Three Theban Plays, The

SOPHOCLES died some time in the year 406-5 B.C., but the Athenians did not see this last play performed until the festival of Dionysus in the spring of 401 B.C. In the intervening five years they had tasted the bitterness of total defeat and unconditional surrender. The peace terms of 404 were harsh: the Athenians were reduced to military impotence by the surrender of their few remaining ships and the destruction of their fortifications; the democratic institutions under which they had lived for almost exactly a century were replaced by a Spartan-backed reactionary dictatorship—the Thirty Tyrants, who ruled by terror. It could, however, have been worse; the Thebans and Corinthians argued for the annihilation of Athens—enslavement of the population, destruction of the city—but the Spartans were unwilling to go so far. And when their puppet regime provoked an uprising by its excesses they did not intervene vigorously enough to save it; by 401 Athens was once again a democracy, and the worst effects of the years of civil war were mitigated by an enlightened act of amnesty. But it was not the same Athens; gone forever were the confidence and daring, the sense of unlimited horizons characteristic of the Periclean city.

The audience that saw Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus in 401 B.C. must have been profoundly moved, for it is, among other things, a valedictory celebration of Athens as it was in its time of greatness. Sophocles must have known when he wrote it that the city was headed for defeat, perhaps destruction; in this play he brings Oedipus to Athens, or rather to the nearby village of Colonus, his own birthplace, where the blind exile from Thebes is to receive Athenian protection and, in return, guarantee victory for Athens over Thebes in some future war. This victory will be won on the site of his grave; but, for that to happen, its location must remain a secret, known only to the rulers of his adopted city.

In any case, though Oedipus speaks of going to Colonus to die in Euripides’ Phoenician Women (produced long before our play), the motif of the secret grave at Colonus and its power over the future meets us nowhere else in the Oedipus legends. Such a protective grave however is not an unknown phenomenon in Greek tragedy. Eurystheus, in Euripides’ Sons of Heracles, promises the Athenians that if they will bury him in front of Athena’s temple he will be “a resident alien, conferring favor and safety on the city” and “a bitter enemy” to the Peloponnesians “when they come here in force.” And Orestes, in the final play of the Oresteia, makes a similar promise to the Athenians as he thanks them for the verdict of their court which frees him from the Furies: if his descendants ever make war on Athens, he says,

We ourselves, even if we must rise up from the grave,
will deal with those who break the oath I take—
baffle them with disasters, curse their marches ...
(The Eumenides, 781-83, trans. Robert Fagles)

These passages are not mere tragic convention; they reflect deep-seated popular belief. Typical is the story Herodotus tells about the Spartan search for the bones of Orestes. They had been told by the oracle at Delphi that they would never defeat their hostile neighbors, the Tegeans, until they removed the bones of Orestes to Sparta. After a long search they found them, on Tegean soil; once they succeeded in removing them, without the Tegeans realizing what had happened, they were steadily victorious over their enemy. And in the early days of the naval offensive against Persia, so Plutarch tells us, the Athenians, after wiping out the pirates based on the rocky island of Scyros, discovered the bones of their own hero Theseus, who had died there, and brought them back reverently to Athens for burial in Attic earth. “This is not our doing,” said Themistocles in Herodotus, after the Persian defeat at Salamis, “it is the work of gods and heroes ...” By “heroes” he does not mean the men who fought the battle but the dead heroes, protectors of Greek earth, worshiped and placated by sacrifice on their graves. When this cult of heroes began we do not know—there is no trace of it in Homer, where the word hêrôs seems to mean no more than “nobleman”—but by the fifth century it was a widespread religious phenomenon.

These sacrificial ceremonies took place at the grave (real or supposed) of the hero; usually he was one of the great figures of Homeric saga—Achilles, Ajax, Hector all had their places, some of them more than one—and sometimes he was believed to possess healing or prophetic powers, like Asclepius, or to send prophetic dreams, like Amphiaraus. More often he was thought of simply as an angry spirit whose wrath had to be appeased by sacrifice. The heroes followed in death the fierce code they had lived by: to help their friends and harm their enemies.

