Oedipus the King

Oedipus the King is the most perfectly constructed tragedy ever written, and the most famous. In about ninety minutes of stage time, a great king, determined to save his city from plague by finding the murderer of his predecessor, conducts an investigation — the first detective story in literature — and discovers, step by step, that the murderer is himself, that the man he killed was his father, and that the woman he married is his mother. At the end, he puts out his own eyes.

For Aristotle it was the model of tragedy. For Freud it was the key to the human mind. For philosophers it is the supreme drama of knowledge — of the man who solved the riddle of the Sphinx but could not see who he was.

Background: the myth

The audience in Athens knew the story. Laius, king of Thebes, was warned by the oracle of Apollo at Delphi that any son he had with his wife Jocasta would kill him. When a son was born, Laius pinned the baby’s ankles together and gave him to a shepherd to expose on Mount Cithaeron. The shepherd, out of pity, gave the child to a shepherd from Corinth, who brought him to the childless king and queen of Corinth, Polybus and Merope. They named him Oedipus (“swollen foot”) and raised him as their son.

As a young man, Oedipus heard a drunk at a banquet call him a bastard. He went to Delphi to ask who his parents were; the oracle did not answer, but told him he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified, he resolved never to return to Corinth. On the road, at a place where three roads meet, an old man in a chariot with attendants tried to force him off the road and struck him; Oedipus killed him and all but one of his men.

Arriving at Thebes, he found the city terrorized by the Sphinx, a monster with a woman’s head and a lion’s body, who devoured all who failed to answer her riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? Oedipus answered: Man — who crawls as a baby, walks upright as an adult, and leans on a stick in old age. The Sphinx threw herself from a cliff. Thebes, whose king Laius had recently been killed by robbers on the road, made Oedipus king and gave him the widowed queen Jocasta in marriage. They had four children: Eteocles, Polyneices, Antigone and Ismene.

Many years later, the play begins.

Synopsis

A plague has struck Thebes: crops wither, cattle die, women give birth to stillborn children. Before the royal palace a crowd of suppliants, led by an old priest, begs Oedipus — “first of men”, who saved them once from the Sphinx — to save them again. Oedipus, compassionate and decisive, has already acted: he has sent his brother-in-law Creon to Delphi to ask Apollo what to do. Creon returns with the oracle: the plague is caused by pollution — the murderer of King Laius lives in Thebes unpunished. He must be driven out or killed.

Oedipus takes charge of the investigation. Before the chorus of Theban elders he pronounces a solemn curse on the unknown murderer: may he be banished, shunned by all, his life wretched — even if he is found in Oedipus’s own house. Every word of the curse falls, unknowingly, on himself.

On Creon’s advice he sends for the blind prophet Tiresias. Tiresias arrives reluctantly and refuses to speak: “How terrible it is to know, when knowledge brings no profit to the knower.” Oedipus, enraged, accuses him of plotting the murder himself. Tiresias, provoked, speaks plainly: “You are the murderer you seek.” He goes further, in riddles: the man they seek will be found to be “brother and father of the children he lives with, son and husband of the woman who bore him”. Oedipus mocks his blindness; Tiresias answers that Oedipus has eyes and does not see the evil he lives in, and that soon he too will be blind. Oedipus concludes that Creon has bribed the prophet to overthrow him.

Creon comes to defend himself; Oedipus accuses him of treason and condemns him to death. Creon replies with a reasoned speech: why would he want the burdens of kingship, when he already has its benefits without its cares? Jocasta comes out and stops the quarrel. Learning that it began with a prophecy, she tries to reassure her husband: prophecies are worthless. An oracle once said Laius would be killed by his own son; but Laius was killed by robbers “at a place where three roads meet” — and their only son was exposed on the mountain as a baby.

