Oedipus Rex

“[...] I sent Creon,

my wife’s own brother, to Delphi—

Apollo the Prophet’s oracle—to learn

what I might do or say to save our city.

Today’s the day. When I count the days gone by

it torments me...what is he doing?

Strange, he’s late, he’s gone too long.

But once he returns, then, then I’ll be a traitor

if I do not do all the god makes clear.” 

These ominous lines prepare the way for bad news. Sophocles’s audience would have been familiar with the myth of Oedipus, and thus would have known that, in this passage, Oedipus is predicting his own punishment. The dramatic irony here will only intensify throughout the play, and it creates the sense of a mythic, fated pattern at work.

“Now my curse on the murderer. Whoever he is,

a lone man unknown in his crime

or one among many, let that man drag out

his life in agony, step by painful step—

I curse myself as well...if by any chance

he proves to be an intimate of our house,

here at my hearth, with my full knowledge,

may the curse I just called down on him strike me!” 

With even richer dramatic irony, Oedipus calls down a curse on himself that will indeed be fulfilled. Part of the tragedy of the play is that Oedipus is a good king: fair-minded, thoughtful, and empathetic. That he does not exempt himself or his own family from his search for Laius’s murderer shows an unselfish commitment to the Theban people.

“Listen to me closely:

the man you’ve sought so long, proclaiming,

cursing up and down, the murderer of Laius—he is here.

 A stranger, you may think, who lives among you,

he soon will be revealed a native Theban

but he will take no joy in the revelation.

Blind who now has eyes, beggar who now is rich,

he will grope his way toward a foreign soil,

a stick tapping before him step by step.

Revealed at last, brother and father both

to the children he embraces, to his mother

son and husband both—he sowed the loins

his father sowed, he spilled his father’s blood!

Go in and reflect on that, solve that.

And if you’ve find I’ve lied

from this day onward call the prophet blind.” 

Oedipus doesn’t stay to hear the entirety of Tiresias’s summative speech, and thus doesn’t catch the most disturbing part of it: the horror of his incestuous marriage to his mother and his unknowing murder of his father. This passage is just one instance of the play’s recurring blindness motif. The blind Tiresias can see the truth; which is a light so bright as to blind those who see it. As Tiresias predicts, Oedipus will follow him into physical blindness and inner revelation.

“The skilled prophet scans the birds and shatters me with terror!

I can’t accept him, can’t deny him, don’t know what to say,

I’m lost, and the wings of dark foreboding beating—

I cannot see what’s come, what’s still to come…” 

The Chorus’s poetic interludes serve diverse purposes. An expected part of any Greek drama, the Chorus often serves a religious function by singing hymns and a dramatic function by crystallizing a moment in the play’s emotional journey. But they’re also a civic body: They speak for the Thebans and for the audience, reflecting the humanity of all who watch Oedipus’s fall. Here, their vision of inscrutable black birds of prophecy evokes the shivery quiet of foreboding.

“An oracle came to Laius one fine day

(I won’t say from Apollo himself

but his underlings his priests)

and it declared

that doom would strike him down at the hands of a son,

our son, to be born of our own flesh and blood. But Laius,

so the report goes at least, was killed by strangers,

thieves, at a place where three roads meet...my son—

he wasn’t three days old and the boy’s father

fastened his ankles, had a henchman fling him away

on a barren, trackless mountain. There, you see?

Apollo brought neither thing to pass. My baby

no more murdered his father than Laius suffered—

his wildest fear—death at his son’s hands.

That’s how the seers and all their revelations

mapped out the future. Brush them from your mind.” 

Jocasta’s recounting of her past mingles tones strangely. Here, she’s trying to cheer Oedipus up by demonstrating the unreliability of prophecy—but the example she provides is her infanticide of her firstborn. Poor Jocasta seems perhaps the most cursed person of the bunch; her “murdered” son’s restoration itself becomes a blight.

“[...] unknown to mother and father I set out for Delphi, and the god Apollo spurned me, sent me away

denied the facts I came for,

but first he flashed before my eyes a future

great with pain, terror, disaster—I can hear him cry,

‘You are fated to couple with your mother, you will bring

a breed of children into the light no man can bear to see—

you will kill your father, the one who gave you life!’

I heard all that and ran. I abandoned Corinth,

from that day on I gauged its landfall only

by the stars, running, always running

toward some place where I would never see

the shame of all those oracles come true.”

The correspondence between Jocasta’s and Oedipus’s prophecies is overwhelming. But Oedipus and his people aren’t willing to surrender hope until they interrogate every last servant and shepherd involved in their two tales. Part of Oedipus’s tragedy is the pain of struggling against a reality that only becomes more and more evident. 

