Tereus (Sophocles)

Tereus
Tereus being presented with his son's head. In Sophocles' play, Tereus unknowingly ate his son.
Written by	Sophocles
Chorus	Possibly maidens from Thrace
Characters	Tereus, Procne, Philomela, at least one other male character, possibly others
Date premiered	Before 414 BCE
Place premiered	Athens
Original language	Ancient Greek
Genre	Athenian tragedy

Tereus (Ancient Greek: Τηρεύς, Tēreus) is a Greek play by the Athenian poet Sophocles. Although the play has been lost, several fragments have been recovered. Although the date that the play was first produced is not known, it is known that it was produced before 414 BCE, because the Greek comedic playwright Aristophanes referenced Tereus in his play The Birds, which was first performed in 414.Thomas B. L. Webster dates the play to near but before 431 BCE, based on circumstantial evidence from a comment Thucydides made in 431 about the need to distinguish between Tereus and the King of Thrace, Teres, which Webster believes was made necessary by the popularity of Sophocles play around this time causing confusion between the two names. Based on references in The Birds it is also known that another Greek playwright, Philocles, had also written a play on the subject of Tereus, and there is evidence both from The Birds and from a scholiast that Sophocles' play came first.

Some scholars believe that Sophocles' Tereus was influenced by Euripides' Medea, and thus must have been produced after 431. However, this is not certain and any influence may well have been in the opposite direction, with Sophocles' play influencing Euripides. Jenny Marsh believes that Euripides' Medea did come before Sophocles' Tereus, based primarily on a statement in Euripides' chorus "I have heard of only one woman, only one of all that have lived, who put her hand on her own children: Ino." Marsh takes this to imply that as of the time of Medea's production, the myth of Tereus had not yet incorporated the infanticide, as it did in Sophocles' play.

A hypothesis of the play dating from the 2nd or 3rd century CE was translated by P.J. Parsons in 1974. According to this hypothesis, Tereus, the king of Thrace, was married to Procne, daughter of the Athenian ruler. Tereus and Procne had a son Itys. Procne wanted to see her sister Philomela and asked Tereus to escort her sister to Thrace. During the journey, Tereus fell in love with Philomela and raped her. In order to prevent her from telling Procne what he had done, he cut out Philomela's tongue. But Philomela wove a tapestry showing what had happened and sent it to Procne. Procne became jealous and, in revenge, killed Itys and served him as a meal to Tereus. The gods turned Procne and Philomela into a nightingale and a swallow to protect them from Tereus, while Tereus was turned into a hoopoe.