At the words “where three roads meet”, Oedipus goes cold. He questions her: where? when? what did Laius look like? how many men were with him? Every answer matches his memory. He tells her his own story — Corinth, the drunk, the oracle, the old man at the crossroads. One hope remains: the one survivor of Laius’s party, a servant, reported that robbers, plural, killed the king. If he sticks to that story, Oedipus is innocent. They send for him — he is now a shepherd in the hills; on seeing Oedipus on the throne, years ago, he begged to be sent far from the city.

Jocasta prays to Apollo. A messenger arrives from Corinth with what he thinks is good news: King Polybus has died of old age, and the Corinthians want Oedipus as their king. Jocasta exults: the oracle was false — Oedipus did not kill his father! Oedipus too feels relief — but he still fears the other half of the prophecy, marrying his mother, since Merope still lives. Jocasta delivers a famous speech: why should we fear, when chance rules our lives? “Many men have slept with their mothers in their dreams.” The messenger, trying to help, says: you need not fear Merope — she is not your mother. Polybus was not your father either. He himself received Oedipus as a baby, with his ankles pierced, from a shepherd of Laius on Mount Cithaeron.

Jocasta understands everything. She begs Oedipus to stop the search: “For the love of the gods, if you care for your life, do not search into this.” He refuses; he thinks she fears he will be revealed as low-born. “Unhappy man — may you never know who you are!” she cries, and runs into the palace. Oedipus, exalted, declares himself “the child of Fortune”.

The old shepherd of Laius arrives — the same man who survived the crossroads, and the same man who carried the baby to the mountain. He tries to deny everything. Oedipus threatens him with torture. At last, the truth: the baby came from the house of Laius; it was said to be his own child; Jocasta herself gave it to him to destroy, because of an oracle that the child would kill its father. “Why did you give it to this old man?” “Out of pity.”

Oedipus cries: “Oh, oh! All is clear now. O light, may I look upon you for the last time — I who have been revealed as born of those I should not, living with those I should not, killing those I should not!” He rushes into the palace.

The chorus sings of human happiness as a shadow: “O generations of mortals, I count your life as equal to nothing.” A second messenger comes out to report what happened inside. Jocasta, in the bedroom, tore her hair, cried out to Laius, and hanged herself. Oedipus burst in, shouting for a sword, found her hanging, cut her down — and tearing the golden brooches from her robe, drove the pins into his eyes again and again, crying that they would no longer see the evils he had suffered and done, and the blood ran down his face in a dark shower.

The blind Oedipus comes out. The chorus can hardly look at him. He laments; he wishes he had died on Mount Cithaeron. Asked why he blinded himself rather than die, he answers that he could not have faced his father and mother in the underworld, nor looked at his children, nor his city. Creon, now ruler, arrives — not to gloat, but to do what is right: he will consult the oracle. Oedipus begs to be exiled, and to touch his young daughters, Antigone and Ismene, one last time; he weeps over them, foreseeing that no one will marry them because of their shameful birth. Creon has them led away. The chorus ends:

Look, citizens of Thebes: this is Oedipus, who knew the famous riddle and was the mightiest of men… see into what a stormy sea of terrible trouble he has come. Therefore, while a mortal waits to see that final day, count no one happy until he has crossed the boundary of life without suffering pain.

Characters

• Oedipus — king of Thebes; intelligent, compassionate, decisive, quick-tempered, relentless in pursuit of truth.
• Jocasta — queen, his wife and (unknown to them) his mother; sceptical of oracles.
• Creon — Jocasta’s brother; reasonable, loyal, later king (and the tyrant of Antigone).
• Tiresias — the blind prophet who sees the truth.
• The Messenger from Corinth — who brings good news that becomes the worst news.
• The Shepherd — servant of Laius, the last witness.
• The Chorus — elders of Thebes.

Themes

Knowledge

The play is the tragedy of the man who must know. Oedipus’s great virtue — his intelligence and determination to find the truth whatever it costs — is exactly what destroys him. Every attempt to stop him (Tiresias, Jocasta, the Shepherd) fails because he will not stop. The riddle of the Sphinx was “what is man?”; Oedipus answered it in general and failed to answer it for himself. See Knowledge and the Great Question What Are the Limits of the Human Mind?.