“They are dying, the old oracles sent to Laius,

now our masters strike them off the rolls.

Nowhere Apollo’s golden glory now—

the gods, the gods go down.”

The Chorus’s intermittent hymns often praise the gods. Here, however, the Chorus doubts the gods, creating a tension between terrible alternatives: Proving the prophecy true would mean the horrific loss of a good king; proving it false would mean the loss of the gods. 

“So!

Jocasta, why, why look to the Prophet’s hearth,

the fires of the future? Why scan the birds

that scream above our heads? They winged me on

to the murder of my father, did they? That was my doom?

Well look, he’s dead and buried, hidden under the earth,

and here I am in Thebes, I never put hand to sword—unless some longing for me wasted him away,

then in a sense you’d say I caused his death.

But now, all those prophecies I feared—Polybus

packs them off to sleep with him in hell!

They’re nothing, worthless.” 

Oedipus, grasping at straws, demonstrates the lengths he’ll go to in order to avoid facing the truth. Polybus’s death means little in terms of the prophecy if he wasn’t Oedipus’s biological father—but Oedipus needs the relief of believing that everything is fine, even on unstable grounds. His veneer of logic—he didn’t kill Polybus, so the prophecy is wrong!—is an effort to paper over the glaringly obvious.

“What should a man fear? It’s all chance,

chance rules our lives. Not a man on earth

can see a day ahead, groping through the dark.

Better to live at random, best we can.

And as for this marriage with your mother—

have no fear. Many a man before you,

in his dreams, has shared his mother’s bed.” 

Jocasta’s resignation, to a modern audience, feels like a familiarly jaded attitude. But in the context of the play, it’s doom: Deciding that all of life is random chance means ignoring the ultimate power of the gods. This passage also provides grist for a later writer, Sigmund Freud, who built on the Oedipus story in constructing the foundations of psychoanalysis. In Freud’s view, the impulse to kill one’s father and bed one’s mother is every man’s first psychological dilemma.

“Apollo told me once—it is my fate—

I must make love with my own mother,

shed my father’s blood with my own hands.

So for years I’ve given Corinth a wide berth,

and it’s been my good fortune too. But still,

to see one’s parents and look into their eyes

is the greatest joy I know.” 

Oedipus’s image of looking lovingly into one’s parents’ eyes horribly foreshadows the final image of the play, when his daughters will see his gruesomely blinded face while he embraces them. Both Oedipus and Jocasta have buried griefs that trouble them—griefs occasioned by their desire to avoid fate. As the play unfolds, we will see that these socially acceptable sorrows mask a shameful and unspeakable one: There was no reason for Oedipus to shun the people he believed to be his parents, and Jocasta’s baby didn’t die after all—instead, it is their marriage and children that are taboo.

“I must know my birth, no matter how common

it may be—I must see my origins face-to-face.

She perhaps, she with her woman’s pride

may well be mortified by my birth,

but I, I count myself the son of Chance,

the great goddess, giver of all good things—

I’ll never see myself disgraced.” 

Oedipus’s deepening denial brings with it a deepening manic overconfidence. That overconfidence also comes with cruelty—here to Jocasta, and later to the old shepherd, whom he will torture for information. The desire to evade fate makes Oedipus into the tyrant he so emphatically wasn’t at the play’s beginning.

“Oedipus: This one here—ever have dealings with him?

Shepherd: Not so I could say, but give me a chance, my memory’s bad…” 

The dialogue in Oedipus Rex ranges from the heightened hymning of the Chorus to plainspoken naturalism. In this important scene, the Shepherd’s evasiveness comes in everyday language. His simple voice links the lowly to the grand workings of fate.

“O the generations of men

the dying generations—adding the total

of all your lives I find they come to nothing...

does there exist, is there a man on earth

who seizes more joy than just a dream, a vision?

And the vision no sooner dawns than dies

blazing into oblivion.

You are my great example, you, your life

your destiny, Oedipus, man of misery—

I count no man blest.” 

The Chorus’s harrowing lament over Oedipus’s final revelation casts him as a stand-in for all humanity. Oedipus’s life encapsulates both the greatest fortune and the greatest misfortune as part of the same package. Oedipus’s rise to wise and beloved King of Thebes is in no way separate from his ultimate and horrifying fall. This isn’t just the story of how Fortune turns her wheel, but the story of how Fortune’s wheel is illegible to mere humans.

“[...] But you are spared the worst,

you never had to watch...I saw it all,

and with all the memory that’s in me

you will learn what that poor woman suffered.” 

Sophocles places Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’s murder offstage. This choice serves a couple of important dramatic purposes. The messenger’s telling of the story is grimly detailed, but also leaves plenty to the reader’s imagination—and thus presents images even fouler than those that could be enacted on stage. This report also adds to the shock when the blinded Oedipus himself reappears: His wounded eyes speak to a scene too terrible to look on.

