Antigone / Oedipus the King / Electra

by Sophocles

  Antigone

  Of all Sophocles’ tragedies Antigone is the most overtly political, in that it directly confronts problems involved in running a polis, a city-state. The ancients already recognized this; a tradition emerged that Sophocles’ election to the generalship in 441/0 was a direct result of the success of the play.27 In modern times the political element has inspired numerous adaptations and productions, often anachronistically portraying Antigone as a liberal individualist shaking her little fist against a totalitarian state: she has been made to protest against everything from Nazism (especially in the versions by Jean Anouilh of 1944 and Bertolt Brecht of 1948) to eastern-bloc communism, South African apartheid, and British imperialism in Ireland.28

  The action of the play, although occupying first place in this volume, should, according to a strict observance of ‘mythical time’, occur later than that of Oedipus the King. It is set in Thebes, a mainland Greek city-state to the north of Athens and in reality anti-democratic and hostile to her; the Athenian dramatists typically displaced or ‘expatriated’ to Thebes political strife, tyranny, and domestic chaos.29 Antigone opens at a moment of political crisis caused directly by internecine warfare. King Oedipus and Iocasta, now deceased, had four children, Polyneices, Eteocles, Antigone, and Ismene. The two sons quarrelled over the kingship of Thebes, and Polyneices was driven into exile; Eteocles was left ruling Thebes, apparently with the support of the brothers’ maternal uncle Creon. Polyneices formed an alliance with the king of the important Peloponnesian city of Argos (where Electra is set), and raised a force with which to attack his own city. The assault failed, but in the battle Polyneices and Eteocles killed each other.

  The tragedy begins at dawn after the Theban victory; Creon, as the nearest surviving male relative of the two sons of Oedipus, has now assumed power. The play enacts the catastrophic events which take place on his first day in office; it ironically demonstrates the truth of his own inaugural speech, in which he pronounces that no man’s character can be known ‘Until he has been proved by government | And lawgiving’ (p. 8). For the very first law which Creon passes—that the body of the traitor Polyneices is to be refused burial—is in direct contravention of the ‘Unwritten Law’ protecting the rights of the dead; it precipitates, moreover, not only the death of his disobedient niece Antigone, who buries the corpse, but also the suicides of his own son Haemon and of Creon’s wife Eurydice.

  Antigone explores the difficult path any head of state must tread between clear leadership and despotism. It has sometimes been argued that Creon’s law was defensible, given the divisive nature of the civil war which had blighted Thebes and the urgent need for a firm hand on the rudder of government.30 Funerals, as politicians everywhere know, can spark off insurrection. It is even possible to see Creon’s failure to achieve heroic stature, at least in human terms, as a result simply of his unsteadiness in the face of opposition. For he is, above all, erratic: having decided that Ismene is as guilty as Antigone, he then changes his mind about her. He vacillates wildly about Antigone’s fate: the original edict decreed death by stoning, but at one point he is going to have her executed publicly in front of Haemon; finally he opts for entombing her alive, but eventually revokes even this decision. He is the perfect example of the type of tragic character Aristotle described as ‘consistently inconsistent’ (Poetics, ch. 15).

  Thinkers contemporary with Sophocles were involved in the development of a political theory to match the needs of the new Athenian democracy. One concept being developed was that of homonoia or ‘same-mindedness’, according to which laws are ideally the results of a consensual or contractual agreement made by all the citizens of a state.31 Creon’s law was passed autocratically, without homonoia, and his increasingly domineering attitude towards the views of others renders the disastrous outcome of his reign, and of the play, inevitable. As his own son puts it, ‘The man | Who thinks that he alone is wise, that he | Is best in speech or counsel, such a man | Brought to the proof is found but emptiness’ (pp. 25–6).