Sight and blindness

The blind prophet sees; the clear-sighted king is blind. When Oedipus finally sees, he puts out his eyes. The imagery of light and darkness runs through the whole play.

Fate and freedom

Was Oedipus free? The oracle foretold everything, and everything came true. But no one forced him: every step — leaving Corinth, killing the old man, investigating the murder — was his own choice, flowing from his character. The play shows fate fulfilled through free action, not against it — which is why it is a tragedy and not merely a catastrophe. See Fate & Necessity and the Great Question Are We Free?.

Guilt and innocence

Oedipus did not know whom he killed or whom he married. By modern standards he is innocent. But Greek religion recognized pollution (miasma) — the objective stain of a terrible deed, whatever the intention — and Oedipus’s horror is at what he is, not at what he meant. In Oedipus at Colonus, the old Oedipus defends himself: he acted in ignorance. The tension between objective guilt and subjective innocence makes the play endlessly debatable. See Guilt & Redemption.

The limits of reason

Jocasta rejects oracles; Oedipus trusts his own intelligence. The play, written in the age of the Sophists and Socrates, seems to warn against the arrogance of rationalism: the gods’ truth prevails. Yet it is Oedipus’s rational investigation that uncovers it.

Form

Oedipus the King is the supreme example of dramatic irony: the audience knows the truth from the start, and every word Oedipus speaks — the curse on the murderer, “I will fight for Laius as if he were my father” — carries a meaning he does not intend. Its plot is an inexorable sequence in which each new piece of evidence tightens the trap, and in which, as Aristotle noted, the reversal (peripeteia — the messenger’s “good news” turning to disaster) coincides with the recognition (anagnōrisis — Oedipus learning who he is).

Interpretations

• Aristotle (Poetics, c. 335 BCE): the best tragedy has a complex plot with reversal and recognition, and a hero who is neither wholly good nor bad but falls through some hamartia (error) — Oedipus’s ignorance, or his rashness. Pity and fear produce catharsis.
• Hegel (Aesthetics): the tragedy of the “right of the wide-awake consciousness” — what a man does knowingly — against the deeper unconscious reality of what he has done.
• Nietzsche (Birth of Tragedy §9): Oedipus, solver of riddles and violator of nature, embodies the Dionysian wisdom that “whoever plunges nature into the abyss of destruction by his knowledge must also experience the dissolution of nature in himself”.
• Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900): the play moves us because it fulfils our childhood wishes — “it is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and murderous wish against our father” — the Oedipus complex. Freud also cites Jocasta’s line about men sleeping with their mothers in dreams.
• Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, 1972): Oedipus as the ambiguous figure of the tyrant and the scapegoat (pharmakos), both god-like and polluted.
• Bernard Knox (Oedipus at Thebes, 1957): Oedipus as the image of Athens itself — brilliant, energetic, confident in human intelligence, heading for a fall.

Legacy

Seneca wrote a gory Latin Oedipus; Corneille, Voltaire, Dryden and Cocteau (The Infernal Machine, 1934) rewrote it; Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927) set a Latin libretto by Cocteau; Pasolini filmed it (Edipo re, 1967). The detective story — in which the investigator discovers that he himself is implicated — descends from it, through Chinatown and Angel Heart. “Oedipal” is in every language.

Lines to carry

• “How terrible it is to know, when knowledge brings no profit to the knower.” — Tiresias
• “You are the murderer you seek.” — Tiresias
• “Many men have slept with their mothers in their dreams.” — Jocasta
• “May you never know who you are!” — Jocasta
• “Count no one happy until he has crossed the boundary of life without pain.” — the Chorus

Using Oedipus in conversation

• On self-knowledge: the man who solved the riddle of humanity but not of himself.
• On investigations that backfire: the search for the culprit that ends with the investigator.
• On fate and choice: every step was free, and the oracle came true.
• On moral luck: can you be guilty of what you did not know you did?