by Sophocles
My god. What is this?
AEGISTHUS flinches as he reveals KLYTEMNESTRA’s body.
ORESTES
Scare you? An unfamiliar face?
AEGISTHUS
These men! Have got me—I’ve stumbled
into a net with no way out. Who are they?
ORESTES
Haven’t you realized by now “the dead”— 1790
as you perversely called them—are alive?
AEGISTHUS
(pauses a beat)
Oh yes. That’s a puzzle I’ve solved.
This must be Orestes I’m talking to.
ORESTES
How come, though you’re a discerning
prophet, we deceived you so long?
AEGISTHUS
We’re done. Ruined. But
give me just one brief word . . .
ELEKTRA
For gods’ sake, brother,
don’t let him talk!
You’ll get a speech! 1800
He’s going to die.
What good does it do
to drag this out?
Kill him now. Throw his corpse
somewhere way out of sight—
scavengers will give him
the burial he deserves.
Nothing else will free me
from all I’ve been through.
ORESTES
(to AEGISTHUS)
Get inside! Now! Move! This isn’t 1810
a debate, it’s an execution.
AEGISTHUS
Then why force me inside? If what
you plan is just, why do it in the dark?
What stops you killing me right here?
ORESTES
Don’t give me orders. We’re going where
you killed my father! You’ll die there!
AEGISTHUS
Must this house witness all the murders
our family’s suffered—and those still to come?
ORESTES
This house will witness yours.
That much I can predict. 1820
AEGISTHUS
Your father lacked the foresight you boast of.
ORESTES
More words. You’re stalling. Go.
AEGISTHUS
After you.
ORESTES
Go in first.
AEGISTHUS
Afraid I’ll escape?
ORESTES
(to AEGISTHUS in a calm, confiding tone)
No. To keep you from dying
where you choose. I want your death
to be bitter and without mercy.
Justice should always be instant—
for anyone who breaks the law. 1830
Justice dealt by the sword
will keep evil in check.
CHORUS
(facing the palace façade)
House of Atreus, you’ve survived
so much grief, but what’s been
accomplished today sets you free.
ALL leave, except ELEKTRA, who remains, standing alone, until the lights dim or the curtain falls.
Oedipus the King
INTRODUCTION
“SOMETHING . . . I REMEMBER . . . WAKES UP TERRIFIED”
The story of a man named Oedipus who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother goes back at least to Homer.1 Epic poets and Athenian playwrights in classical times found the story irresistible, and scores tried their hands at it, including Sophocles’ contemporaries Aeschylus and Euripides, whose versions survive only in scattered lines or lists of plays produced. Aristotle was fascinated by Sophocles’ version. He referred to it often, analyzed its craft astutely, and cited it as the finest example of the playwright’s art. Its centrality continues. Because so much of our cultural tradition radiates from it, and because the nerves it touches are so sensitive and its issues so immense, Oedipus the King still provokes passionate debate. Is Oedipus, prophesied by Apollo to commit patricide and father children with his mother, truly innocent or in some sense guilty? What does the play imply about the nature of divinity, the family, and the human psyche? If this is the ultimate tragedy, how should we define tragedy? Answers to these questions fill many splendid books that discuss the qualities underlying the play’s greatness. Such scholarship has been indispensable to me in making this translation, particularly Richard Jebb’s and Thomas Gould’s translations with commentary.
In Sophocles’ time, most Greeks believed the fate of an individual was bound up with a daimon, a divinity that presided over every person’s life. The Greek word for happiness, eudaimonia, meaning “well-daimoned,” implies that a person so blessed might be permanently protected. But a daimon could quickly and just as often devastate an individual or an entire family. One abiding question Oedipus the King asks is whether Oedipus controls his own destiny or whether Apollo and/or a personal divinity, or daimon, does.
Sophocles deploys two metaphors to establish his own implicit answer. The first is a common Greek metaphor for a king, general, or statesman—he’s a helmsman facing trouble in a storm. This image supports our confidence that a resourceful leader can handle threats from gods or mortals. Oedipus and (initially) all the characters, except the seer Tiresias, view Oedipus as a courageous sailor who can weather problems churned up in his stormy life. But Oedipus’ superior intelligence proves of no use in riding out the diabolical dangers he confronts.
The second metaphor appears in a succession of images that show the daimon as a dynamic force: it leaps, strikes, or plunges directly at its target. As Oedipus commits each act of violence throughout the play, the daimon destroying him would be seen by a Greek audience as present in each blow Oedipus delivers or receives. This audience would also understand that each blow Oedipus struck would, as his life played out, be seen as a blow he struck against himself. Thus Oedipus’ consultation with the Delphic oracle, his fatal attack on his father, the sexual mounting of his mother/wife, and his self-blinding near the play’s end (when he plunges the pins of Jokasta’s brooch into his eyes), as well as the search he undertakes for his true father and for Laios’ killer, are all physical aspects of one divine intent: they are blows Apollo struck through Oedipus’ own actions that guilefully manipulate Oedipus’ proactive nature until it destroys him. Apollo has made Oedipus both his weapon and his victim. Throughout the play, the presence of his daimon looms continually in echoes, double meanings, and ironies.