  Creon is ‘brought to the proof, however, not by civic disagreement articulated in the male arenas of council or assembly, but by a young female relative. This completely incenses him. Her goal is not political influence; she is simply obeying the divine law which laid on family members—especially women—the solemn duty of performing funeral rites for their kin. The mysterious, and often arrogant, Antigone is as inflexible as Creon is erratic; as the chorus comments, ‘The daughter shows her father’s temper—fierce, | Defiant; she will not yield to any storm’ (p. 17). It is Creon’s misfortune that she happens to be not only Oedipus’ daughter, but Creon’s own niece and his son’s fiancée. This calls the conventional dichotomy of public and private life into profound question; Creon cannot keep his two worlds separate, and the drama shows that they are as inextricably intertwined as the corpses of Antigone and Haemon, locked in a bizarre travesty of a nuptial embrace. If the play has a moral, it is that when political expediency cannot accommodate familial obligations and ritual observance of ancestral law, its advocates are courting disaster.

  Oedipus the King

  In recent times this definitive tragedy has been brought to a wider audience than ever before by a cinematic adaptation, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s atmospheric Edipo Re (1967), which, appropriately in our post-Freudian era, concentrates on the hero’s private psychological and emotional self-discovery.32 But Oedipus the King (sometimes known by its Latinized name as Oedipus Rex) was previously reinvented, especially in pre-revolutionary France, as a treatise on government.33 And indeed, although less transparently political than Antigone, it meditates on a similar difficult issue in statecraft: the via media between decisive leadership and excessive self-confidence.

  This aspect of the play is somewhat obscured in translation: the Greek title and several passages actually call Oedipus a turannos. This is an ambiguous word, from which our ‘tyrant’ is derived, but whose meaning in Sophocles’ time was unstable. It oscillated between ‘a ruler who has attained to power, not by inheritance, but by popular support’ (which Oedipus thinks he has, although he is ironically later revealed as the true son of the former hereditary king of Thebes), and the more value-laden and pejorative ‘despot’ (which Oedipus is in danger of becoming). The play’s interest in the psychology of the turannos is expressed in Oedipus’ monologue on the fears besetting those in power (pp. 61—2), and culminates in the enigmatic central ode, in which the chorus sings, ‘Pride makes the tyrant—pride of wealth | And power, too great for wisdom and restraint’ (p. 78).

  The action takes place perhaps a decade earlier in mythical time than that of Antigone. It also opens with the city of Thebes in crisis, but on this occasion the reason is plague. The opening tableau portrays the priests and other Thebans entreating their king, Oedipus, who had previously saved them from the monstrous Sphinx by solving her famous riddle, to find a way to cure the disease. It is the irony of the play that in this he is successful, but only by bringing utter catastrophe upon himself, for it is none but he who has unwittingly caused the city’s afflictions.

  Twentieth-century scholarship has continually reassessed the relationships in Sophocles between fate and freewill, character and action.34 The litmus test is always the unforgettable story of the lame king who becomes a scapegoat, and who blinds himself at the precise point when he is no longer blind to the truth of which his audience, in this paradigmatic exercise in dramatic irony, has been painfully aware all along. Oedipus was doomed before he was born to kill his father and marry his mother, and commits both crimes unwittingly. Some interpreters see him as a virtuous man, through whom Sophocles shows the absolute injustice (from a human perspective) of divine preordinance; others point to the unattractive sides of his character—his temper, his paranoia, the way he threatens Teiresias, Creon, and the Theban with arbitrary punishment, and his arrogant conviction that his intellect can surmount any obstacles in his, or his city’s path. This view renders Oedipus somehow culpable after th
e event; his fate is rendered justifiable by his abrasive personality.

