INTRODUCTION

I

SOPHOCLES the Athenian was born in 496 B.C. and lived ninety years. A memoir written by an anonymous scholar of a later age – perhaps two hundred years after the poet’s death – gives us a picture of his life which we may take to be substantially true in outline and in spirit, though some of its circumstantial details may be apocryphal: a picture of a childhood spent under the best influences of a prosperous and enlightened home, a youth educated in a harmonious physical and intellectual discipline and endowed with grace and accomplishment, a manhood devoted to the service of the state in art and public affairs, and an old age regarded with affectionate respect.

He lived through a cycle of events spatially narrow, no doubt, in the scale of national and global history, but without parallel in intensity of action and emotion, and of lasting significance in the procession of human achievement. At his birth, Athens was still in the infancy of her life as a free democracy, making her first experiments with the new machinery of popular government. During his boyhood she was defending that life and liberty, and those of Greece and the Europe of the future, against the aggression of the power-state of Persia. In his sixteenth year he was the chosen leader and symbol of Athenian youth in the ceremonial celebration of the decisive victory of Salamis. Through most of the fifty comparatively peaceful years during which Athens created and enjoyed the richness and breadth of a free social life and culture, Sophocles contributed to the expression of that culture in the theatre which was its prime temple, performing also in his course the public duties which were as much the province of the artist as of the man of action. From his sixty-fifth year another struggle for existence engaged and drained the forces of Athens and her miniature empire, when in the so-called Peloponnesian War all Greece was divided by contrary ideals of statecraft and opposing ambitions for power. He died as that struggle was drawing to a close, leaving Athens materially exhausted and spiritually wrecked by the physical and moral strains of the conflict.

For first-hand acquaintance with the life and spirit of this momentous age we naturally turn to its surviving literature; and of this, apart from the two major historical works of Herodotus and Thucydides, by far the greatest bulk, and incomparably the greatest in range and power, is the work of the three tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedian, Aristophanes. The lyric poetry of Greece belongs mainly to the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., that of the fifth century being traditional rather than contemporary or progressive in spirit; while the full flowering of prose in oratory and philosophy is not to be seen until the fourth century. What then, was this Athenian theatre, into which was poured so much of the creative power of the age, and whose literature, it seems, is almost all that is left to us with which to fill out the factual narratives of the historians?

Negatively – to rid ourselves of the associations of modern ‘theatre’ – we must determine what it was not. It was not a place of daily or nightly resort and entertainment. It was not a medium in which any ingenious story-teller could make a living by the invention of novel, amusing, or exciting fictions to tickle the fancy of a chance audience. It was not a place in which to hold the mirror up to life in all its superficial and ephemeral detail. Even its comedy, which drew upon the contemporary social and political scene for subject-matter, did so only to add a topical spice to a highly stylised and largely conventional product. But tragedy, with which we are here concerned, touched the deepest centres of man’s individual and corporate consciousness.

Tragedies were presented in the Athenian theatre at certain annual festivals. At the principal one, held in the spring, the whole population, swelled by large numbers of visiting strangers, was assembled on a number of successive days, and for the greater part of each day, in an open-air theatre accommodating about 17,000 spectators, to witness a cycle of dramatic performances presented amid high civic splendour and religious ritual. On the practitioners of this art, therefore, rested a solemn responsibility, and for its worthy performance the rewards, in esteem and possibly in material value, were substantial. Competition was the order of the day, and was not felt to be incongruous with the religious dignity of the occasion. Before a tragedy could be performed at all, it had to pass the scrutiny of a selection board, and its acceptance for production already conferred a high honour on the author. In performance it competed with the work of two other chosen authors, and the victory in the whole contest was awarded by the votes of a panel of adjudicators, influenced, no doubt, to some degree by the reactions of the audience. For the purposes of this contest, the work of each author consisted of a group of four plays – three tragedies, either independent of each other or forming a ‘trilogy’ on a connected theme, and a ‘satyr-play’ in lighter vein. Such were the basic conditions of the dramatist’s art, and within them was established a code of technique and convention of which more must now be said – though the new reader may, at this point, prefer (and not unwisely) to turn to the plays themselves and form his own impressions of them before seeking the answers to such questions as they will probably suggest.