But heroic cult was not exclusively reserved for ancestral figures of the remote past; we know of at least two fifth-century men who were paid such honors after their death. One was Brasidas, the Spartan general, who, in a campaign like that waged by Lawrence of Arabia, liberated the cities of the North Aegean from Athenian domination in the early years of the Peloponnesian War. After his death in a battle that saved the principal city of Amphipolis from an Athenian counterattack in 422 B.C., he was buried inside the city walls and given heroic sacrifice. The other, strangely enough, was Sophocles himself. This extraordinary honor was paid him not because of his eminence as a dramatist or his services to the city but because he had been the official host of the healing hero Asclepius when his cult was introduced into Athens. Sophocles was accorded heroic worship under the name Dexion—The Receiver. We know from an inscription found on the west slope of the Acropolis that the cult of Dexion was still active in the second half of the fourth century.

Though his grave will not be the scene of sacrifice (for its location is to be kept secret from all except Theseus and his descendants) Oedipus is to become such a figure: his grave will be the site of a battle in which an invading army will be defeated. This is the destiny Oedipus dimly foresaw at the end of the earlier play. In its final scene, the blind outcast begs Creon to expel him from Thebes, to let him die on the barren mountains. But then he corrects himself; somehow he knows that this will not be the manner of his death. “I have been saved / for something great and terrible, something strange” (1596-97). The last play shows us the fulfillment of that prophetic insight.

The setting of the play distinguishes it sharply from its predecessors; the stage door is not the entrance to the palace of a ruler, Creon or Oedipus, but the shadowed edge of a thick wood. Such places filled the Greeks with awe and not a little fear. Yeats understood this, as he did so much about the Greeks: “When Oedipus at Colonus went into the Wood of the Furies,” he wrote, “he felt the same creeping in his flesh that an Irish countryman feels in certain haunted woods in Galway and in Sligo.” The wood is indeed sacred to the Furies, those grim goddesses whose special province is the punishment of wrong-doers, especially those who wrong their parents. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia they pursued the matricide Orestes, only to lose their prey when an Athenian court acquitted him; they then turned their wrath against Athens, but the goddess Athena offered them honors and a home in her city, and they became protecting deities of the Athenian land. So they are not only “The Terrible Goddesses ... / Daughters of Earth, Daughters of the Darkness” but also “the Kindly Ones, / the Eumenides” (46-50).

Toward their sacred grove come two actors to open the play. Their entrance is a long-drawn-out movement through the parodos —the passage between the end of the spectators’ benches and the stage building—to center stage. One of them represents a young girl; the other, a blind man feeling his way with a stick and leaning on his daughter’s arm, is a pitiful sight, as we know from the reaction of his son Polynices later in the play:

wrapped in such rags—appalling—
the filth of years clings to his old withered body,
wasting away the skin, the flesh on his ribs ...
and his face, the blind sockets of his eyes,
and the white hair wild, flying in the wind!
And all of a piece with this, I’m afraid, the scraps
he packs to fill his shriveled belly. (1421-27)

We learn, from his very first words, that this wreck of a human being is Oedipus, once King of Thebes. For him the place he has come to is just one more way station in his vagrant life as a beggar. “Where are we now? What land, what city of men? / Who will receive the wandering Oedipus today?” (2-3). But when he hears, from the local citizen who orders him to move away from the sacred grove, the name of the Kindly Ones, he is a changed man. He had been all compliance, as befits a beggar—

This peremptory refusal to move is followed by something even more unexpected: Oedipus gives the citizen a message for Theseus, King of Athens, and the message is as incomprehensible as the beggar’s change of attitude. “Simply tell him this: / with a small service he may gain a great deal” (86-87). The citizen goes off, not to Theseus, but to consult the inhabitants of the nearby village of Colonus; they will soon, in the persons of the chorus, come to see for themselves. Meanwhile Oedipus, assured by Antigone that they are alone, addresses the goddesses of the grove. We learn now the reason for his sudden assumption of authority, the explanation of his enigmatic phrase: “this is the sign, the pact that seals my fate” (55). At Delphi, when as a young man he was given the terrible prophecies that came eventually to fulfillment, he was also promised an end to his sufferings: “my promised rest / after hard years weathered” (107-8). And the place of his rest was to be “the grounds of the Awesome Goddesses” (110). This prophecy also explains his message to Theseus: he was to be “a blessing to the hosts I live among” (113). From this place he now intends never to move, and though he makes some concessions in the next scene, leaving the actual precinct of the Eumenides for profane ground, he will not go offstage from this moment until he leaves the earth forever. The play’s movement will be that of the other characters, friendly or hostile, around this fixed center. He will not be induced to move by force, threats or persuasion; he will leave only when the lightning and thunder summon him to “some great consummation at the end” (126).

