Oedipus the King

Oedipus the King
Written by Sophocles
Date premiered c. 429 BC
Place premiered Theatre of Dionysos, Athens
Original language Classical Greek
Subject Episode from Mythological story of Oedipus
Genre Athenian tragedy
Setting Thebes

Oedipus the King is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles that was first performed c. 429 BC.[1] It was the second of Sophocles' three Theban plays to be produced, but it comes first in the internal chronology, followed by Oedipus at Colonus and then Antigone. Over the centuries, it has come to be regarded by many as the Greek tragedy par excellence.[2]

Contents

Plot

Much of the myth of Oedipus takes place before the opening scene of the play. The protagonist of the tragedy is the son of King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes. After Laius learns from an oracle that "he is doomed/To perish by the hand of his own son," he binds tightly together with a pin the feet of the infant Oedipus and orders Jocasta to kill the infant. Hesitant to do so, she demands a servant to commit the act for her. Instead, the servant abandons the baby in the fields, leaving the baby's fate to the gods. A shepherd rescues the infant and names him Oedipus (or "swollen foot"). Intending to raise the baby himself, but not possessing of the means to do so, the shepherd gives it to a fellow shepherd from a distant land, who spends the summers sharing pastureland with his flocks. The second shepherd carries the baby with him to Corinth, where Oedipus is taken in and raised in the court of the childless King Polybus of Corinth as if he were his own.

As a young man in Corinth, Oedipus hears a rumour that he is not the biological son of Polybus and his wife Merope. When Oedipus sounds them out on this, they deny it, but, still suspicious, he asks the Delphic Oracle whom his parents really are. The Oracle seems to ignore this question, telling him instead that he is destined to "Mate with [his] own mother, and shed/With [his] own hands the blood of [his] own sire." Desperate to avoid his foretold fate, Oedipus leaves Corinth in the belief that Polybus and Merope are indeed his true parents and that, once away from them, he will never harm them.

On the road to Thebes, he meets Laius, his true father. Unaware of each other's identities, they quarrel over whose chariot has right-of-way. Oedipus's pride leads him to murder Laius, fulfilling part of the oracle's prophecy. Shortly after, he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, which has baffled many a diviner: "What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?"

To this Oedipus replies, "Man" (who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks upright later, and needs a walking stick in old age), and the distraught Sphinx throws herself off the cliffside. Oedipus's reward for freeing the kingdom of Thebes from her curse is the kingship and the hand of queen Jocasta, his biological mother. The prophecy is thus fulfilled, although none of the main role players know it.

The play begins years after Oedipus has taken the throne of Thebes. The Theban chorus cries out to him for salvation from the plague sent by the gods in response to Laius's murder. Oedipus searches for the murderer, unaware that he himself is guilty of that crime.

The blind prophet Tiresias is called upon to aid the search, but, after his warning against following through with it, Oedipus oppugns him as the murderer, even though he is blind and aged. In response, an angry Tiresias tells Oedipus that he is looking for himself, causing the king to become enraged in incredulity. He then accuses the prophet of conspiring with Creon, Jocasta's brother, to overthrow him.

Oedipus calls for one of Laius's former servants, the only surviving witness of the murder, who fled the city when Oedipus became king in order to avoid being the one to reveal the truth. Soon a messenger from Corinth arrives to inform the king of the death of Polybus, whom Oedipus still believes to be his real father. At this point, the messenger informs him that he was in fact adopted and that his true parentage is unknown. In the subsequent discussions between Oedipus, Jocasta, the servant and the messenger, the second-mentioned surmises the truth and runs away in shame.

Oedipus remains stubborn and incredulous until a second messenger arrives with the shepherd, who reveals that Oedipus himself was the child abandoned by Laius. He realises what he is, and leaves in a rage. An attendant then breaks the news that Jocasta has hanged herself. On discovering her body, Oedipus gouges out his eyes with the golden brooches on her dress.