II

The origins of the art of drama, in Greece as elsewhere, lie far beyond the reach of literary or even archaeological evidence. At its roots lie not only the human instinct for narrative and impersonation, but also the instinct for the ritualistic expression and interpretation of the power of natural forces, the cycle of life and death, and the nexus of past, present, and future. By the time the art emerges into anything like historical daylight, it is evident that the elements of dance and song are essential to its nature and that its prime function is the expression of the feelings and reasonings excited by man’s battles with the eternal forces that appear to govern his life – in Sophoclean words ‘the encounters of man with more than man’. These two characteristics – the choric element and the religious note – survive throughout the great period of Greek tragedy. In the earliest plays of Aeschylus the strictly dramatic element is hardly greater than, for instance, that of a modern oratorio; the play is a poem recited or sung by a ‘chorus’ with one or two ‘characters’ to personify its leading themes; and even with Euripides the innovator, the Chorus, though often standing aloof from the now more highly developed plot and action, is still the unifying and commenting interpreter of the drama. In common parlance a dramatic performance was as often called a ‘chorus’ as a ‘drama’.

Sophocles stands midway between Aeschylus and Euripides in this respect. For him, the dramatic action is vital and to a great extent realistic, but the Chorus is also essential to the play both in its capacity as actor in the events of the drama, and as ‘presenter’ of its dominating theme in lyric terms; and a particularly subtle and interesting feature of his technique is the way in which the Chorus, distinctly characterised as ‘Elders of Thebes’, ‘People of Colonus’, and so on, bridge the footlights, as it were, between spectator and stage, their presence and participation in the acted events heightening the vividness and urgency of the action. With them we, the audience, are citizens of Thebes, witnesses of the passion of Oedipus, the martyrdom of Antigone; whose conflicts must not only be fought out, but must be fought out in public, submitted to the scrutiny and judgment of their fellow-men. Sometimes, indeed, this double function of the Chorus, as actor and as commentator, leads, we may think, to a somewhat too palpable inconsistency. The Chorus of Antigone, in their dramatic character, must express a submissive, if rather unenthusiastic, loyalty to their king, Creon, and are heard to reprove Antigone as having ‘gone to the outermost limit of daring, and stumbled against Law enthroned’; ‘authority,’ they opine, ‘cannot afford to connive at disobedience’. But in the greater detachment of their lyric utterances they are instinctively aware, as we must be, that the truth of the situation, and of the tragedy, lies deeper than that. For it is here a question of two stubborn wills, each loyal to a principle good in itself, but each pressing that loyalty with ruthless single-mindedness to the point at which it breaks against the other, and on both the disaster falls. Yet there is a plausibility and a dramatic necessity in this convention. The tragedy, whatever its subject, is our tragedy. We, like the Chorus, are both in it and spectators of it. And while the tragedy is played out, we identify ourselves now with this character and now with that – inconsistent, vacillating mortals that we are. But the tragedy is not fully played out, the story not fully told, until we have looked the whole matter squarely in the face and commented on it, so far as lies in us, truthfully, impartially, without passion, bias, or self-deception.

