No doubt you've had a chance to read the text of Pericles' funeral oration to the people of Athens (see link, previous post), and we'll no doubt have further occasion to discuss the vision of the polis and the people at work in this text, and in the Theban plays as a whole. Thucydides goes on, immediately after, to give his account of the plague that hit Athens at nearly the same time. I'm not sure if Th. was thinking dramatically or not (he is writing history, after all) but a plague hitting the city right after a moment of patriotic speech making is hard to see as coincidence. I encourage you all as well to read Th's account of the plague (linked here, goes on for several pages). I'll rephrase and redeploy here a question we ran out of time for: How does the Sphinx function symbolically for the Oedipus the King? Why the linkage with plague?
