“Dwellers in our native Thebes, behold, this is Oedipus, who knew the famed riddle and was a man most mighty: what citizen did not gaze with envy upon his fortunes? Behold into what a stormy sea of dread trouble he has come.”

 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (Hadas 120)

It had been weeks since the victory, but Athens seemed anything but triumphant. Charred husks of once-fine houses lined the streets, and when the wind was in the right quarter, the people could still smell smoke. It felt sometimes as if the ghosts of their enemies had taken up residence in the very stones of the city they’d tried to burn. The daring of Themistocles and Eurybiades; the glorious feats of the allied sailors at Salamis – these did something to wash away the bitterness of the Persian occupation, but stains and scars would linger a while yet.

Still, even if Athens was battered, she was unbroken, and it was time to thank the gods for delivering the Attic people from a different future – one in which they had come under the yoke of Xerxes, and abandoned democracy to be ruled by a foreign autocrat. The chief citizens named a day for a ceremony of praise and thanksgiving, and had a beautiful trophy made to be dedicated to the gods. The crowning event of this ceremony would be a paean, a choral performance by the boys and youths of the city. And the crowning ornament of the paean would be the youth they had chosen to lead it.

The boy was about fifteen. He was from Colonus, northwest of the city. His father was a patriotic Athenian by birth, and a prosperous maker of weapons and armor, too – many an Attic warrior had marched off to fight the Persians with a shield by Sophillus on his left arm. The son, it was already clear, would not follow his father into this trade: he was made for higher things.

The boy had an easy charm and gracious manners. He was already known as an accomplished dancer, singer, and player of both the lyre and the cithara. And he was stunningly handsome: tall, lithe, and graceful. His performance would be a balm for the war-weary citizens. Many hundreds of years later, the Greek grammarian Athenaeus would write:

“He danced to accompaniment of his lyre around the trophy, naked and anointed with oil. Others say he danced with his cloak on.” (Athenaeus quoted in Hadas vii)

Clothed or naked, this first performance in the thin, clear sunlight of late autumn marked the beginning of the legendary career of Sophocles – a career that would last another seventy-five years, and would see him become one of the city’s leading lights in politics, poetry, acting – and, of course, as a writer of searing tragic dramas that disturb audiences to this day.

I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.

Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 33: Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, Part 1 – The Future Will Come of Itself. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.

This week, we’re returning to the world of Athenian drama. We dipped our toes into its bloody waters a few months back with our episodes on the Oresteia by Aeschylus. Now, we’re diving all the way in, beginning a three-month immersion that will cover the other playwrights from ancient Greece whose works have survived to the present day: Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. The lives of all four of these writers overlapped to some degree, and they learned from, admired, and competed with each other – or, in Aristophanes’s case, made fun of each other.

Sophocles, who lived from 496 BCE to 406 BCE, is considered the greatest of all of them. We have plenty of evidence for his actual existence – an existence that runs almost exactly parallel with the cultural and political peak of the city he called home. Athens during the fifth century BCE was an incredible engine of innovation, and Sophocles almost seems to personify that: a golden boy for a golden age. “A life more satisfying than Sophocles’ is difficult to imagine,” writes Moses Hadas in his introduction to the 2006 Bantam Classics edition of Sophocles’ plays. (Hadas vii)

Handsome, charming, gifted as a performer, Sophocles was also an important member of Athenian civic life, acting in financial and religious leadership roles as well as serving as a general during the Peloponnesian War. (Struck 2006) He numbered the historian Herodotus among his friends in addition to his fellow dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides – in fact, in spite of being a good 16 years older than Euripides, Sophocles outlived him – well, barely. He led public mourning services eulogizing the younger writer shortly before his own death in 406 BCE.

Sophocles was wildly prolific as a playwright, producing 120 plays over a period of almost 65 years. Naturally, he was an annual fixture in the City Dionysia. You may recall from episode 27 of this show – The Oresteia, Part 2: Deus Ex Machina – that the Dionysia was an annual religious festival which featured a drama competition. Playwrights would write three tragedies and a satyr play (a comedy) for the festival. A committee would select three writers to have their works performed, and a winner would be chosen from among them.