It is, then, in the Chorus as persons, and in their more impersonal lyric interludes, that we shall chiefly observe that religious approach to the dramatic theme which, as we have said, is an essential characteristic of Greek Tragedy. It remains to notice some further consequences of this religious approach. The Greek dramatists could, no doubt, if they had been so minded, have constructed plays of ‘ordinary life’ in which the tragic aspects of man’s ambition or perversity should be starkly depicted against a contemporary background. But dramatic convention grows and changes slowly, and the fact remains that it was taken as axiomatic that the play should tell some already established story of the legendary and heroic past. (The few exceptions to this rule only demonstrate the unsuitability of any other kind of theme for such treatment as the conventions demanded.) Indeed, it was not necessary that the play should ‘tell a story’ self-contained and complete. Since the audience was already in possession of the main facts of the story, the way was prepared for the dramatist to come swiftly to whatever situation in it he chose for the exposition of his theme. Some element of narrative, of course, remained, as well as much scope for originality in the ordering of the incidents within the chosen field; but the attention of the audience was not primarily to be held by the factor of suspense or the desire to ‘see what happens’. And this was the most fitting condition for an art-form which was to invite not a passing curiosity but profound contemplation of eternal truths. In addition, on the technical side, it gave the dramatist that powerful and subtle weapon of ‘dramatic irony’, which Sophocles used with especial skill, whereby the audience can judge every speech and action of the play in the light of their previous knowledge of the situation. We are to imagine, then, an Athenian audience listening – for it was more a matter of listening than of looking, even though the décor, within its conventional limits, was carried out with lavish care and expense – listening to a tragedy somewhat in the attitude of a Christian audience at a Nativity or Passion play, familiar with the accepted version of the story and thus the more ready to grasp, and to criticise, the particular interpretation offered by the author, and to be struck by any out-of-the-way incident or novel emphasis in his treatment of the subject. It may reasonably be added, without contradiction of the above principle, that part of the function of the drama was to keep alive the old stories, and that some, the youngest, of the audience, must often have found in the theatre their first introduction to them – nor would they have been disappointed, in most cases, of a clear and exciting tale.

III

The three plays included in this volume are derived, it will be seen, from one cycle of legend – that concerning the royal house of Thebes – and may be read, with the connecting narrative which will be found in its place, as a continuous saga. But with a caution. The plays were not written or produced in the order in which they are here placed – the order of the narrative – and they belong to widely different periods in the poet’s life. Their probable dates are: Antigone, 442–441 B.C.; King Oedipus, 429–420; Oedipus at Colonus, 401 (after the poet’s death). The series, therefore, cannot have formed a ‘trilogy’ in the sense already referred to; nor from internal evidence should we have supposed that it did. Beyond the fact that each of the three plays deals with a situation in the Oedipodean family history, there is no unity of theme or treatment between them, and, except for the obvious links of fact connecting them, each constitutes a fresh approach to a distinct and self-contained problem. A minor detail, but significant, is that the respective ages of the persons concerned cannot be harmonized with any probability. Creon, who must be at least as old as his nephew, Oedipus, and speaks of himself as, like him, an old man in Oedipus at Colonus, would be still older in Antigone; but his character in the latter play is that of a vigorous middle-aged father of a youthful son, who is betrothed to the still youthful Antigone.

In Antigone (to take them now in the order of the poet’s thought) we are concerned with a single, and comparatively simple, conflict. A king, in full and sincere consciousness of his responsibility for the integrity of the state, has, for an example against treason, made an order of ruthless punishment upon a traitor and rebel – an order denying the barest rites of sepulture to his body, and therefore of solace to his soul. A woman, for whom political expediency takes second place, by a long way, to compassion and piety, has defied the order and is condemned to death. Here is conflict enough, and tragedy – not in the martyrdom of obvious right under obvious wrong, but in the far more bitter, and at the same time more exhilarating, contest between two passionately held principles of right, each partly justifiable, and each to a degree (though one more than the other) vitiated by stubborn blindness to the merits of the opposite. But there is more: between these two antagonists stands a third character, in whom their tragedy, and that of the whole situation, is personified and brought to a single focus – a young man, betrothed to the woman, whom he honours for her courage and piety, and son to the king, whom he has respected and longs to go on respecting for his fatherhood and for his office. To see statecraft misdirected into blasphemous defiance of piety is for him (and for the Athenian audience) the greater tragedy; the sacrifice of a well-meaning woman, the less. Thus the king’s final humiliation and chastening, through the loss of his son, is of higher dramatic significance than the fate of the woman. This triangular tragedy, of the woman ruled by conscience, the king too confident in his authority, and the young man tormented by conflicting loyalties, it is the function of the Chorus to resolve, gradually but in the end uncompromisingly, by appeal to God’s law, which alone can hold the scales between opposing and imperfect human wills. All else (to this conclusion the successive choral odes point with cumulative force) – intellect, ambition, power, even love itself – draws mankind as often to evil as to good:

‘Of happiness the crown

And chiefest part

Is wisdom, and to hold

The gods in awe.