The play ends with Oedipus entrusting his children to Creon and declaring his intent to live in exile. Although he initially begs for the company of his children, Creon refuses, and Oedipus is exiled alone. The theme can perhaps be summarized with a line spoken by Tiresias: "Wisdom is a dreadful thing when it bringeth no profit unto its possessor" (Sophocles). In the denouement, the chorus narrates his tragic history.[3]

Sophocles' departure from mythic tradition

Two cities in particular, Troy and Thebes, were the focus of Greek epic poetry. The events surrounding the Trojan War were chronicled in the Epic Cycle, and Myths about Thebes in the Theban Cycle, which has been lost. Combined, the epics in this cycle recount the many misfortunes that befell Thebes—particularly the House of Laius.[1]

In 467 BC, Sophocles's fellow tragedian Aeschylus won first prize at the City Dionysia with a trilogy about the House of Laius, comprising Laius, Oedipus and (the sole surviving play) Seven against Thebes. Aeschylus presumably treated Oedipus's story as one link in a chain of calamities that befell Laius, his son and his grandsons.[2]

Sophocles did not share Aeschylus's predilection for writing connected trilogies. His play, then, by necessity, treats the Oedipus myth with a much narrower focus than its epic and tragic predecessors. Though Laius's story obviously plays a part in the tragedy, the travails of Oedipus become much more self-contained. No longer part of an entire House's inexorable slide to ruin, Sophocles's Oedipus the King is instead the tragedy of a single man who tries to outwit the defiant Delphic Oracle and fails.

Themes and motifs

Fate

Fate is a theme often occurring in Greek plays in general and tragedies in particular. From the beginning of this one, we know that Oedipus is destined to "kill his father and mate with his mother". Oedipus runs away from Corinth and meets his biological father Laius, only to kill him, not knowing that Laius is his father. He then proceeds to Thebes, where a sphinx is terrorizing the city. He solves the riddle and marries his mother, unwittingly.

Throughout the whole of this play, fate plays a vital role in Oedipus's downfall, in relation to his audience, this shows everyone the power and how merciless they were to "mortals". The term fate not only played a vital role in the play but this justifies that it played a vital role in ethics and religion, particularly how people were encouraged to respect the wishes of the gods.

Oracles, fate and free will

Two oracles dominate the plot of Oedipus the King. In lines 711 to 714, Jocasta relates the prophecy that was told to Laius before the birth of Oedipus. Laius was told only of the patricide, not the incest:

There was an oracle once that came to Laius—
I will not say that it was Phoebus's own,
but it is was from His thousands of servants—and it told him
that it was fate that he should die a victim
at the hands of his own son, a son to be born
of Laius and me.

The oracle is implicitly conditional: if Laius has a son, that son will kill him, so Laius is in no way a victim of fate. He knowingly fathers a child and suffers the predicted consequences. Hearing this prophecy prompts Oedipus to recall one that he received from the Delphic Oracle shortly before he left Corinth (787-93):

And so I went in secret off to Delphi.
Apollo sent me back without an answer,
so I didn't learn what I had come to find.
But when he spoke he uttered monstrous things, strange terrors and horrific miseries—
it was my fate to defile my mother's bed,
to bring forth to men a human family that people could not bear to look upon,
to murder the father who engendered me.

Given our modern conception of fate and fatalism, readers of the play have a tendency to view Oedipus as a mere puppet controlled by greater forces. This, however, is inaccurate. While it is a mythological truism that oracles exist to be fulfilled, oracles merely predict the future. Neither they nor Fate dictate the future. In his landmark essay "On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex",[4] E.R. Dodds draws a comparison with Jesus's prophecy at the Last Supper that Peter would deny him three times that night. Jesus knows that Peter will do this — but he in no way forces him to do it. Thus is the case with Oedipus.

The oracle delivered to Oedipus is often called a "self-fulfilling prophecy", in that the prophecy itself sets in motion events that conclude with its own fulfillment.[5] This, however, is not to say that Oedipus is a victim of fate and has no free will. The oracle inspires a series of specific choices, freely made by Oedipus, which lead to kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus chooses not to return to Corinth after hearing the oracle, just as he chooses to head toward Thebes, to kill Laius, to marry and to take Jocasta specifically as his bride; in response to the plague at Thebes, he chooses to send Creon to the Oracle for advice and then to follow that advice, initiating the investigation into Laius's murder. None of these choices were predetermined.