  Yet both views oversimplify the sophisticated dialectics of the Sophoclean negotiations between character, action, and responsibility. Although the Greeks had none of the Christian cognitive machinery which lies behind, for example, Renaissance drama, a limited psychological vocabulary, and only an embryonic notion of the autonomous individual will, Sophocles still makes it entirely plausible that tragic victims can only bring their fates upon themselves because of the type of people that they are. If Oedipus had not been a self-sufficient individual, confident in his ability to escape the dreadful destiny the Delphic oracle had revealed to him as a youth, he would never have left Corinth, the city in which he grew up, and the couple he believed to be his natural parents. If he had not been a proud and daring man, he would not have retaliated single-handedly against the travellers, including his real father Laius, who tried to push him off the road at the triple junction between Thebes and Delphi. He certainly would not have killed them. If he had not been a man of searching intellect and sense of civic responsibility, he could never have solved the riddle of the supernatural Sphinx and released Thebes from servitude, thus meriting election to kingship of the very city of his birth and marriage to its queen. It is the same public spirit and curiosity which drives Oedipus on to solve the new riddle—who killed king Laius?—and thence to the discovery of the horrifying truth. The play’s agonizingly slow accumulation of the ‘facts’ of the past simultaneously builds up a picture of Oedipus’ egregious personality. The magisterial subtlety of Sophoclean characterization thus lends credibility to the breathtaking coincidences which led to his hero’s unconscious breaching of fundamental taboos. Oedipus can only fulfil his exceptional god-ordained destiny because Oedipus is a pre-eminently capable and intelligent human being.

  Electra

  Sophocles’ Electra, of whose numerous adaptations perhaps the most familiar today is Richard Strauss’s searing opera Elektra (1909),35 is the only surviving Sophoclean tragedy set at Mycenae, somewhat inaccurately conflated with another Peloponnesian city-state, Argos. The fortunes of the Argive dynasty were popular with the ancient dramatists: Aeschylus and Euripides, the other two great Athenian tragedians, portrayed their versions of the same myth in their Libation Bearers (458 BC, the second play of the Oresteia) and Electra (undated, though possibly earlier than Sophocles’ play), respectively. The action of Sophocles’ tragedy takes place on a day perhaps fifteen years after the king of the city, Agamemnon, returned from the Trojan war to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus (also Agamemnon’s first cousin), who had jointly usurped his power. The crisis awaiting resolution in this play is less political than domestic; Agamemnon and Clytemnestra’s son Orestes, with his sister Electra’s fullest co-operation, takes vengeance on his father’s murderers by killing them in return.

  The central question in the other two playwrights’ versions of the story of Orestes’ revenge is the justice of his actions. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia he is pursued by his mother’s vengeance spirits (known in Greek as ‘Erinyes’ though more familiar in their Latin guise as ‘Furies’), but is eventually tried for the murder, and acquitted by Athena, who is carrying out the will of her father Zeus. In the torrid psychological world of Euripides, on the other hand, the two siblings decline into guilt, remorse, and misery. Yet Sophocles appears, on a superficial reading, to have put his individual stamp on the story by completely exonerating the matricide; there is no explicit prediction in the text that Orestes is to be hounded by the Erinyes, put on trial, or that he or Electra will suffer any consequences at all.

  The play has therefore usually been seen as a morally uncomplicated vindication of the divine law that a death within the family must be punished by another death, and a fulfilment of the matricidal injunction given to Orestes by Apollo at Delphi. This view asserts that the play’s focus is, rather, on the psychological disturbances undergone by Electra. Sophocles certainly found an effective dramatic vehicle in this remarkable figure, driven by deprivation and cruelty into near-psychotic extremes of behaviour; no other character in his extant dramas dominates the stage to such an extent. In contrast, Orestes seems two-dimensional. Sophocles seduces his audience into a quasi-voyeuristic enjoyment of Electra’s obsession with the past, her despair, her anger, her embarrassingly demonstrative recognition of her brother and her correspondingly bloodthirsty exultation at the deaths of her persecutors.

  This line of interpretation fails, however, to do justice to the irony and ambivalence of the play’s comment on the ancient story. Electra’s speech in her great debate with her mother, for example, throws up several hints that the play’s ethics are not as simple as they seem. She is quite shockingly dismissive of her mother’s claim that her murder of Agamemnon was an act of retribution for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigeneia. She also articulates the principle of retributive killing, ’Blood in return for blood’ (p. 123); an attentive audience must realize that intra-familial murder, by this law, is bound to result in an endless cycle of violence down the generations. If Clytemnestra is killed, her blood too must ultimately be avenged. Sophocles even obliquely suggests candidates to take on this responsibility, by attributing children to her by Aegisthus; according to Electra’s own principle, they must sooner or later avenge their own parents’ deaths.