This is the law

That, seeing the stricken heart

Of pride brought down,

We learn when we are old.’

Returning to the Theban legend in the maturity of his powers, Sophocles produced in King Oedipus the masterpiece of his life’s work, so far as we can judge from the seven plays surviving out of the hundred or more ascribed to his pen. This is the judgment also of Aristotle, who has this play constantly at his elbow as the perfect type of tragic composition. In brief, its greatness lies in the combination of a faultlessly articulated plot with the profoundest insight into human motive and circumstance. Formally a story of the impact of quite fortuitous mischance upon a man of no exceptional faults or virtues, it lays bare, with a ruthless sincerity worthy of its own protagonist, the pitfalls lying about the path of man, into which those very unexceptional faults or virtues may at a touch overbalance him, at the bidding of some incalculable chance, and out of which he must raise himself, chastened and ennobled, by the ‘greatness in the soul’ which alone makes him a match for the eternal powers. The anthropological and religious implications of the story offer fruitful fields of research and speculation to the expert inquirer. The average reader will be well enough rewarded by a study of the more universal human issues of the drama. Oedipus, too complacent in his prosperity, too confident of his sufficiency, too ready to take offence or to impute blame when ‘rattled’ by the approach of trouble; Oedipus, unshirking in the performance of a self-appointed unpleasant task, unflinching in quest of the truth at whatever cost of terrible self-revelation; Oedipus driven to the summit of passion by agony of body and soul, and returning at the last to humility and selfless resignation: this vast and living portrait of man, surrounded by a group of subsidiary portraits no less vital, has no equal in the Greek, nor perhaps in any other, theatre. The Chorus, fellow-citizens desperately implicated in the awful happenings, are more than ever closely tied to the action, and their moods move swiftly with the march of events. Bewildered and apprehensive, they have little respite for calm reflection or reasoned judgment, and even their final words seem only to deepen the hopeless gloom. What more constructive ‘moral’ they would draw for us is implied, rather than stated, in their moods of apprehension lest divine law should after all be found wanting and a lurking spirit of defiance be vindicated by the event. This worst calamity at least is averted.

‘Then learn that mortal man must always look to his ending, And none can be called happy until that day when he carries His happiness down to the grave in peace.’

These closing words of King Oedipus themselves suggest a sequel; but it was only in the closing years of his own long life that Sophocles completed the story with the legend of the passing of the aged hero. Oedipus does not indeed die happy, but in Oedipus at Colonus he is a different man. Though resigned by long endurance to the hardness of his physical lot, the consciousness of defilement coupled with moral innocence has in no way softened his daemonic temper, which blazes out with the old fury in denunciation of his rebellious son and deceitful uncle; but it has brought him to a sense of his symbolic sacredness, as a person set apart, a sufferer in whom others may find redemption. Therefore a special and wonderful end is reserved for him, a passing ‘without grief or agony, more marvellous than that of any other man’.

The mood of the play is a singular blend of harshness and serenity, with slow-moving action and a somewhat static plot, and a strongly-marked ritual element which presents some difficulty to the modern reader. The whole is sweetened with the fragrant local atmosphere of a spot long hallowed and cherished in Athenian lore, no other than the poet’s own birthplace, the ‘white Colonus’, to which he pays his farewell tribute in one of his most picturesque odes.