While sources vary, Sophocles seems to have won the Dionysia 24 times, beating out both Aeschylus and Euripides on multiple occasions. That means 96 of his 120 plays were winners – an 80% hit rate. Today, just seven of those plays – 5.8% – survive. They’ve been passed down to us because they were chosen for inclusion in the curriculum at the Athenian academy not long after Sophocles died, and so many, many more copies of them were made than of the other 113 plays. “We can only hope,” Moses Hadas writes, “that the scholars who chose the plays that survived have given us a fair representation of Sophocles’ work.” (Hadas ix)

The play we’re looking at today, commonly known in the modern era as Oedipus Rex or Oedipus the King, was probably produced in the 420s or 430s BCE, well into Sophocles’ prime as a writer. It’s had many titles over the last 2,000 years. Sophocles probably called it just plain Oedipus, but later editors and compilers altered that title to differentiate it from one of his last plays, Oedipus at Colonus. Sometimes it’s known as Oedipus Tyrannus. Whatever you want to call it, this play has had a reputation as the greatest example of Athenian tragic art ever since Aristotle singled it out as such a century after Sophocles died.

Audiences at the time, however, were less enthusiastic about it. It only came second at the Dionysia that year, losing out to a set of plays by Aeschylus’s nephew Philocles, whose works are entirely lost (Lefkowitz and Romm 224).

Still, Citizen Kane lost the Best Picture Oscar to How Green Was My Valley, and which one of those is more famous today, eh? Let’s crack on with the story.

[music]

Oedipus Rex, like all plays produced for the City Dionysia, drew on earlier cycles of myths that audiences at the time would have known well. Oedipus centers around a myth cycle dealing with the city of Thebes, and events which were reckoned to have taken place about a century or so before the Trojan War. Of Sophocles’ surviving plays, three of them happen to deal with the city of Thebes: Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus. These are often referred to as a “trilogy,” but they’re not, really. Unlike Aeschylus, who tended to submit a series of connected, consecutive plays for the Dionysia, Sophocles’ Theban plays were written for different festivals over a 35-year period. (Lefkowitz and Romm 222)

The earliest play was Antigone, which would be the second episode of the trilogy if you presented them in chronological story order. About 10-20 years later came Oedipus Rex, the first part of the story, and finally, Oedipus at Colonus, the last chapter, was produced in 405 BCE, after Sophocles had died. It’s a bit like all the various Star Wars trilogies, but without Chewbacca.

As with Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’ Theban plays focus on the fate of a single royal house. In the Oresteia, it’s the House of Atreus, king of Mycenae. Atreus curses his bloodline by feeding a rival’s sons to him in a stew. In the Theban plays, it’s the House of Laius, king of Thebes. Laius’s crime is similar: while visiting a fellow king, he violates the sacred gift of hospitality by sexually assaulting his host’s young son, a boy named Chrysippus.

Crimes like this in Greek tragedies fester and ooze as the generations roll past, and there is nothing the descendants of the original criminal can do to avoid their role in either compounding that criminality or sacrificing everything to expiate it once and for all.

But Oedipus, the tyrant of Thebes, is going to do his damnedest to avoid it. Oedipus is the tyrant of Thebes. Now, tyrant, to the ancient Greeks, didn’t mean a ruler who was cruel and lawless and vindictive, necessarily. It just meant a ruler who had not inherited the throne from the previous holder. Oedipus has married the previous ruler’s wife, Jocasta, a widow who is probably about 13 or so years his senior. Together they’ve had four children – two sons, two daughters.

As the play opens, Oedipus comes out of his palace and speaks with great sympathy to a crowd of petitioners gathered there – citizens of Thebes seeking his help. “Children,” he calls them:

“… latest in the line of ancient Cadmus,

what is the meaning of your sitting here?

Why these suppliant branches, why these garlands?

The city is full of the smoke of incense, prayers

to the healing god, lamentations, all at once.

I didn’t think it right, children, to hear of it

at second hand, from messengers, but came myself—

I, Oedipus, renowned in the eyes of all.” (Lefkowitz & Romm 274)

These petitioners are the Chorus for this play, and their leader is an old priest of the city. He tells Oedipus that the city is in turmoil: plague runs riot, crops fail, women miscarry, and the animals in the fields are dying. Clearly there’s some curse at work. The priest reminds Oedipus (and us in the audience) that Oedipus holds the throne because he once saved the city from the murderous Sphinx and her riddles. Surely he can solve this problem, too. Quote:

“But now, Oedipus, mightiest in the eyes of all,

we turn to you, in prayer: Find us help

in any way you can—from a god’s utterance,

or a man’s, anything you’ve heard and know

Advice from men tested, like you, in action,

will not miss the mark.” (ibid. 274)

“Well, as it happens,” Oedipus tells the priest, “I’m already working on this problem, as a good king should.” He explains to the petitioners that he recently sent his wife’s brother, Creon, to consult the oracle at Delphi as to why Thebes is so stricken like this, and that Creon is expected any moment to bring back a message from Apollo.