  Even more sinister are the words of Aegisthus (unusually credited with prophetic powers), which reverberate around the theatre at the end of the play. Just before he enters the palace to his death, he enigmatically laments that it must ‘behold | Death upon death, those now and those to come’ (p. 155). Sophocles provides no solution to the contradictions inherent in the archaic system of reciprocal murder. He neither condemns nor condones the killing of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. But he does ironically undermine the apparently complacent closure of his portrayal of this outstandingly familiar myth. Surely Nabokov was correct in commenting that the ‘effect of a play cannot be final when it ends with murder’.36

  Background

  The texts seem to inhabit a time-warp between fifth-century Athens and the present. Since Aristotle, critics have stressed the universality of their meanings and the timelessness of their imports; but there are more rigorous ways of explaining their apparent modernity. One is to appeal to historical relativism. Every generation listens to the ancient world and hears new resonances in tune with its own contingent preoccupations; perhaps it is tragedy’s very susceptibility to reinterpretation which lends it its aura of universality. Another approach is to concede that the influence of these archetypal dramas has actually allowed them to transcend history. They seem familiar precisely because they have been so consistently emulated. Despite the changes which have taken place in drama, the alterations in perspective which are connected with the historical contexts of its later practitioners, it remains umbilically attached to the ancient theatre. Greek tragedy has exerted such a profound influence on European aesthetic categories—often via its Latin adaptations by Seneca—that it has moulded all later drama. The great classical scholar Jean-Pierre Vernant compares the legacy of Greek thought. Philosophers must still use the vocabulary and types of argument which first took shape in ancient Greece; similarly, subsequent western dramatists have not been able to avoid locating themselves, whether by imitation or rejection, in or against a tradition founded by the playwrights of classical Athens.37

  Recent criticism has, however, tried to scrape off the barnacles of meaning with which reinterpretation and their status as Classics have encrusted these texts, and to relocate them in their own time and place.38 However powerful their impact may still be, the social structures implicit within them to a varying degree have vanished from western experience.

  Tragedy was invented in Athens a few decades before the birth of Sophocles. Albert Camus said that a necessary condition for the production of tragedy was a time of transition ‘between a sacred society and a society built by man’,39 and in the case of Atheni
an tragedy this perception is strikingly apposite. The rise of tragedy coincided historically with the Athenian democratic revolution. Rich and prominent families were forced by a series of uprisings and reforms, notably those of Cleisthenes in 508 BC, to transfer much of their power to the body of Athenian citizens. The central institution of pre-democratic Athens had been the extended family; with the rise of the democracy the claims of the state, the collective citizenship, began to challenge the claims of blood-kinship. With this radical change in the political and social situation there had to come changes in the values, ideas, and ideals of the community. As the notion of the citizen was forced into the centre of the conceptual universe, as the natural rights of the aristocracy to ascendancy began to be questioned, so the archaic religious imperatives were increasingly eroded and humanity took central place on the intellectual and ideological stage. Democracy was a man-made political order; the Athenians became increasingly aware of their own power to create their own destiny. Some thinkers even began to question, if not the existence of the gods, then certainly their power to affect human life: Protagoras, for example, a philosopher working in Athens, whose ideas have come down to us in the form of a Platonic dialogue named after him, famously declared that man was the measure of all things. He traced the evolution of humankind from the status of victim of nature to master of nature, in a linear progression towards the civilization of the democratic city-state—an idea which seems to have influenced Sophocles and finds expression in the great second choral ode of Antigone, ‘Wonders are many, yet of all | Things is Man the most wonderful’ (p. 13).