The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus Rex/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone

by Sophocles

  869 Oooodysseus, my friend Odysseus is not named in the Greek text, where he’s called “the Kephallenian.”

  884 Lemnian fire Mount Mosychlos, associated with Hephestos.

  889 Where are you? Literally, “Where are you [in your thinking]?” The “where” is idiomatic, as in “Where’re you at?” or “Where’s your mind at?” Compare this with the exchange (997–1000) that begins when Philoktetes, troubled that a suddenly disoriented Neoptolemos has started talking to himself, asks: “Where’re you getting at?” At that juncture the highly adaptable, idiomatic “where” metamorphoses into a revelatory road metaphor.

  898 Not that I’d ask you to swear to that Philoktetes is not asking for a solemn oath but simply a “hand pledge” or handshake. Cf. 900: “Your hand on that! Give it.”

  902–904 Now. Up there. Take me . . . Up up . . . Apparently referring to the volcano, Mount Mosychlos. In his agony, Philoktetes wants, like Herakles, to be consumed by fire.

  910 You’ll kill me holding me like that This is resonant given Sophocles’ hands-on involvement in medicine and practical health care. But the full implications of these words, their ‘teaching message,’ are not exhausted by their use in a medical context. Clearly, it is necessary but not sufficient to do the right thing. It must also be done in the right way. So Herakles, later, not only predicts that Neoptolemos and Philoktetes will take Troy but also warns that they must do it in the proper way: “with piety toward all things / relating to the gods.”

  914 sleep will grip him soon Another ‘personification.’ Note that the onset of sleep, unlike sleep itself, has a preemptive character. Neoptolemos characterizes it as an event. This differs markedly from the Chorus’s softer-edged evocation of sleep as a beatific state of being.

  919–926 Sweet sleep that feels . . . Come Lullaby. Sleep identified as a healing agent.

  923 this most serene glow The daughter of Asklepios, the god of healing, is Aigla, the “gleam of serenity” that healing brings.

  930–932 The Right Moment is . . . victory A common saying. It’s not that they don’t feel for Philoktetes, they do, but they have a task to accomplish. N.B. Though the sailors serve under Neoptolemos, they will on occasion question or (obliquely) correct him. Unlike soldiers in modern military structures, they have a complex historical relation to their lord, including as retainers. They do not operate, as is the norm now, within a relatively freestanding, codified chain of command.

  935 He’s the victory trophy Neoptolemos must bring not only the bow but Philoktetes himself back to Troy.

  940 sick men sleep sleepless, they pick up on things Literal: “all men’s sleep is keen of sight in sickness” (Ussher, 39).

  947–956 But now, my boy, the wind . . . quickly, without warning As conceived in this translation, the Chorus is a collectivity in which several voices, at times with individual inflections, express common perspectives or concerns. e.g., The voice coming from the Chorus in 952 (“Strengthless he is, like one laid at the edge of Hades”) is different from that of the practical-minded Leader. The same sententious voice is heard in 195–197 (“Dark are the doings of the gods . . . short of their doom”). Not that these distinctions need be observed, but in contemporary (maskless) production they’re available as a dramatic resource.

  969–970 you’re / naturally noble Belief in the efficacy of breeding, or bloodline, is a given.

  1036 you filthy piece of work! Literal: “you contrivance of villainy” (Ussher, 142).

  1093–1094 You learned this / from truly evil teachers Cf. Neoptolemos’ words at 430–433.

  1099–1101 You won’t get back / here and / give me that bow? A negative future question posed as a command. The phrasing reflects a common Greek construction. The difficulty, in English, is in keeping it from sounding like a plea. It may help to deliver 1100–1101 in a heavy-footed way, hence the gaps between the words.

  1116 Let that man drag me off? Emphasis to indicate that “drag” is literal, not metaphorical. Philoktetes will be forced, not led, away.

  1119–1121 ZEUS rules . . . I carry out his orders That Odysseus is cynical doesn’t preclude his having beliefs. “Odysseus—whatever his interpretation of it—is concerned to bring a prophecy, in which he believes, to fulfillment” (Ussher, 145).

  1140–1142 hands . . . now / together, held helpless His hands are held down by the guards on either side of him.