Which, conveniently, Creon does. He comes in wearing a crown of laurel – a hopeful sign – and tells Oedipus and the Chorus that the god Apollo says that the murderer of the previous king of Thebes, Laius, is living secretly within the city. Find him, punish him, and exile or execute him, says the God, and Thebes will be cleansed.

“The late king’s murderer, living here?” Oedipus asks. “How is that possible?”

Creon relates the story of Laius’s murder as the people of Thebes heard it at the time: Laius was himself traveling to Delphi to consult the oracle on some matter, and his party was waylaid by bandits on the road. One servant survived to tell them all this.

“And you didn’t follow it up at the time?” Oedipus demands.

“We were a little distracted by the Sphinx,” Creon reminds him. “But then you turned up and sent her packing, and we made you king, and you married Laius’s widow Jocasta, and she began having your babies, and we were so relieved to have order again that we kind of let it go.”

Oedipus seems fired up by the prospect of a new riddle to solve. “I’ll bring them back to light, from the beginning!” he declares:

“It’s not for the sake of a distant friend

that I’ll dispel this pollution, but for my own.

For the man who killed him may well want

to turn on me with the same violence.

By taking up his cause, I help myself.” (ibid. 274)

The game’s afoot, Creon! Time to solve a cold case! Oedipus and Creon go offstage while the Chorus sing about the agonies of Thebes and beg various individual gods to help them in their trouble. And while they do that, a short aside about the Sphinx.

Sophocles takes it as read that his audience will know all about the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx – he does not go into any detail about their encounter. For us, some backstory is required. The Sphinx is a monster with the body of a lion, the face of a woman, and the wings of a bird of prey. She was mentioned in passing in Hesiod’s Theogony – one of his long genealogical passages about which monsters descend from which titans – but she is mostly associated with the city of Thebes.

According to the Dictionary of Classical Mythology by the French classicist Pierre Grimal, the Sphinx was sent to torment Thebes by Hera, who was angry with Laius for raping the boy Chrysippus. The Sphinx parked herself along the main road to Thebes, asking riddles of the people who passed by and eating them when they couldn’t answer. (Grimal 407)

The two most famous riddles attributed to the Sphinx were not set down until after Sophocles’s time. The first was:

“What creature has only one voice, walks sometimes on two legs, sometimes on three, [and] sometimes on four?” (ibid. 407)

The second was:

“There are two sisters; one gives birth to the other, and she in turn gives birth to the first.” (ibid. 407)

The answer to the first riddle is “man,” of course: we crawl on all fours as babies, walk on two feet as adults, and then get around with a stick in our old age. The sisters in the second riddle are Night and Day.

When Oedipus solved the riddle, the Sphinx died. Some versions of the story say she threw herself off a cliff in shame; others say he stabbed her with a spear. At any rate, the throne of Thebes happened to be vacant when Oedipus saved the city, so he was made king.

Digression complete. Let’s get back to CSI: Thebes, shall we?

[music]

At the end of the Chorus’s first song, Oedipus comes back out of the palace and asks the people of Thebes to a) send him tips about who Laius’s murderers could be, or who might know them. He also promises that rewards will be forthcoming to anyone who helps solve the crime, and punishment for anyone who conceals it – or who knowingly socializes with any of the killers. He wraps up this declaration with a stirring, and bitterly ironic, promise:

“I will fight for [Laius]

as for my own father, go to every length

in my determination to catch the killer

of the son of Labdacus…” (Lefkowitz and Romm 274)

The priest who leads the Chorus suggests to Oedipus that he should send for the prophet Tiresias for insight. Oedipus says he’s done that already with a view toward finding out about why Thebes was cursed in the first place, but twice Tiresias refused. However, third time is evidently the charm, because here comes Tiresias, who is blind, led by his servant.

Oedipus greets him courteously, updating him on the situation: He is now aware why the city is cursed and what they have to do to lift that curse; he just needs Tiresias to tell them where to find the murderer or murderers.