The play opens with Oedipus well established as the king of Thebes. Some fifteen years have passed since Apollo revealed his terrifying prediction to Oedipus, who then refused to return to his home in Korinth. Heading toward Thebes, Oedipus struck and killed a man who attacked him at a three-way intersection, leaving as well the rest of the man’s traveling companions for dead. That man, King Laios of Thebes, will prove to be Oedipus’ father. When Oedipus, shortly after the violence at the crossroads, risked his life and used his wits to rid Thebes of the Sphinx that tortured the city, grateful Thebans asked him to assume the kingship. He accepted and married Jokasta, Laios’ widow, who eventually bore Oedipus’ four children.
Now an epidemic has struck Thebes, and the cure requires solving the mystery of Laios’ murder. As the investigator, Oedipus naturally refers to himself as the hunter. As he comes closer to discovering his own responsibility, we realize Oedipus is the one being hunted. The audience (who will be familiar with the Oedipus myth) feels the daimon’s effect in the first scene, when Oedipus tells his people that though each of them is sick, none is so sick as he, and again when Jokasta’s brother Kreon describes Laios’ disappearance: “He told us his journey would take him / into god’s presence. He never came back” (129–130). The word expanded and translated with the phrase “take him into god’s presence” is theoros, which normally refers to a pilgrim or devotee who sees or takes part in a holy event or rite. By using that word, Kreon implies that Laios’ destination was Delphi. But by not naming Delphi, Sophocles can use the inclusiveness of the word theoros to suggest that “god�
��s presence” might be manifest in a consultation with Apollo at Delphi or in an out-of-control encounter on a road.
In the middle of a speech in which Jokasta intends to prove Oedipus’ innocence, she supplies the detail that informs Oedipus of his almost certain guilt. Long ago, a prophecy warned “that Laios was destined to die / at the hands of a son born to him and me. / Yet, as rumor had it, foreign bandits / killed Laios at a place where three roads meet” (829–832). Hearing those last words strikes Oedipus a physical blow, as Jokasta instantly notices. (An actor portraying Oedipus should react to her speech: perhaps start, stare, freeze, or shudder.) Jokasta asks him about his reaction. He replies, “Just now, something you said made my heart race. / Something . . . I remember . . . wakes up terrified” (844–845). He proceeds to tell his wife in detail how he left Korinth, visited Apollo at Delphi, and killed a man on his way to Thebes.
The play’s spare, ingenious, and suspenseful plot, its bravura characterizations, unflagging eloquence, and terrifying subject set it apart. But how this artistry intensifies the terror is worth pursuing. We learn, well into the play, that Apollo’s priests at Delphi communicated an existential threat to Oedipus’ parents: their newborn would kill his father. Jokasta and Laios took an immediate preventive measure by giving the infant to a shepherd with instructions to expose him far from Thebes on the mountain where Laios’ flocks grazed. But the shepherd, moved by compassion, disobeyed and gave the infant to a fellow shepherd from Korinth. Clearly Oedipus’ parents did not take into account how human kindness might upset their plans—and Apollo was perfectly willing to use such kindness to outwit his victims.
Meanwhile, Oedipus conceptualizes the task of finding Laios’ killers: “unless I can mesh some clue I hold / with something known of the killer, I will / be tracking him alone, on a cold trail” (265–267). Symbolon, the word translated as “clue,” was a physical object, part of a larger whole, typically a jagged potsherd (ostrakon) that would fit with another potsherd to authenticate a message brought by a stranger, for instance, or to reunite long-lost kin. By simply using the word symbolon, Sophocles invokes the context of a child finding its lost parents. As the action unfolds, Oedipus will “mesh” many clues, but the decisive fit occurs when two men meet onstage after many years: the compassionate Theban herdsman and his friend, the Korinthian shepherd who took Oedipus from him and then saw to it that the child would be raised by King Polybos of Korinth.
This same Korinthian now brings news that seems to prove Apollo’s prophecy wrong. Polybos, the ‘father’ whom Oedipus believed Apollo had predicted he would kill, has died, and Oedipus is his designated heir. But the reunion of the Korinthian and the herdsman, who both admit to their earlier actions, irretrievably links Oedipus’ Korinthian life to his birth in Thebes as the son of Jokasta and Laios.
The two shepherds are, in the flesh, halves of the symbolon Oedipus believed from the start he must find; their coming together onstage becomes the living symbol whose destructive effect extends beyond prediction or intuition. Now that he has meshed this last final clue with its other half, Oedipus sees his killing and incest as parts of a monstrous, divinely ordained whole—and we see it as a series of events that could not have happened had not a man taken pity on a child left to die. While such compassion is never universal, it thrives within a healthy culture or a loving family. Unforgivable violations of familial love, in fact, drive the plots of all the Athenian theater’s dynastic plays.