  1225 The two of us Neoptolemos speaking as though he and Odysseus were still of one mind in this mission.

  1233–1234 O forlorn space, all echoed up / reeking with my pain The Greek mingles “both the groaning and the stench” (Webster, 136).

  1372 would you be so kind as to say why Aggressive (faux) politeness.

  1404 You will be Odysseus’s line has been lost. “You will be” is the translator’s interpolation.

  1418 But you, son of Poias Removed, awkward phrasing. Neop-tolemos is apprehensive, uncertain what reception he’ll get.

  1523 And O my eyes Literally, “orbs.” In the remarkable phrase of T. B. L. Webster: “The lonely man’s eyes have a life of their own . . .” (152).

  1532–1534 Men whose souls / have conceived, once . . . evils Another gno-me-.

  1562 You, I should imagine Neoptolemos “dismisses the question (with light irony) as one that cannot seriously be intended” (Ussher, 160).

  1595–1596 Not till you’ve heard / what I will say As Herakles speaks from a cultural and historical context that is fundamental, and more comprehensive, than any contained within personal or otherwise partial perspectives, his word is authoritative.

  1619 spoils such as common soldiers get See introduction to this play (187).

  1631ff. Yet remember, when / you sack Troy show piety Implicitly, though unmistakably, an admonition to Neoptolemos.

  1669–1670 the god . . . subduing everything Zeus.

  1673 the nymphs of the sea The Nereids, patrons of sailors and fishermen.

  ELEKTRA

  6–13 Hallowed country . . . house of Pelops The Elder quickly evokes legendary and contemporary Argos and Mycenae, and the horrific legacy of the house of Pelops and Atreus. His is not a guidebook’s pinpointing of sights, but an evocative gathering of legendary aspects of Mycenae.

  7 horsefly hounded Io Zeus seduced Io, whereupon Zeus’ wife Hera turned her into a cow and arranged to have her chased over the countryside by a giant buzzing horsefly.

  9 outdoor market The market square, dedicated to Apollo, and Hera’s temple were the city’s most famous landmarks, though the temple would not be visible from the actual heights where the trio pauses.

  13 Pelops The house of Pelops, whose name was given to the entire region still known as the Peloponnesus, began with Pelops’ father Tantalos, who offered his son to Zeus and the god’s divine cohorts as the entrée at a banquet brazenly intended to test the gods’ powers of perception. Zeus, not fooled or pleased, restored Pelops to life. Pelops fathered Atreus, who became king of Mycenae, and eventually adopted his grandsons, Agamemnon and Menelaus. Through further episodes of cannibalism, incest, adultery, and kin murder, this dynastic family continued to foster the hatred and treachery we see as the play opens.

  21 Pylades The son of Strophios, king of Phokis, and Anaxibia, the sister of Agamemnon, with whom Orestes lived while growing to manhood and preparing to return to Argos and avenge his father.

  29–30 My best friend . . . mentor The initial role of the “Paedogogus,” as he is named in the Greek manuscripts, was to oversee Orestes’ education, but he has assumed the duties of a friend and adviser as Orestes reached maturity.

  40 I went to Delphi Orestes had determined to kill Klytemnestra and Aegisthus before consulting the sibyl at Delphi; he did not ask Apollo whether to do so was advisable. He simply asked how best to carry out the murders. Apollo supplied a plan and made no effort to discourage him.

  76 Why should this omen bother me Ambiguous words or physical signs that suggested worst-case scenarios frequently spooked the super
stitious Greeks. Here Orestes briefly fears that his feigned death might invite his actual death. He reassures himself by remembering that famous travelers and war veterans were known to feign death as a ploy to enhance their reputations as survivors.

  ORESTES and his companions descend from their hilltop In the original staging, it was likely that the trio appeared atop the roof of the skenê behind the façade of the palace, to represent their excellent vantage. After Orestes completed his long speech, they would have descended and entered the orchestra from stage right.

  122–123 when he fought / barbarians Elektra wishes that if Agamemnon was fated to die a violent death, he had died fighting the Trojans (whom she considers barbarians). She regrets that Ares, the war god, deprived her father of such an honorable death.

  124–126 my mother / and . . . Aegisthus, / laid open Sophocles envisions the murder of Agamemnon as having occurred while he was reclining at dinner on his first night home from Troy and thus unable to see his killers approaching from behind. So positioned, his head would be an easy target for a swung ax.