Tiresias mutters to himself that he wishes he hadn’t come to Thebes, and that he doesn’t want to say anything. Oedipus is nonplussed: he was not expecting Tiresias to have this attitude. He asks the prophet what’s wrong. Tiresias asks to be sent home. Oedipus, with rising wrath, demands Tiresias tell what he knows about the identity of Laius’ killers. Tiresias insists he won’t, saying: “The future will come of itself, though I shroud it in silence.” (Hadas 89)

Oedipus then decides he understands Tiresias’ motive for not telling him what he wants to know: he, Tiresias, conspired to effect Laius’s death with the killers – why else would he conceal them?

“Is that so?” Tiresias says:

“Then I insist that you abide

by your own proclamation, and from this day

speak neither to these men here nor to me.

For you are the unholy polluter of our land.” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx)

Oedipus flies off the handle at this, as you would, but Tiresias is unflappable, even when Oedipus stoops to taunting him for being blind. “What a sad case you are,” the prophet says to the king, “Taunting me as all these here will soon be taunting you!” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx) But Oedipus’s mind is racing, now, and he jumps to the conclusion that Creon has put Tiresias up to this in order to push Oedipus off the throne.

He rages at Tiresias, accusing him of spouting false prophecies for anyone who’s willing to pay. The priest in charge of the Chorus tries to intervene, but Oedipus and Tiresias go on sniping at each other until Tiresias makes a cryptic remark about having spoken to Oedipus’s parents that puts the king on the back foot.

“Who brought me forth?” demands Oedipus.

“This day will bring you forth, and will destroy you,” Tiresias shoots back.

When Oedipus mutters that he doesn’t get it, Tiresias sneers, “Aren’t you our champion riddle solver?” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx) Then the old prophet declares he really is leaving this time – but first, he repeats and enlarges on his message:

“This man, the one you’ve long

been looking for, with threats and proclamations

about the death of Laius—he’s here, a guest

from abroad, so they say, but soon to emerge

a native Theban, though he’ll take no pleasure

in that discovery! Blind instead of seeing,

beggar instead of rich, he’ll make his way

to a foreign land, feeling the ground with a stick.

And he’ll be found to be both brother and father

to his children, son and husband to

his mother—breeding where his father bred,

having spilled his father’s blood!” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx)

Tiresias finally leaves. And after a moment, so does Oedipus, storming back into the palace to demand answers from his brother-in-law. But you get the sense that there’s already a little uneasiness under the king’s bluster. A little.

[music]

After the chorus debate whether to believe Tiresias’s accusations against Oedipus, Creon returns to the stage. He’s heard that the king has accused him of conspiring with Tiresias to take the throne, and he’s keen to get a read of what Oedipus’s mood was, as well as to clear his name with the people.

Then Oedipus, still on the warpath, comes out and finds his brother-in-law talking with the citizens. He furiously repeats his charges: that Creon has solicited false prophecies to convince the people to overthrow Oedipus. He thunders (again, in what will be a very ironic statement), “If you think you won’t pay for abusing a kinsman, you haven’t thought it through.” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx)

Creon insists he was just following orders by bringing Tiresias to Thebes. He has no designs on the throne – he quite likes having influence without responsibility, actually. He urges Oedipus not to condemn him out of hand. Oedipus swears he’ll have Creon executed. Shouting ensues, and out of the palace comes Oedipus’s wife, Jocasta, who is also Creon’s sister.

She sends the squabbling men to neutral corners. When Oedipus tells her that Creon has had a prophet accuse him of murdering Laius, she scoffs:

“You can call yourself acquitted!

Listen to me and know no mortal man

has any share in arts of prophecy.

I’ll prove it to you, and at no great length.” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx)

Jocasta then tells Oedipus how, when she was pregnant with her and Laius’s child, a prophet foretold that the boy would grow up to murder his father. But Laius had the child’s feet bound together and sent him out to be exposed on a mountainside, and later he was killed by bandits at a place where three roads meet. So, not all prophecies come true, and Oedipus can rest easy.

But Oedipus isn’t resting easy. He’s agitated about the fact that Laius was killed where three roads meet. He presses Jocasta for more details. She describes Laius’s appearance at the time of his murder, and that he was traveling in a horse-drawn wagon attended by five servants, only one of whom – a slave – survived the attack.

