View source for Sophokles' Oidipous Rex

{{Sophokles' Oidipous Rex}}

One can see how Greek tragedies, which work largely with material from the mythical past, can become are emotionally charged vehicles of reflection, which, as Martha Nussbaum wrote (The Fragility of Goodness, xxvii) encourage ‘the audience to inhabit (the ethical space) actively, as a contested place of moral struggle’. We seem to have been doing the same! One remarkable thing is that these plays were originally appreciated by a huge audience - up to around 15,000 strong - taken from every social class. It’s also astonishing how much impact they can still have, some 2500 years after their first performances.
The Oidipous myth was actually the subject of various different dramatic approaches: Aiskhylos wrote a tetralogy on the myth (not extant), which apparently explored the working out of an ancestral curse over three generations; [[author::Euripides]]’ Oidipous (also not extant) seems to have been about political violence where Oidipous has his eyes put out in a coup d’état; Sophokles, as we’ve seen, goes down a very different route.

The oracular predictions from [[character::Apollo]]’s oracle at [[place::Delphi]] that underlie the play generated lots of interesting comment and discussion: 
*(1) The one that Oidipous’ father Laios would be killed by his own son, motivating the exposure of the child on [[place::Mt. Kithairon]] with its ankles pierced. Exposure is a common mythological motif: e.g. [[character::Paris]] was exposed on [[place::Mt. Ida]] and rescued by a shepherd; [[character::Perseus]] was exposed at sea in a chest. Evil beings and polluted objects were carried to the mountains or cast into the sea, from which no escape was supposedly possible. However, Oidipous wasn’t the only foundling to survive: Perseus did, and likewise Romulus and Remus in Roman mythology.
(2) The one given to Oidipous that he would kill his father and marry his mother, prompting him to leave [[place::Korinth]], where he had grown up. 

The oracles introduce those fascinating issues that generated such good discussion: human versus divine intelligence; vain attempts to escape from oracles; limitations of human understanding; fate; etc. One thing that was rightly highlighted is that by the start of the play these two prophecies have already come true. You now find some comments on the play (which seem to be to be rather unnecessary attempts to ‘make it cool for teenagers’ or something like that), that the play as ‘the world's first ever detective story’, ‘a murder mystery, a political thriller, and a psychological whodunit.’ No it’s not! We know whodunit. As John Gould (Oxford Classical Dictionary article) says, ‘The recurring pattern of Sophoclean tragedy is that all falls into place and coheres only in retrospect: recognition after the event’.
The theme of blindness is a fascinating one. I particularly like Teiresias’ retort to Oidipous (l. 412 ff.): 

''You have mocked me for my blindness.
You have sight but you do not see the evil state you are in …
A terrible-footed curse will drive you out of this land, you who now see clearly will then see darkness.''

The word translated ‘terrible-footed’ here is deinopous in Greek – obviously a play on Oidipous’ name (Oidipous – ‘Swollen-footed’ – and this is one reason that I like to keep to the original, , so-called because his ankles had been pinned when he was exposed. Don’t you think that is a really strange motif? It looks like one of those incongruities in the tale that would have inspired someone like J.G. Frazer to go looking for the Urmyth. It’s particularly weird because as far as we can tell Sophokles’ Oidipous doesn’t limp. The lameness has loomed large in a range of modern interpretations, which see it as a sign of autochthony, a defect of communication, the reverse of good king¬ship, or the overcoming of fear of castration. But as Jan Bremmer points out (check out the excellent Bremmer, J. (ed.), Interpretations of Greek Mythology, Routledge, 1988, if you get the chance), we should be aware that popular etymologies (e.g. Oidipous = Swollen-footed) always confirm the values already ascribed to the bearer of a name; they do not produce these values. This, Bremmer argues, means that etymological interpretations cannot be used as the main key to decoding the myth, and here Sophokles is also getting mileage out of other aspects of the name: dipous means ‘two-footed’ (remember the Sphinx’s riddle?); foot imagery occurs throughout the play; and the first two syllables of Oidipous link him to the Greek verb oida = ‘I know’, with all the irony implicit in what Oidipous does not know. Oida and its compounds are used at least 74 times in the play and about half of these words are spoken by Oidipous himself. Fascinating!
We touched a little on the contemporary relevance of Sophokles' play to the Athens of his day. When Iocaste states that she doesn’t believe in prophecy she gives two reasons (715 ff.):

''[Laios], so the report goes at least, was killed by strangers,
thieves, at a place where three roads meet … my son – 
he wasn’t three days old and the boy’s father
fastened his ankles, had a henchman fling him away
on a barren trackless mountain. ''

It’s interesting that no-one picks up on Oidipous’ ‘swollen-footedness’ here. The scars only corroborate his identity after it has been all but established on other grounds (ll. 1031-36) – they are surely just a secondary motif in the tale. Rather, it is the reference to the triple crossroads, which the Greeks generally regarded as an ominous location, that moves the drama away from locating the killer of Laius and ending plague and towards the much more interesting issue of what can people know of one another and themselves, and how can they know it? Carl Robert spent much effort doing a ‘CSI’ (Bremmer interesting on this) on the crossroads, and there is interesting stuff in John Gould’s The Language of Oedipus (1988) on the opposition of place 'between the poleis (cities) of Thebes and Corinth, and the space “outside”, the mountainsides and tracks and crossroads of Oedipus’ other world'. There’s so much to explore!

In terms of the impact of the play on its 5th century audience it is notable that that the chorus sing of how they would prefer it to be true that Oidipous should kill his father and marry his mother than that their religious beliefs should be shattered. For them, the truth of prophecy = the existence of the gods. If ‘sacrilege’ wins out here, there can be no point in the kind of religious ritual that the performance of this tragedy was part of. If, as the statement that became almost the ‘manifesto’ of the sophistic movement claims, ‘man is the measure of all things’, what place is left for the gods? The chorus dread that.
The discussions in the sub-forums were also very vibrant, and we pondered over whether Oidipous' very human qualities of courage, intelligence and perseverance might mean he is not a powerless puppet of Fate, but a shining example of man’s dedication to search for the truth about himself. As Karl Reinhardt put it, ‘the daimonic, continual and unconscious reaching over out of the realm of appearance into the realm of truth is the human element which was not supplied by the legend and had not been linked with the figure of Oidipous before Sophokles.’ In other words the myth is pliable – Sophokles can mould it into whatever form he wishes, which is another characteristic of the way these tales can be made to function in a variety of ways (like the Medeia myth that we discussed too). 

I wonder whether, in the end (as was also suggested) Oidipous has transcended the worst of the gods can do to him. The concepts of an overturn/change of fortune (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis) are stressed by Aristotle in his discussions of tragedy. The gods are immortal, invulnerable, and they always win; but the experience of change, is uniquely human and is some¬thing they can never know (an idea used in the Troy movie, where [[character::Akhilleus]] says ‘the gods envy us because we are mortal’). The personal cost of this is horrendous, but might there be a sense in which Oidipous triumphs: he has, after all, discovered exactly who he is. Just a thought!

Freud loomed large and controversially (as he often does). He regarded Oidipous’ process of self-discovery as a kind of allegory of the work of psychoanalysis. He also had a look at the myths of [[character::Medousa]] and [[character::Prometheus]] 

[[Category:Greek Mythology]]
[[Category:Philosophy]]