In spite of the self-imposed immobility of the protagonist the play is not static; in fact it is, by the standards of Greek tragedy, remarkable for the variety and intensity of its stage action. The impressive entrance of Oedipus and Antigone is the first in a series of highly dramatic appearances: the citizen with his terrified, peremptory order to move off; the chorus hunting the sacrilegious trespasser; Ismene in a broad traveling hat, riding a colt and bringing surprising news; Theseus with his warm welcome for the blind outcast; Creon with his soldiers, his lying speech and his violent hands laid on the old man; Theseus’ sudden entry in the nick of time; the triumphant return of Antigone and Ismene, rescued by Theseus; and the final surprise, the arrival of Polynices. The exits are no less effective: Ismene goes to perform the purificatory rites for the Furies and, as we learn later, is seized by Creon and his armed men; Antigone is dragged off by Creon’s soldiers as Oedipus gropes in the dark to help her; Creon leaves, under arrest, to go with Theseus to the rescue of the two girls; Polynices, in spite of the pleas of Antigone, departs for Thebes to fulfill the curse of his father—to kill and be killed by his own brother—and, in what is perhaps the most spectacular exit in all Greek tragedy, the blind man walks with sure swift steps as he leads Theseus and the daughters toward the place where his mortal existence will end. But quite apart from all the vigorous stage action created by the basic plot—the succession of assaults on Oedipus’ resolve to confer on Athens the gift within his power—the play also generates dramatic excitement through its exploration of a unique theme: the transformation of Oedipus the mortal man into the hêrôs he is to be in his grave. In the last hours of his life on the earth, he begins to exercise the powers of the daemonic figure he is destined to become.

It is hard to recognize in this broken man the vigorous, confident figure of the earlier play, the man who answered the riddle of the Sphinx, who was “crowned ... with honors ... towering over all—/ mighty king of the seven gates of Thebes” (1329-30). But the news that he is in the grove of the Eumenides brings the old Oedipus to life in this tired old man: the same confident assertiveness—“I shall never leave my place in this new land” (53)—the same sense of his own worth—“whatever I say, there will be great vision / in every word I say” (89- 90). And from this point he never retreats; his sense of mission and power, far from faltering as he stands helpless before the assaults of his enemies, fills him with sure prophetic insight and daemonic rage. His last earthly action before he goes to the mysterious grave to which the gods summon him is the tremendous curse he pronounces on his ingrate son.

But much later when, defeated and captured together with Cordelia, he is sent off to prison, it is the old man who comforts the young woman with counsel of acceptance:

Come, let’s away to prison;
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news ... (5.3.8-14)

The stages of this transformation, from abject beggar to daemonic power, are defined for us in familiar terms: Oedipus’ relation to and comprehension of the Apolline prophecies which, in this play as in the other, hedge his destiny. It is the memory of the old prophecy—that he would find rest in the grove of the Eumenides—that spurs the first expression of his new-found assurance. But Apollo promised more than rest. Oedipus was to be, in death, a dispenser of good and evil—“a blessing to the hosts I live among, / disaster to those who sent me, drove me out!” (113-14). Not until his other daughter, Ismene, comes to bring him news from Thebes will he begin to understand the full meaning of this prophecy. At the moment he is no power in the land but a “harried ghost of a man ... no more / the flesh and blood of old” (133-35) and must hide in the sacred grove from the chorus, which now comes on stage to question the trespasser. He agrees to leave the forbidden ground in exchange for a promise of protection, but the promise is broken when the chorus learns his identity. He has to plead with them for refuge and later answer their prurient questions about his past. But as he defends that past and states his essential innocence, the confident mood returns, and he tells them in authoritative tones that he comes