Each additional detail sends Oedipus into fresh agonies. He asks Jocasta to send for the surviving slave, and then, while they wait for him to arrive, proceeds to explain why he is in such distress. Oedipus says he is the son of Polybus, king of Corinth, and that when Oedipus was a young man, a drunken dinner guest taunted him, saying Polybus was not his true father. His parents reassured him that this was a lie, but he snuck off to Delphi to speak to the oracle. Instead of revealing the true identity of his parents, the oracle told him that he would sleep with his mother and kill his father.

Greatly disturbed by this, Oedipus exiled himself from Corinth to avoid bringing the prophecy true.

“And on my way,” he says, “I reached the very place where you have said this tyrant met his death. To you, my wife, I’ll tell the truth.” (Lefkowitz and Romm XXX) He describes to her what is basically a road rage incident: one of the servants of the man in the wagon tried to shove Oedipus off the road. As Oedipus struggled with the servant, the man in the wagon hit Oedipus with his staff. Oedipus murdered the man and all his servants. Now he has to hope that the slave who survived the attack on Laius sticks to his story – that there was more than one killer involved.

He and Jocasta retire into the palace. The Chorus sings about the hubris – arrogance, my translation interprets that – of men who think they can defy the fate decreed by the gods, and about how if crimes go unpunished, there may as well not be any gods:

“If he reaps his gains unjustly

or does not run from the unholy,

or if in folly he touches the untouchable.

How can a man so steeped in crimes still find

strength to guard his life from the gods’ bolts?

If deeds like his meet with honor,

why celebrate the gods in dance?” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx)

When they’ve finished, Jocasta comes out of the palace with some of her ladies, and makes offerings of flowers and incense to Apollo. She is praying for her husband when a Messenger arrives. He’s from Corinth: Polybus, Oedipus’s father, is dead.

Jocasta is, perhaps a bit unkindly, pleased to hear this: if Oedipus didn’t kill Polybus as the oracle told him he would, it offers further proof that prophecies aren’t to be taken seriously. She calls her husband out of the palace to share the (very qualified) good news with him. He’s cautiously optimistic, but as his mother, Merope, is still alive, he’s worried about the other part of the prophecy.

Jocasta tells him to stop it:

“Why should a human being live in fear?

Chance rules his life, and nothing is foreknown.

It’s best to live at random, as one can.

 You, too—why dread marrying your mother?

Many before, in dreams as well, have lain

with their mothers. It’s the man to whom all this

means nothing who gets along most easily.” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx)

Clearly Jocasta didn’t listen to the chorus – possibly she couldn’t hear them over the sound of Sigmund Freud madly scribbling notes from his seat in the audience. Anyway. The Messenger butts in. “Sorry,” he says. “I couldn’t help but overhear – what’s this about a prophecy?”

Oedipus tells him: Delphi, prophecy, sleep with my mom, kill my dad.

“Oh, well, let me put your mind at ease!” the Messenger says. “I happen to know that you’re not Polybus and Merope’s son! Long ago a shepherd brought you to me, saying he’d been ordered to leave you for dead on the mountainside. You were just a tiny baby – some cruel person had pinned your feet together, that’s why you’re called oedipus, or swollen-foot. I took the pins out and gave you to Polybus as a gift.” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx-xxx)

And then the Messenger adds that, come to think of it, the shepherd who gave Oedipus to him said he came from Thebes. From Laius, in fact.

“Does anyone know the man he’s talking about?” Oedipus asks the Chorus. The priest who leads the chorus says that this shepherd may actually be the same man who survived the attack on Laius.

Jocasta is suddenly anxious: “By the gods, if you care for your own life, don’t look into this. My sorrows are enough.” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx) Oedipus, however, is now just as determined to understand the riddle of his origins as he was to crack the riddle of the sphinx. She runs into the palace in the greatest distress. But Oedipus assumes her agony merely stems from realizing that she’s likely married a low-born man. He is defiant:

“I will not be dishonored.

I’m the child of Chance, Giver of Good. She’s

my mother, and the months, my brothers,

have marked me out, now small, now great.

Being what I am, I will never prove to be

other than myself, and not learn my birth!” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx)

Oh, buddy.