IV

‘Hard to analyse, impossible to translate’ – such, says Dr J. T. Sheppard (Greek Tragedy) is ‘Sophoclean language at its best’. In the face of such an admonition from a supreme authority (who has himself produced a masterly version of King Oedipus) a new translator may well search his heart for an excuse for his audacity. In the versions which I now offer (largely, I hope, to new and unprejudiced readers) I have taken as my first aim the production of a readable, and actable, dramatic text, not a line-for-line, word-for-word transcription of the original. Inaccuracies are, I hope, as few as is humanly possible; but an accurate rendering is not a translation. The problem of finding English substitutes for Greek idiom and terminology is difficult enough in prose, more difficult in verse, and most difficult of all in drama. For here we require not only the lucidity of prose and the formality of verse, but a ‘personality’ in every speech that will ‘get it across’ to the audience as the living utterance of a living character. What character? And in what situation? If there is no English equivalent of a Greek demigod, soothsayer, or messenger, and still less of the social background against which they stand, in what sort of English dress are they to be presented? We can only adopt a substitution, which on historical grounds will be more or less misleading, of such idiom and vocabulary as will create a sufficiently convincing atmosphere. In fact, of course, no translation is free of this difficulty – the difficulty of non-corresponding terms. It would be an exaggeration to say that no Greek word has an exact equivalent in English; we are on sufficiently safe ground with such words as eye, night, tree, water, and shall probably not get into serious difficulties with husband, house, battle, dance, though the possibility of misrepresentation is here already within sight. But with god, king, city, law, virtue, priest, sin, honour, and a host of kindred words very prevalent in tragedy, we enter a sphere in which the English vocabulary is clothed with associations which are at least partly, and sometimes wholly, different from the Greek. For this reason there are those who hold that you cannot call Oedipus ‘King’, or Zeus ‘God’, without falsifying the social and religious background of the original. What, then, are you to do? For the resources of English are not inexhaustible.

Considering the problem with special reference to drama, I have argued thus. The reader of the printed page may take his own time to consider the implications of this or that expression, and may in due course accustom himself to an unfamiliar terminology. But the listener cannot so pause; his understanding and emotion must respond at the instant, and must not be baulked or side-tracked by an unnecessary puzzle; nor must the actor be hampered by having to convey meaning and fervour through a too unfamiliar word-medium – rather he is to be helped by the use, even at the cost of inexactitude, of such terms as will most immediately strike the right dramatic note. (Some Shakespearean anachronisms are of this order; we would not exchange the ‘hats’ and ‘clocks’ of Julius Caesar for their more correct Roman equivalents, if any.) Now every listener may be presumed to understand, at least in some degree, that a ‘king’ in ancient Greece is not the equivalent of a king in modern England. For that matter King Richard II is not equivalent to King George VI; nor the King of Great Britain to the King of Abyssinia. What a ‘king’ in ancient Greece actually was, can be learnt only by an intensive study of the literature and archaeology, and we do not answer any questions by calling him ‘tyrant’, ‘prince’, ‘governor’, or ‘lord’ – when in fact he was probably something more like a wealthy landowner. All that is necessary for the play is that he should be recognised as a ‘great one’ in virtue of his own power of command and, it may be, of the election of his townsmen. And of all the possible alternatives, I think that ‘king’, as being at once the widest and most dignified term, is the least objectionable.

The question of ‘god’ is perhaps more controversial. But again, no one supposes that the Greek ‘god’, or ‘God’, though he had many names, was ever Jehovah, Allah, or Vishnu. And I hold that in certain contexts a listener will be less distracted or jarred, and the dramatic ‘temperature’ more truly registered, by the word ‘God’ than by the word ‘Zeus’. At the same time there are distinctions that must be made; and the following observations may serve to explain some apparent contradictions or inconsistencies.

(1) ‘God’ I consider to be permissible, and the truest rendering, where the notion is of the great invisible source of moral law or unseen arbiter of human destiny (Antigone 450: ‘That order did not come from God’).

(2) ‘The gods’ is sometimes similar in significance to the foregoing, but it is also used in a lower anthropomorphic sense (Oedipus at Colonus 607: ‘Only the gods have ageless and deathless life’).

(3) ‘The god’, though not very happy in English, is unavoidable where the reference is to a particular god – usually Apollo, who communicates his messages to man through his oracle, and ministers (King Oedipus 77: ‘Whatever the god requires it shall be done’).

(4) ‘A god’ will usually be one of an indeterminate range of nameless powers, mostly of evil.

(5) ‘Zeus’, and some other names, must be left unaltered where the differentiation is obviously necessary, and where the context does not require that degree of real intensity for which I reserve the term ‘God’. It will be noticed also that such a name is sometimes taken almost ‘in vain’, as in Oedipus at Colonus 310, where Antigone, at the unexpected arrival of her sister, exclaims ‘O Zeus! What do I see?’ ‘O God’ is here clearly impossible.

