Oedipus Rex for Seekers

Dear reader — that's the most common way in, and it's also a little unfair to the play. Oedipus Tyrannus (usually Oedipus the King, or Oedipus Rex after its Latin title) is a tragedy by Sophocles, probably first staged in the 420s BCE at the City Dionysia in Athens. The exact year isn't known. Thebes is dying of plague, an oracle says the city is polluted by an unpunished murder, and the king sets out to find the killer. You can see where this goes. The audience can too, from the first scene, and that's the engine of the whole thing. It's also nothing like the Freud version, which I'll get to.

The Guy

Sophocles was born around 497 BCE in Colonus, just outside Athens, and died around 406 BCE, so his life spans Athens's rise, its empire, and the start of its long war with Sparta. Ancient sources credit him with well over a hundred plays. Only seven tragedies survive complete.

The Part That Happened Before The Play

The play opens late, and almost everything that matters has already happened. Here's the order. Laius, king of Thebes, is told by an oracle that a child born to him and his wife Jocasta will kill him. When a son is born, Laius has the baby's ankles pierced and pinned together and gives him to a herdsman to be left to die on Mount Cithaeron: "As for the child, it was but three days old, / When Laius, its ankles pierced and pinned / Together, gave it to be cast away." The herdsman takes pity and passes the baby on to a Corinthian.

Grown up in Corinth, Oedipus is taunted at a banquet that Polybus isn't his real father. He goes to Delphi to ask, and Apollo doesn't answer the question but tells him he'll kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he leaves Corinth for good. At a place where three roads meet he's threatened by a herald and an old man in a carriage, and he kills them. He comes to Thebes, solves the Sphinx's riddle, is made king, and marries the widowed queen Jocasta. Years pass. Then the plague.

The Accusation

Suppliants crowd the palace altars. A priest of Zeus asks Oedipus to save the city again, as he did from the Sphinx. Oedipus is already ahead of them: he's sent Creon, his wife's brother, to Delphi. The answer: the plague comes from a pollution, the unpunished murder of Laius. Oedipus vows to find the killer, and the oath he swears curses the murderer: "And on the murderer this curse I lay (On him and all the partners in his guilt): — Wretch, may he pine in utter wretchedness!" The audience knows exactly who he just cursed.

At the Chorus's suggestion he summons the blind prophet Tiresias, who'd rather go home than speak. Pushed, then insulted, Tiresias says it plain: Oedipus himself is the killer, living in shame with his nearest kin without knowing it. "Thou hast eyes, yet see'st not in what misery thou art fallen." Oedipus refuses to hear it. He accuses Creon of a plot, and Creon comes to defend himself with a sensible argument: he already has power and honor without the crown, so why would he want the weight of ruling? Oedipus's anger rises with every answer.

The Unraveling

Three separate pieces of testimony, each meant to calm his fear, each making it worse. First Jocasta tries to prove oracles are worthless: Laius was supposed to die by his son's hand, and instead he was killed by robbers where three roads meet. The detail stops Oedipus cold. He tells her about the old man he killed at a crossroads.

Then a messenger arrives from Corinth to say King Polybus has died of natural causes. Oedipus is relieved: he can't have killed his father. But he still fears the other half of the prophecy, and the messenger, trying to help, tells him he needn't fear that either, because Polybus and his queen weren't his real parents. Jocasta, who understands first, begs Oedipus to stop. "Let the storm burst, my fixed resolve still holds, / To learn my lineage, be it ne'er so low." She leaves: "O woe is thee, poor wretch! With that last word / I leave thee, henceforth silent evermore."

The old herdsman is brought in, the survivor of Laius's party and the man who handed the baby away. He doesn't want to speak and Oedipus threatens him until he does. The baby came from Laius's house, and Jocasta herself gave it to him, to be killed. "Ah me! I stand upon the perilous edge of speech." Oedipus: "And I of hearing, but I still must hear." Then: "Ah me! ah me! all brought to pass, all true! / O light, may I behold thee nevermore."

A second messenger reports what happened inside the palace. Jocasta hanged herself. Oedipus took the gold brooches from her dress and drove them into his own eyes. He comes back on stage blind and asks to be driven out of Thebes. Creon, now in charge, would have done the same in his place. Oedipus: "Apollo, friend, Apollo, he it was / That brought these ills to pass; / But the right hand that dealt the blow / Was mine, none other."

What The Play Keeps Doing

Sight and blindness is the controlling image. Oedipus has working eyes and can't see the truth. Tiresias is blind and sees everything. Words for seeing, light, and darkness recur from the first scene to the last. When Oedipus finally sees, he puts out his eyes: "No more shall ye behold such sights of woe, / Deeds I have suffered and myself have wrought; / Henceforward quenched in darkness shall ye see / Those ye should ne'er have seen."

The drive to know defines him. He answered the Sphinx by thinking, not by prophecy. He started the investigation without being asked, and he refuses every warning to stop: "Well, I will start afresh and once again / Make dark things clear." The play makes that quality both admirable and fatal.

Fate and choice. The oracles are accurate, and everything they predict happens. Oedipus also makes real choices at each step. The play puts both facts on stage and doesn't resolve them into one explanation. People have argued about it for nearly two and a half thousand years, and I'm not going to settle it for you.

Pollution. In Greek belief a killing left a stain called miasma, which spread to the killer's community until it was dealt with. The plague in Thebes is a physical sign of a moral wound, and the city doesn't recover until the cause is named and expelled.

And dramatic irony. The audience knows the answer from the first scene. Almost every speech Oedipus makes has a second meaning he can't hear. The tension is the gap.

The Chorus of Theban elders stays on stage for most of the play, singing the odes between scenes as the conscience and common sense of the community: "Of insolence is bred / The tyrant; insolence full blown, / With empty riches surfeited, / Scales the precipitous height and grasps the throne. / Then topples o'er and lies in ruin prone." And the line that closes the play: wait to see life's ending before you count anyone blessed.

So Was It His Fault

Oedipus is intelligent, decisive, generous, and quick to anger. He's loved by his people and he cares for them. The play never shows him as a bad man, which is exactly why it troubles readers. Is he guilty? The play gives reasons to say yes and reasons to say no, and a good reading holds both. He did kill his father and marry his mother. He did both without knowing. He tried to avoid the prophecy, and he also never stopped asking.

Aristotle used this play again and again in the Poetics, written about a century later, as his model of how a tragedy works, and his terms for it, reversal, recognition, and hamartia, are still the usual vocabulary. Freud wrote about it in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899, dated 1900) and gave the name to what he saw as a universal childhood desire. It became famous in a way the play never was, and many classicists point out the play says nothing about Oedipus wanting any of it. There's a line in it that nods the other way, Jocasta saying how often men dream of marrying their mothers and the man who minds least lives most at ease, and I'd say that tells you the idea was floating around long before Vienna.

To read it: the lines quoted here are Francis Storr's 1912 translation, free, in rhymed and blank verse, dated. Most readers do better with a recent one. Greek tragedy follows a regular pattern, and knowing it helps: a prologue, the Chorus's entrance, episodes alternating with choral songs (stasima), and the last section, the exodos.