Now the Shepherd arrives. The Messenger from Corinth confirms that the Shepherd is the same man who gave him Baby Oedipus all those years ago. The Shepherd is suddenly very upset when the Messenger tells him that Oedipus is the foundling, and he refuses to answer any more questions. Oedipus threatens to torture the poor old man, berating him until he finally spills all: he, the Shepherd, received the tiny, helpless child from the hands of Queen Jocasta herself.

Naturally, this wrecks Oedipus. He cries:

“It’s all come out too clear. Light,

may I never look on you again! I’m the one

born to those I shouldn’t have come from, living with those

I shouldn’t live with, killing those I ought not have killed.” (Lefkowitz and Romm xxx)

He stumbles into the palace. The Chorus sings again, lamenting Oedipus’s fate. An attendant comes out of the palace to relate bloody deeds within – remember, in our episodes on Aeschylus, we learned that actors couldn’t stage violent scenes before the audience at the Dionysia.

The attendant describes how Oedipus went roaring through the palace, sword in hand, ready to kill Jocasta. But upon bursting into her room only to discover she’d hanged herself, Oedipus cut her down, plucked a pair of golden brooches from her dress, and gouged his own eyes out with them. The attendant says:

“These evils broke forth not from one, but both,

not separate but mixed together, man

and wife. The happiness of old was truly

happiness back then, but now, and on this day

lamentation, disaster, death, shame—of all

the evils with a name, not one is missing.” (Lefkowitz and Romm XXX)

Oedipus emerges from the palace, blinded, lamenting that he was ever saved from death by the Shepherd. The Chorus wants to know: why has he blinded himself? Why not just kill himself and be done with it? Oedipus, even in extremis, is capable of getting testy with people who try to tell him what to do:

“Don’t lecture me that any of this is not

for the best, or give me any more advice.

For I do not know with what sort of eyes

I’d see my father when I came to Hades,

or my wretched mother—against them both

I have committed crimes too huge for hanging.” (Lefkowitz and Romm XXX)

So that’s them told. Creon returns to the stage. He shows Oedipus nothing but pity – a pretty magnanimous gesture, given that Oedipus had made false accusations against him. Oedipus asks to be banished, and for Creon to see that Jocasta is buried with dignity. He begs Creon to look after his and Jocasta’s daughters – Creon actually has the two girls, Antigone and Ismene, come out to embrace the man they have known as their father – the man now revealed to be their half-brother as well.

Oedipus weeps over them, knowing the shame they will bear for the rest of their lives because of their parentage, and how they will never be able to marry anyone respectable. Creon hands Oedipus to attendants, who take him inside the palace to prepare for exile. His girls exit the stage with Creon.

The chorus addresses the audience one last time, beginning with the verse I shared at the top of the show:

“Dwellers in our native Thebes, behold, this is Oedipus, who knew the famed riddle and was a man most mighty: what citizen did not gaze with envy upon his fortunes? Behold into what a stormy sea of dread trouble he has come.” (Hadas 120)

Their final lines recall the words of Solon the Athenian to King Croesus of Greece – lines Sophocles might have read or heard from Herodotus:

“Therefore, while our eyes wait to see the destined final day, we must call no one happy who is of mortal race, until he has crossed life’s border, free from pain.” (Hadas 120)

[music]

That is the story of Oedipus the King, a play which has moved and chilled and, frankly, disgusted people for thousands of years. Its moral message, if it has one, seems to be that the gods have their own designs for us, and trying to outwit them, as Oedipus did, demonstrates a lack of faith. Even if their designs are horrible beyond our comprehension, all that a mortal can do is submit.

I have read it a few times for this episode, and it’s hard to avoid having the kinds of thoughts you have about a story when your brain has been pickled by too many screenwriting seminars – did Oedipus and Jocasta never talk about his background before the day shown in this play, for example? Wouldn’t this all have come out a lot earlier if they’d asked about each other’s families the way a normal couple would?

But I can also relate to the characterization of Oedipus: a man who has lived and thrived by doggedly applying his powerful intelligence to serious problems is undone by that same doggedness, that same intellectual process. He has, in spite of all his smarts and cunning, stepped blithely into the snare Apollo has set for him – a snare he wasn’t born deserving, but came to deserve nevertheless.

The play’s staying power is staggering when you consider that it was staged once in its day, for a select group of about 18,000 citizens who happened to be at the Dionysia. And not everyone at the time was that enamored of it, obviously: it came second in the competition. There was also, as there always is, a strain of sentiment against the staging of tragic plays generally: in book 10 of Plato’s Republic (coming this autumn to a podcast near you), he includes a long argument against tragedy by Socrates. Socrates’s point is basically that tragic plays, by making people feel strong emotions based on representations of fictional events, lead them away from rationality and the truth.