In the matter of idiom and style my principle has been much the same. A literal translation can only result in prose – or worse, a strained versification – which may faithfully (and rightly, for some purposes) preserve the quite un-English constructions and thought-processes of the original, but cannot possibly be spoken as living English. For straightforward reading, and for acting, we need contemporary English, not Greek in an Elizabethan or Victorian disguise. What looks like a cliché or proverbial saying must be rendered by the most appropriate contemporary equivalent. Outbursts of passionate or hasty speech on the one hand, and casual commonplaces on the other, must fall into whatever form will come with the right accent from the actor’s lips. When all is said and done, an ancient Greek play can never be a modern English one, and some degree of incongruity is inescapable; but in stage performance, and to some extent in reading, we can and should recapture most of the dramatic force and characterisation of the original, and these cannot possibly be preserved in a dead or imitative idiom.

I would not wish anyone to imagine that in these, or any other, versions he will find the whole Sophocles and nothing but Sophocles. Translation inevitably omits, or transmutes, something of its original, and cannot escape importing something that is alien to it. At best it can ease the opening of doors that would otherwise remain, for some, permanently closed; it cannot transmit the whole quality of what lies behind those doors.

V

The proper place for drama is in the theatre; and, like most great drama, Greek tragedy will survive transplantation into a theatrical climate quite different from that in which it was first reared. To anyone contemplating the production of any of these plays my advice would be that he should not be unduly burdened, and certainly not be daunted, by a too scrupulous awareness of the physical conditions of the ancient Greek theatre. That theatre was a vast open-air arena, provided with a dancing-place (orchestra) in which the Chorus moved and chanted; a platform for the actors, probably raised by a few steps above the orchestra and communicating with it; and a building which afforded both a retiring-place for the actors and a background for their performance. The dress and action of the players were designed in formal style for long-distance effect; the actor wore a mask which depicted with broad and exaggerated emphasis the dominant characteristics of his rôle. In our own time and place open-air acting is a doubtful proposition at best, and the chances of our ever being able to appreciate, or achieve, a faithful replica of an ancient Greek performance are remote – though there have been some interesting experiments. The modern producer will have other advantages – chiefly a more intimate relation between stage and audience, providing greater scope for the abundant subtlety of speech which the dialogue affords. The use of a drop-curtain will not be out of place (though the play should usually be presented without an interval), and will simplify and enhance, for instance, the opening scene of King Oedipus, where a ‘crowd’ is discovered on-stage (an unusual opening, incidentally, for the Greek theatre, where they must have ‘entered’). Settings can be either simple or elaborate, according to taste or opportunity; for most Greek plays a dignified central entrance, preferably approached by a step or two, is the minimum requirement; side entrances are also presumed, one leading to the immediate neighbourhood of the ‘city’, the other to more distant country. One of the plays in this volume, Oedipus at Colonus, requires a rustic scene. It is in connection with such as this, no doubt, that Sophocles became known as ‘the inventor of scene-painting’; whatever this involved, we cannot suppose that it implies anything approaching realism, which would have been as disastrous on the Greek stage as in any modern ‘little theatre’. The Greeks were doubtless quite as capable of using their imagination as we are.

The Chorus may be as large or small as convenience indicates; fifteen was the regular number in Sophocles’ day, but as few as five will serve. Large or small, it is essential that their words should be intelligible; the choral odes should be spoken in unison – or distributed among the speakers – rather than sung to any musical setting in the modern formula. Incidental music, on single instruments of wood-wind or string, should be confined to short interludes marking the passage of time or the transition between chorus and dialogue. Nor should audibility of speech be sacrificed to any complicated ‘eurhythmic’ movements, though there may be some place for stylised grouping and posture. On the speaking of the verse in general, a word of caution may be desirable. The traditional iambic line of the Shakespearean pattern comes easily to the reader, but for that reason may as easily become monotonous to the ear. I have used, for the most part, a much ‘resolved’ form of iambic line which allows a greater elasticity of construction while preserving the basic five-stress rhythm; the proper ‘pointing’ of a line is thus not always obvious to the reader at first sight, but when rightly delivered will be found to maintain the rhythm and confirm the sense.

