, the royal servant couldn’t bring himself to murder an infant, and instead had the boy secretly sent away to Corinth, where he was adopted into the childless royal household and renamed Oedipus.
Years later, as a young man, Oedipus consulted a seer to learn his fate and was horrified to discover that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Desperate to avoid such a scandal, Oedipus fled from Corinth and the only parents he had ever known.
At a crossroad on his journey, Oedipus encountered a stranger and got into an argument that quickly escalated into a fight. Before he knew it, Oedipus had slain the man and all of his bodyguards, except for one who ran away to preserve his own life. This bodyguard, ashamed of his cowardice, would later claim that the king’s company had been slaughtered by a massive gang of robbers and that the king had ordered him away with a final message of love for the queen.
Traveling onward, more intent than ever on avoiding his fated crimes in Corinth, Oedipus begins to hear rumors that the Kingdom of Thebes was being threatened by a monstrous Sphynx, and that the King of Thebes, while on an aid-seeking mission, had been waylayed and killed by a massive gang of robbers.
The beautiful young queen, newly widowed, had decreed that whoever could rid the kingdom of its monster would win her hand in marriage and a seat on the throne. In truth, although the queen was getting on in years, she had a magical heirloom necklace that made her appear decades younger than she actually was.
So Oedipus solved the riddle of the Sphynx, married the young-seeming queen, had four children with her, and lived in blissful ignorance until the day everyone learned the horrible truth that yes, Oedipus actually had killed his biological father and married his biological mother.
The thing I wonder about is how different the story would have been if there had been no seers to consult. If this prophecy had remained unknown, Oedipus wouldn’t have been sent away, wouldn’t have fled from his presumptive parents, and wouldn’t have fulfilled the prophecy. The seers made these absurd and unlikely things happen simply by saying that they would happen, implying that any number of future events were possible until the first seer put one into a revelation that was then believed and acted upon.
Even today, thousands of years after the story of Oedipus was first told, we are still wrestling with issues of free will versus predestination.
I keep Oedipus in mind when writing from the perspective Calchas, the in-house seer of Agamemnon and the Achaeans. Calchas doesn’t just know the future, he knows what will happen if he reveals certain truths, what will happen if he doesn’t, and what he might cause to happen just by putting his prophecies into different phrasing.
In this week’s installment, Calchas knows that speaking truth to power will get him killed, perhaps explaining why Homer keeps Calchas silent for ten plague-ridden days. And just as the story of Oedipus only happens because of a self-fulfilling prophecy, the events of the Iliad hinge upon the revealed word of Calchas.
Nine years into the siege of Troy, the greatest Achaean warrior, Achilles, is sidelined by rage and resentment following a conflict with his commander, Agamemnon. This short but intense phase of warfare leads to devastating losses on both sides, conflict among the gods, and great tragedy on a human level.
Rage! is a disruptive retelling of Homer’s Iliad, restoring diversity, inclusion, and equity to a three-thousand-year-old tradition.