For these sons Oedipus has nothing but angry feelings, as we learn from his bitter outburst that points the contrast between their indifference to his suffering and the devoted service of the two girls. But there is more than this behind his anger. As we learn later, he had cursed them for their ingratitude even before he was expelled from Thebes. In the old epic poem that dealt with these events the curse was provoked by actions on the part of the sons which seem trivial by comparison with their terrible consequences—they gave him the haunch of the roast instead of the choice cut from the shoulder, for example. But Sophocles makes no reference to these traditional details: he leaves us to attribute Oedipus’ fatal curse to his anger at the sons’ indifference to his fate; later, face-to-face with Polynices, he will even charge him with responsibility for his father’s lamentable condition. What he now learns from Ismene is what the outcome of the war between the sons may depend on, and once again prophecies are involved. The Thebans have been told by Apollo that victory over Argos depends on Oedipus: “They are in your hands, the oracle says, / their power rests in you” (429-30). Now he learns, as we do, the nature of the gift he can make to Athens: his grave, if it is on foreign soil, will be the site of a Theban defeat. Creon, acting for Eteocles, will come to try to lure him back to Thebes, but, Ismene warns him, they will not bury him in Theban soil, not with his father’s blood on his hands. They will bury him just at the frontier, where he can be of no use to any other city. On these terms Oedipus will never go: “they will never get me in their clutches—never!” (453). And when he hears that both his sons knew of the prophecy but made no move to bring him home, his anger blazes out and he renews the terms of the curse he had pronounced on them:

may the great gods
never quench their blazing, fated strife!
May it rest in my hands alone—
now their spears are lifting tip to tip—
to bring their fighting to its bitter end.
I’d see that the one who holds the scepter now
would not last long, nor would the exile ever
return again! (469-76)

This is the same curse he had pronounced on them at the time when, as he says, Thebes expelled him and “my own sons who could have swept to the rescue, / ... they did nothing, they refused!” (493-94). The Greek word for curse, ara, is also the word for “prayer”; a curse is just a prayer for someone to come to harm. And so Oedipus expresses his will here, as a wish, a prayer, something not in his power but a gift of the gods. Yet he has some inner sense that his wish will be granted:

precious little good will ever come to them
from lording over Thebes. That much I know,
now that I hear the oracles my dear one brings
and brood on the old prophecies, stored
in the depths of all my being,
that Apollo has fulfilled for me at last. (506-11)

Now his mind is fully made up. The dream that he might be welcomed back to Thebes has gone forever; Athens is to be his eternal home; to Athens will go the victory his grave confers. Oedipus the blind outcast found it hard to believe Ismene’s news that his decrepit body was an object to be sought after—“What good could anyone get from the like of me?” (428). Now he understands fully the prophecy given to him so long ago. “The gods are about to raise you to your feet—” Ismene told him (432); by his choice of a place to die he can make history, become a presence in the soil feared by some and thanked by others.

Even the frightened and suspicious chorus is impressed. They now accept the stranger but warn him he must make a ritual appeasement of the spirits on whose forbidden ground he has trespassed. The careful instructions for carrying out the ritual reinforce the religious solemnity that surrounds the action of this mystery play from start to finish. Ismene goes to perform the rites and (as we learn later) to be captured by Creon; the chorus now has their chance to probe fully into the horrors of Oedipus’ past. They do not spare his feelings. In spite of his appeals, they demand, as a return for their concession, answers to their questions, confirmation of all the rumors they have heard. Oedipus is forced to rehearse it all, to the shocked outcries of the old men: the marriage with his mother, the daughters who are actually his sisters, the blood of his father on his hands. But he ends this recital of horrors with a claim that he is not a guilty man. As before (284-95) he pleads both self-defense and ignorance of identity in the matter of Laius’ death, but this time the plea of ignorance is more explicit, and the affirmation of innocence in the eyes of the law is more emphatic:

the man I murdered—he’d have murdered me!
I am innocent! Pure in the eyes of the law,
blind, unknowing, I, I came to this! (614-16)

The arrival of Theseus puts a stop to the importunate probing of the chorus; his treatment of Oedipus is a stunning contrast. No personal questions: “I know all about you, son of Laius” (621). He asks only what the suppliant desires, and promises, as one who has known exile himself, to do all he can to help. He does not know, as yet, that Oedipus comes bringing a gift. No wonder Oedipus sounds his praises: “so magnanimous, so noble! Your few words / spare me the need to draw things out at length” (642-43).