Recent experiments in contemporary verse-drama have accustomed actors and audiences to a form of naturalistic, yet rhythmical, speech, which is probably nearer to the pattern of Greek dramatic verse than the more formal rhetoric of our older classic drama. It is this development in modern drama that has made possible the type of diction at which I have aimed in the versions here offered to new generations of readers and actors.

December 1946.

E. F. W.

The text followed is mainly that of Jebb

(Cambridge; O.T. 1893, O.C. 1889, Ant. 1891).

THE THEBAN LEGEND

The place called Thebes lay in the central plain of Boeotia, part of the narrow tongue of land joining the Athenian country to the more northerly mainland. Here, under the guidance of the oracle of Delphi, a city was first founded by Cadmus, son of Agenor and brother of that Europa whom Zeus courted in the likeness of a bull. Misfortune befell him even before his city was established, for all the trusty companions who should have been his first citizens were devoured by a fierce dragon which inhabited a neighbouring glen. But Cadmus was a match for the dragon and at one stroke laid him dead. Again the word of Heaven guided him, and he was instructed to sow the dragon’s teeth in the ground prepared for his future city; from which seed there instantly sprang up a tribe of giants so fierce and fully armed that a deadly combat immediately broke out between them. At length but five remained alive, and these offering their submission to Cadmus became the founders and fathers of the Thebes to be.

Cadmus begat Polydorus, and Polydorus begat Labdacus, and Labdacus begat Laius; and to Laius and his wife Jocasta a son was born. Before even a name had been given to this infant – indeed, by some accounts, before he was born – his life was clouded with the presage of disaster; for Apollo’s oracle had nothing but ill to foretell of him: he was destined one day to kill his father, and to become his own mother’s husband. Could any mortal device be proof against the god’s prediction? Could any mortal be so presumptuous as to try to thwart it? Laius and Jocasta would so presume. One way alone offered any hope – more than hope, certainty. The child should not live. They would not indeed take upon themselves the guilt of infanticide, but they would deliver the child to a servant of theirs, a shepherd, with orders to abandon it on the mountain-side, its feet cruelly pierced with an iron pin, so that it might not even crawl to safety.

This was done. But still the word of Apollo – and human compassion – prevailed. For the shepherd had not the heart to leave the child to perish; instead he entrusted it to a fellow-labourer, a Corinthian shepherd, beseeching him to take it away beyond the borders of Thebes and rear it as his own. The Corinthian, a servant of Polybus, King of Corinth, in due course brought the child to his royal master, who, being childless, gladly welcomed the infant and adopted it as his own, giving it the name of Oedipus (Swollen-foot) in commiseration for its painful treatment.

Oedipus grew to manhood, the honoured Prince of Corinth and loved foster-son of those whom he supposed to be his true parents. But by chance he came to hear, again from the mouth of Apollo’s ministers, the terrible prediction concerning him. Again, as his parents had done, he sought to give the lie to the oracle. He fled from Corinth, resolved never again to set eyes on his supposed father and mother as long as they lived. His wanderings brought him to Thebes, where now all was calamity and confusion. King Laius had been killed by an unknown traveller on a lonely road; the city was in the grip of a deadly monster, the Sphinx, who pitted her ferocity against the wits of man, destroying all who failed to answer her cunning riddle: and none could answer it. But in Oedipus the creature met her match. He answered her riddle and destroyed her power, and so was received joyfully into Thebes as her king and heir to the house and fortune; a happy man, a wise and resourceful man, and (save for one sharp encounter on his journey from Corinth to Thebes) a man of peace. He married Jocasta; and sons and daughters were born to them.

There passed some fifteen years of seeming prosperity. But beneath the deceptive surface a hideous depth of shame and infamy lay concealed. The gods could no longer brook in silence the affront of Oedipus’ unwitting sins. Pestilence and famine brought Thebes once more to the verge of utter extinction. In their despair her citizens cried to their king for yet more proofs of his infallible resource, and to their gods, chief among them Apollo, for light and healing in their wretchedness.

[Here the play of KING OEDIPUS begins]