“He rips off her brooches, the long gold pins

holding her robes—and lifting them high,

looking straight up into the points,

he digs them down the sockets of his eyes, crying, ‘You,

you’ll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused!

Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen,

blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind

from this hour on! Blind in the darkness—blind!’

His voice like a dirge, rising, over and over

raising the pins, raking them down his eyes.

And at each stroke, blood spurts from the roots,

splashing his beard, a swirl of it, nerves and clots—

black hail of blood pulsing, gushing down.” 

Oedipus’s blinding is gruesomely physical, with its “nerves and clots” reminding the audience that this king is merely flesh. But beyond the body-horror of this moment, there’s also a symbolic significance. In blinding himself, Oedipus joins Tiresias as a truth-seer—one who has looked on a light of truth that mortal eyes can’t endure.

“Oh, Ohh—

the agony! I am agony—

where am I going? where on earth?

where does all this agony hurl me?

where’s my voice?—

winging, swept away on a dark tide—

My destiny, my dark power, what a leap you made!” 

The blinded Oedipus laments that he is a man who is in such pain that he can no longer distinguish himself from that pain. As in the Chorus’s earlier declaration that Oedipus is an example of a broader human fate, here Oedipus feels himself as one with his pain and his destiny, a dark power that is him even as it destroys him. 

“Apollo, friends, Apollo—

he ordained my agonies—these, my pains on pains!

But the hand that struck my eyes was mine,

mine alone—no one else—

I did it all myself!” 

When the Chorus asks how Oedipus could bear to blind himself, his answer blurs boundaries: Apollo and Oedipus are mysteriously one. The blinding is an extreme example of the play’s paradox: Oedipus has made all the choices that brought him to this fate, and in doing so has exactly carried out the gods’ will.

“O triple roads—it all comes back, the secret,

dark ravine, and the oaks closing in

where the three roads join…” 

These lines, in the midst of Oedipus’s great lament, make metaphorical meaning out of Oedipus’s life story. The meeting of the triple roads in a secret ravine suggests not only the confluence of the strands of fate, but the incestuous meeting of bloodstreams. Like the three roads, Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus meet in one horrible knot.

“Oh no, what can I say to him?

How can I ever hope to win his trust?

I wronged him so, just now, in every way.

You must see that—I was so wrong, so wrong.” 

Blindness is revelatory. Oedipus can now see the horrible truth of his fate and the horrible truth of his behavior, so his pangs of remorse over his treatment of Creon are just one more way in which he suffers.

“You there,

have you lost all respect for human feelings?

At least revere the Sun, the holy fire

that keeps us all alive. Never expose a thing

of guilt and holy dread so great it appalls

the earth, the rain from heaven, the light of day!

Get him into the halls—quickly as you can.

Piety demands no less. Kindred alone

should see a kinsman’s shame. This is obscene.” 

When Creon shames the guards who have allowed Oedipus to display his wounds to the populace, he draws attention to the link between Oedipus’s self-punishment and Apollo, the sun-god who has steered the king’s dreadful destiny. There’s a terrible ugliness to the idea that the holy Sun wouldn’t want to look upon the monster he’s created. Creon’s charges also implicate the audience, who have been goggling at Oedipus’s “obscene” fate just as much as the assembled crowd. 

“Oh but this I know: no sickness can destroy me,

nothing can. I would never have been saved

from death—I have been saved

for something great and terrible, something strange.

Well let destiny come and take me on its way!” 

Oedipus’s utter surrender to fate brings with it a paradoxical power. Now truly understanding the inexorable movement of destiny, Oedipus isn’t willing to try to buck it any more, even by suicide—he’s prepared to face whatever is next. This is a terrible kind of courage.

“What’s that?

O god! Do I really hear you sobbing?—

my two children. Creon, you’ve pitied me?

Sent me my darling girls, my own flesh and blood!

Am I right?” 

The horrors of incest and murder don’t interfere with feelings of family love. Just as Oedipus mourns Jocasta as his beloved wife, he greets his daughters only with compassion (though one wonders how these nursery-aged girls might feel at the sight of their mutilated father). That Oedipus recognizes them by their sobbing adds poignancy to the scene, which compounds when Oedipus’s daughters are at last dragged from his arms.

“Oedipus: Drive me out of Thebes, in exile.

Creon: Not I. Only the gods can give you that.” 

Creon is taking absolutely no chances: He refuses to banish Oedipus without getting the go-ahead from the gods first, Creon gestures at one of the play’s big questions. If there’s no escaping fate, then how are humans to interact with the will of the gods? If whatever the gods decree will be, what role do humans have in shaping their lives?