Tragedy, to Plato, is anti-philosophical, and even anti-moral. A city that puts tragic plays on risks a creating a social order where “pleasure and sorrow will rule in the city instead of law and reason.” (Plato, quoted by Hays in Lefkowitz and Romm 806) Interestingly, Plato was born in 425 BCE, and may have been able to watch some of Sophocles’s late-career productions in person. Socrates, who was likely born around 470, may have seen even more of them – possibly Oedipus Rex itself.

Oedipus Rex’s reputation as the pinnacle of Athenian tragedy owes much to its slightly later champion Aristotle, who wrote about it (and Sophocles more generally) in his highly influential work The Poetics. Anyone who’s taken an ancient lit or drama survey course will be familiar with Aristotle’s “rules” or “features” of a good tragedy. There’s a tragic hero, burdened by a tragic flaw – usually arrogance, or hubris – who watches his or her world fall apart in a single day at a single location. Witnessing these emotions causes a catharsis, a cleansing, in the audience.

The funny thing is that Aristotle lived during the fourth century BCE, a few generations after Sophocles and his colleagues had put on their plays. He was never able to talk to these writers about their goals or their process, and he almost certainly never saw the plays performed – he would only have read them. His Poetics is therefore best seen, as the scholar Gregory Hays wrote in an essay, as the product of “an intelligent and enthusiastic reader, roughly as distant in time from the Oresteia as modern students are from Tosca or The Cherry Orchard.” (Hays, in Lefkowitz and Romm 810)

Aristotle was a fan of a good plot, and Oedipus Rex has a very good one – I joked about it being CSI: Thebes, but it is basically a detective story. His love for it helped keep its flame alive as surely as the school curriculum compilers did.

However, Oedipus Rex didn’t get staged very often, thanks in large part to the incest. There were adapted versions of it that circulated – either softening the sexual transgression or making sure everyone was roundly punished for it – but according to an episode of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex did not get staged in Europe until the late 19^th century.

One of these early productions was around 1890, when the great French stage actor Jean Mounet-Sully played Oedipus in Paris. This production would go on to become one of the most indirectly influential versions of the play in history – not because of its stagecraft or the skill of Monsieur Mounet-Sully, however.

No, this production would change the world because on one night, a Viennese neurologist happened to be in the audience, and watching the play clarified something he’d been thinking about for a long time. But we’ll talk about Sigmund Freud in the next episode.

[music]

That’s it for this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed listening – insofar as one can enjoy listening to some lady recapping a story about a horrible, inescapable fate. Now. Do I think you should read this play if you haven’t? Of course I do. I have an old paperback version by Bantam, which uses a translation by R.C. Jebb – it’s mostly in prose, and I liked it: plenty of dramatic thunder, but clear enough to follow. There are also translations by Robert Fagles, who translated one of the versions of the Oresteia that I read for our show, and one from 2022 by Emily Wilson, who produced the wonderful verse translation of The Iliad that I read way back when we did Homer.

Next time, we’ll be looking at one of the weirdest legacies of this play: the Oedipus Complex, Freud’s psychoanalytical theory that all boys feel a desire to kill their fathers and make love to their mothers. We’ll also be looking at how Freud used stories as a way into understanding – or at least theorising – about the human psyche. Plato and Socrates surely would have disapproved. Join me on Thursday, June 12^th for Episode 34: “Oedipus Rex, Part 2: The Soil Your Father Sowed.”

Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough, John Cole and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.

References and Works Cited:

Bragg, Melvyn, et. al. In Our Time: Oedipus Rex. BBC Radio 4, 6 July 2023.

Grimal, Pierre, and A. R. Maxwell-Hyslop. The Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

Lefkowitz, Mary R., and James S. Romm. The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Modern Library/Random House, 2017.

Poole, Adrian. Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions). Oxford University Press, 2005.

Sophocles. The Complete Plays of Sophocles. Edited by Moses Hadas. Translated by R. C. Jebb, Bantam Dell, 2006.

Struck, Peter. Greek & Roman Mythology – Greek Tragedy, www2.classics.upenn.edu/myth/php/tragedy/index.php?page=sophocles.