Oedipus, who refuses to forgive himself for killing his father and defiling his mother, his children, and himself, sees no escape from the unbreakable embrace of his family, be it loving or crushing. This conviction leads Oedipus to one of his finest and most shocking imaginative leaps. In his misery he names what creates all families, the sexual act in marriage, and declares it the source of humankind’s self-immolation: “O marriages! You marriages! You created us, / we sprang to life, then from the same seed / you burst fathers, brothers, sons, / kinsmen shedding kinsmen’s blood, / brides and mothers and wives—the most loathsome / atrocities that strike mankind” (1591–1596).
Where the bonds of love are most intense, the danger is greatest. Oedipus knows he has suffered more of this potential misery than any other man, but he also immediately declares that all humankind is equally vulnerable. He realizes that love itself, which causes such pain, is the irresistible weapon Apollo has used against him. He is the victim of his loyalties—loyalties through which the god controls his responses and his choices.
In his grief, Oedipus foresees a barren and lonely future for his daughters, whom no man will marry because they carry the family’s curse. He takes his daughters in his arms as he speaks to them. We see the tangible result of incest here; the father’s arms are the brother’s. Sophocles focuses our attention on what remains of this family, not on the gods. Oedipus’ love is as palpable to us at the end of the play as his wrath, his intelligence, his energy, and his special relation with divinity. This side of his character is uppermost in our minds as we leave the theater. It reminds us of a truth that might be lost in the fury of the drama, that the intensity of his love for his family and his city underlies the intensity of his misery, and is as full, if unwitting, a partner in his destruction as divinity itself.
—RB
NOTE
1. Odyssey (11. 211ff.), “And I saw the mother of Oedipus, beautiful Epicaste. / What a monstrous thing she did, in all innocence— / she married her own son . . . / who’d killed his own father, then he married her! / But the gods soon made it known to all mankind. / So he in growing pain ruled on in beloved Thebes, / lording Cadmus’ people—thanks to the gods’ brutal plan— / while she went down to Death who guards the massive gates. / Lashing a noose to a steep rafter, there she hanged aloft, / strangling in all her anguish, leaving her son to bear / a world of horrors a mother’s Furies bring to life.”
Oedipus the King
Translated by Robert Bagg
CHARACTERS
Delegation of Thebans, young, middle-aged, elderly
OEDIPUS, king of Thebes
PRIEST of Zeus
KREON, Jokasta’s brother
CHORUS of older Theban men
LEADER of the Chorus
TIRESIAS, blind prophet of Apollo
Boy to lead Tiresias
JOKASTA, Oedipus’ wife
MESSENGER from Korinth
Attendants and maids
HERDSMAN, formerly of Laios’ house
SERVANT from Oedipus’ house
Antigone and Ismene, Oedipus’ daughters
The play opens in front of the royal palace in Thebes. The palace has an imposing central double door flanked by two altars: one to Apollo, one to household gods. The Delegation of Thebans enters carrying olive branches wound with wool strips. They gather by the palace stairs. The light and atmosphere are oppressive. OEDIPUS enters through the great doors.
OEDIPUS
My children—you are the fresh green life
old Kadmos nurtures and protects.
Why do you surge at me like this—
with your wool-strung boughs? While
the city is swollen with howls of pain,
reeking incense, and prayers sung
to the Healing God? To have others
tell me these things would not be right,
my sons. So I’ve come out myself.
My name is Oedipus—the famous— 10
as everyone calls me.
Tell me, old man,
yours is the natural voice for the rest,
what troubles you? You’re terrified?
Looking for reassurance? Be certain
I’ll give you all the help I can.
I’d be a hard man if an approach
like yours failed to rouse my pity.
PRIEST
You rule our land, Oedipus! You can see
who comes to your altars, how varied
we are in years: children too weak-winged 20
to fl
y far, others hunched with age,
a few priests—I am a priest of Zeus—
joined by the best of our young lads.
More of us wait with wool-strung boughs
in the markets, and at Athena’s two temples.
Some, at Ismenos’ shrine, are watching
ashes for the glow of prophecy.
You can see our city going under,
too feeble to lift its head clear
of the angry murderous waves. 30
Plague blackens our flowering farmland,
sickens our cattle where they graze.
Our women in labor give birth to nothing.
A burning god rakes his fire through our town.
He hates us with fever, he empties
the House of Kadmos, enriching
black Hades with our groans and tears.
We haven’t come to beg at your hearth
because we think you’re the gods’ equal.
We’ve come because you are the best man 40
at handling trouble or confronting gods.
You came to Thebes, you freed us
from the tax we paid with our lives
to that rasping Singer. You did it with no
help from us. We had nothing to teach you.
People say—they believe!—you had a god’s
help when you restored life to our city.
Oedipus, we need now the great power
men everywhere know you possess.
Find some way to protect us—learn it 50
from a god’s intimation, or a man’s.
This much I know: guidance
from men proven right in the past
will meet a crisis with the surest force.
Act as our greatest man! Act
as you did when you first seized fame!
We believe your nerve saved us then.
Don’t let us look back on your rule and say,
He lifted us once, but then let us down.
Put us firmly back on our feet, 60
so Thebes will never fall again.