  136 I’m like the nightingale Elektra compares herself to Prokne, who killed her own son, Itys, and served him to her husband, Tereus, who had raped her sister Philomela and cut out her tongue to prevent her from exposing him. When vengeful Tereus pursued both sisters, Zeus changed all three to birds, Tereus to a hoopoe, and the two women to a swallow and a nightingale respectively. The resemblance to a bird whose sole powers of complaint are musical suits the fact that the passage in which the metaphor occurs is sung.

  140 Hades! Persephone! Hermes! All gods of the underworld: respectively, the ruler of the underworld, his semicaptive wife who divides her time each year between the living world and the world of the dead, and the nimble messenger god, one of whose duties is to lead dead souls into Hades’ kingdom.

  143 You Curses who can kill! The Greeks of the Homeric era believed an emphatically uttered curse had the power to kill or damage its target. Note that Elektra takes this verbal power literally though her brother does not.

  144 And you Furies The (female) Furies were tasked with pursuing murderers of kin until the kin of their victims killed them or the murderers committed suicide. Though Elektra asks them to intervene, the traditional Furies do not appear in the play. Sophocles, however, suggests at several places that Orestes, Pylades, and Elektra have become human embodiments of Furies and are fulfilling their ancient function in the course of killing Klytemnestra and Aegisthus.

  190–193 Littlewheel! . . . Niobe Another appropriate mythological counterpart to express Elektra’s inconsolable bereavement. Niobe was the daughter of King Tantalos of Lydia. She married Amphion, a king of Thebes, and bore six sons and six daughters to him, according to Homer. She infuriated the goddess Leto by claiming to be a better mother than the goddess, having given birth to twelve children compared to Leto’s two. Unfortunately for Niobe, Leto instructed her children (Apollo and Artemis) to murder Niobe’s children. Niobe wept for nine days and nights, and the Olympian gods turned her to stone on a cliff of Mount Sipylos, the home of her father, where her rock face continued to drip with tears. “Littlewheel” may refer to Prokne’s dead child Itys, whose name in Greek could mean small wheel or circle.

  199 Chrysòthomis and Iphianassa Elektra’s living sisters. Iphianassa does not figure in the play.

  231 Acheron The river and marsh surrounding the underworld.

  364 hold off a bit After Agamemnon’s murder, Elektra acted swiftly, entrusting the Elder with her brother, Orestes, giving the man instructions to keep the boy safe in another part of Greece, and to train him to return to Mycenae and kill his father’s murderers.

  444–445 shut you up / in a cave A mode of execution that avoided the polluting effect on perpetrators who inflicted outright kin murder with their own hands or through direct orders. See the similar use of death by entombment and starvation in Antigone.

  476 reacting, I think, to a nightmare Dreams and nightmares were believed to be sent into sleeping minds by the gods, but they needed to be accurately interpreted to illuminate a situation or to become prophecies.

  508 hacked off his extremities This phrase translates the Greek verb emascalisthe (which also appears in two passages from Aeschylus) and refers to the practice of murderers who would cut off the arms and legs and then tie them around the necks of their victims. Though the English word “emasculate” derives from the same root, Sophocles did not necessarily mean that Klytemnestra emasculated Agamemnon. What she did was terrible enough. The word also referred to the military practice of amputating an enemy’s arms and/or legs after death to humiliate him in the underworld.

  539 Justice The Chorus refers to Diké, whom they assume sent Klytemnestra the dream as a warning that this goddess was about to strike a deadlier blow.

  563–564 the chariot race / Pelops ran A moment of treachery that began the curse afflicting the House of Pelops. In order to win Hippodamia as a bride, Pelops bested her father, Oenomaus, in a chariot race. But Pelops had cheated and needed to cover up his malfeasance. He had bribed Oenomaus’ chariot-mechanic Myrtilos to ensure a wreck (by removing the chariot’s linchpin) that killed his master during the race. Later, Myrtilos and Pelops fell out. While both were aboard an airborne chariot (a gift from Poseidon), Pelops hurled Myrtilos to his death. Dying, Myrtilos cursed Pelops so potently that his malice inflicted grotesque acts of revenge on every subsequent generation of the Pelops clan. This origin myth suggests it is no coincidence that Orestes (i.e., Sophocles) chose a chariot race as the setting for the Elder’s false story of Orestes’ death. When she heard it, Klytemnestra might have been pleased and reassured by the irony: a curse that began with one chariot race conveniently ends with another.