Another characteristic of oracles in myth is that they are almost always misunderstood by those who hear them; hence Oedipus's misunderstanding the significance of the Delphic Oracle. He visits Delphi to find out who his real parents are and assumes that the Oracle refuses to answer that question, offering instead an unrelated prophecy which forecasts patricide and incest. Oedipus's assumption is incorrect: the Oracle does answer his question. Stated less elliptically, the answer to his question reads thus: "Polybus and Merope are not your parents. You will one day kill a man who will turn out to be your biological father. You will also one day marry, and the woman whom you choose as your bride will be your mother."

State control

The exploration of this theme in Oedipus the King is paralleled by the examination of the conflict between the individual and the state in Antigone. The dilemma that Oedipus faces here is similar to that of the tyrannical Creon: each man has, as king, made a decision that his subjects question or disobey; each king also misconstrues both his own role as a sovereign and the role of the rebel. When informed by the blind prophet Teiresias that religious forces are against him, each king claims that the priest has been corrupted. It is here, however, that their similarities come to an end: while Creon, seeing the havoc he has wreaked, tries to amend his mistakes, Oedipus refuses to listen to anyone.[6]

Sight and blindness

Literal and metaphorical references to eyesight appear throughout Oedipus the King. Clear vision serves as a metaphor for insight and knowledge, but the clear-eyed Oedipus is blind to the truth about his origins and inadvertent crimes. The prophet Teiresias, on the other hand, although literally blind, "sees" the truth and relays what is revealed to him. Only after Oedipus has physically blinded himself so as not to look upon his children, the fruit of his unconscious sin, does he gain a limited prophetic ability, as seen in Oedipus at Colonus.. It is deliberately ironic that the "seer" can "see" better than Oedipus, despite being blind. In one line (Oedipus Rex, 469), Tiresias says:

"So, you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this. You [Oedipus] with your precious eyes, you're blind to the corruption of your life..."

(Robert Fagles 1984)

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Although we know that Sophocles won second prize with the group of plays that included Oedipus the King, its date of production is uncertain. The prominence of the Theban plague at the play's opening suggests to many scholars a reference to the plague that devastated Athens in 430 BC, and hence a production date shortly thereafter. See, for example, Bernard Knox: "The Date of the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles," The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 77, No. 2 (1956), 133-147.
  2. ↑ It is widely argued that Aristotle in his Poetics identifies Oedipus the King as the best Greek tragedy. See, for example, Elizabeth Belfiore: Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton, 1992), p. 176. Nevertheless, although Aristotle praises many aspects of the play, he also expresses a preference (1454a) for tragedies in which a timely recognition prevents violence and a plot arc that moves from misfortune to good fortune (as in Euripides's Iphigeneia at Tauris); Oedipus the King, conversely, features a belated recognition of mistaken violence, and a plot that moves from good fortune to misfortune. See Christopher S. Morrissey, "Oedipus the Cliché: Aristotle on Tragic Form and Content", Anthropoetics 9, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2003).
  3. ↑ Herodotus, in his Histories (Book 1.32), attributes this maxim to the 6th-century Athenian statesman Solon.
  4. ↑ Greece & Rome, 2nd Ser., Vol. 13, No. 1 (Apr., 1966), pp. 37-49
  5. ↑ Strictly speaking, this is inaccurate: Oedipus himself set these events in motion when he decided to investigate his parentage against the advice of Polybus and Merope.
  6. ↑ Sophocles. Sophocles I: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone. 2nd ed. Grene, David and Lattimore, Richard, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991.

Translations

Additional references

External links

Bildhuggarkonst, Sofokles, Nordisk familjebok.png Plays by Sophocles
Ajax | Antigone | The Trachiniae | Electra | Oedipus the King | Philoctetes | Oedipus at Colonus