  617–618 ask how impartial . . . before you condemn This spirited and savage debate in which Klytemnestra seizes the first rounds is a good example of Athenian legal argumentation. Such confrontations suggest that hostility was a constant of this household’s daily life. The two women counter each other’s positions, but they remain oblivious to the weakness of their own assumptions and red herrings. To kill one’s daughter is horrific from any point of view, and Klytemnestra clearly is right in saying that her husband has committed the serious crime of kin murder. But her suggestion that it would have been more appropriate for one of Menelaus’ children to have been sacrificed is irrelevant, since it is from Agamemnon that Artemis seeks redress. Klytemnestra’s urging Elektra to evaluate the ‘justice’ of her own argument before responding is wishful thinking.

  630–631 You were seduced / to murder him Here Elektra nails what (she thinks) was her mother’s true motivation for killing Agamemnon. But her speech veers opportunistically from resentment to resentment in a way that such real-life confrontations usually do. Blundell’s exacting analysis of their opposing arguments (Helping Friends and Harming Enemies, 157–72) demonstrates that Sophocles was in control and aware himself of his two antagonists’ valid points and each one’s shortcomings. The dramatic function of this showdown is more to expose a snarl of longstanding hostilities than to ask us to adjudicate the matter.

  641 whooping a boast An inadvisable provocation, though Artemis’ wrath seems out of proportion to the offense.

  642–647 becalmed the Greek fleet . . . Otherwise . . . marooned Perhaps Artemis raised the stakes for the Greek’s getting to Troy to dissuade the Atreus brothers from throwing good men after a bad wife.

  658–660 If you invent a law . . . won’t it / inflict guilt . . . back on you? A valid point, one Klytemnestra brushes off. Her actual rejoinder will be to ignore Elektra and appeal to Apollo to weigh in on her side.

  737–739 Promise me . . . If signs I saw . . . seem harmless A conventional self-protective formula in situations where one cannot be sure that the dreamer is correctly interpreting the intent of the god who inspired the dream.

  748–749 Spare the offspring . . . Lose those More obliquity. She implies that Chrysòthemis should be spared but not Elekt
ra or Orestes.

  782 That’s why I’m here. To tell it all. The Elder must have spent his offstage time composing this remarkably detailed speech. The Orestes it imagines is far more impressive than the Orestes who speaks and acts within the play. Blundell (174) suggests the speech represents Elektra’s idealized version of her brother. The speech also contrasts the Orestes of the play with the man he might have become.

  835 Orestes cut the pillars close The race stewards assigned positions at the start line by drawing lots. Orestes has drawn the inmost position, which, as Kells (144) notes, explains his racing strategy (identical to that Nestor gave his son in the Iliad): stay in your lane; if other drivers pass you, they will tire from covering more distance; you’ll be able to catch them on the last of the twelve laps. The chariots are racing counterclockwise. Rounding them on the innermost lane requires a 180-degree reversal of direction, hence cornering is a highly dangerous maneuver if the charioteer cuts the posts close in order to catch the leader. The forward momentum of the standing driver will naturally throw him forward in front of the chariot when it loses a wheel and drags an axle.

  896 birthing a child A line that dramatizes the maternal reflexes Klytemnestra feels and then suppresses. She quickly recovers her animosity toward Orestes. The line also nods in passing to the Greeks’ belief the mother-child relation is a sacred one. As shrewdly noted by Kells (138–139), the extreme realism of the Elder’s account has a profound effect on Klytemnestra: “she is presented with a picture of Orestes whom she only remembers as a little boy, now grown to manhood, distinguishing himself . . . now behaving as a son of whom she might be proud. . . . Only such an account . . . could have moved . . . the mother’s heart to that . . . amazing peripeteia of emotion 896–898 represents.”

  1012 Nemesis! The goddess of payback. An instance of the Greek sense that all gods listen to all human speech and react to offenses within their spheres of intervention.

  1050 Where is the Sun One of the Sun’s roles was to expose the guilty so that Zeus knew where to aim his thunderbolts.