Theseus is of course the representative Athenian hero, mythic founder of the unity of Attica under the city of Athens, the prototype of Athenian heroic endeavor and civilized living. Sophocles here presents him as a picture of the humane greatness of Athens in its best days, of the compassion that had long since vanished under the harsh pressures of protracted war and revolution. Pericles’ ideal Athens of the Funeral Speech is re-created here in all its generosity: “We alone do good to our neighbors,” Pericles said, “not upon a calculation of interest, but in the confidence of freedom and in a frank and fearless spirit.” This Athens deserves the gift of Oedipus, the future victory over a Thebes that we shall see represented by the violence and lies of Creon, the hypocrisy and fratricidal hate of Polynices. But Theseus still has to learn what advantage will come to Athens because of his generosity, and when he is told what the gift will be, he learns also that it may bring trouble—“My sons will force you to send me back to Thebes” (663). He cannot understand why Oedipus does not want to go home and reproves the old man for his stubborn anger. But Oedipus will accept no rebuke and reproves Theseus in his turn. “Wait till you hear me out, then criticize me—” (667). Told that the grave of Oedipus will be the scene of a Theban defeat on Attic soil, Theseus is incredulous; these cities are at peace. “And how on earth could conflict ever come / between your city and mine?” (684-85). The answer is one of the most famous passages in Sophocles:

Oh Theseus,
dear friend, only the gods can never age,
the gods can never die. All else in the world
almighty Time obliterates, crushes all
to nothing. (685-89)

But he does not abide by the doctrine he preaches; he goes on to prophesy. Athens and Thebes are at peace now, but “a day will come when the treaties of an hour, / the pacts firmed with a handclasp will snap—” (701-2). And as he foresees the day of his vengeance on the Thebans who have wronged him, his words reverberate with an unearthly tone, the daemonic wrath which, in Greek belief, was the characteristic quality of so many of the beings they honored with heroic sacrifice. He looks forward to “some far-off day when my dead body, slumbering, buried / cold in death, will drain their hot blood down” (704-5). Apollo’s prophecy had no such detailed vision; this stems from a growth of some new prophetic power in Oedipus himself. But he still claims Apollo as his authority: “if Zeus is still Zeus and Apollo the son of god / speaks clear and true” (706-7). He does not yet prophesy the future on his own authority. That will be the final stage of his transformation.

Theseus is convinced; he accepts the gift Oedipus offers. He promises protection to the old man not just as a suppliant but as a full citizen of Athens, for so he makes him now: “I will settle him / in our land, a fellow-citizen with full rights” (723-24). So Athena, in the Aeschylean trilogy, offered a home and a place in the city’s worship to those Eumenides whose grove is the background of this play and who, like Oedipus, brought powers and blessings to the land. Oedipus is no longer a helpless vagrant, a stateless refugee, but a citizen of Athens, and the chorus now sings the praises of that city in a choral hymn that re-creates for us the beauty and glory of Athens as Sophocles knew and loved it in the great days of peace and prosperity. It celebrates the countryside of Attica—the trees, the nightingales, the ivy, narcissus and crocus, the rivers, the olive groves, the horses, the sea. But every detail recalls some aspect of the city that presided over all this fruitful landscape. “The Reveler Dionysus” and the “wine-dark ivy” recall not only the wine of the Attic countryside but the theater, perhaps the supreme glory of the city where it first came to birth. The narcissus, “crown of the Great Goddesses,” invokes the memory of Persephone, lured by that flower to her capture by Hades; she and her mother Demeter were worshiped in the famous mysteries at Eleusis in Attica, and it was on Athenian soil that Triptolemos, protégé of the two great goddesses, taught man to cultivate the grain. The olive, gift of Athena to Athens, produced that oil which was exported in decorated vases made of Attic clay to every quarter of the Greek world. The horses, Poseidon’s gift to Athens, are still to be seen on the remains of the great frieze which ran round the inside of the Parthenon portico; they are the spirited mounts of those Athenian aristocratic youngsters who, in the play, will soon ride to rescue Oedipus’ daughters from Creon and his men. And the ship, Poseidon’s other gift, was the instrument of Athenian empire; for most of Sophocles’ long life span, no ship had sailed the Aegean Sea against Athens’ will.

Yet in this lyrical praise of Attic landscape and Athenian greatness there sounds a note of sadness; the hymn of praise is also a requiem. The nightingale, mourning for her butchered son Itys, is a bird of lamentation; the narcissus and the crocus, both associated with the mysteries of Eleusis and the life beyond death, were planted on graves. As Sophocles wrote these marvelous lines the power of Athens was at its lowest ebb; defeat stared her in the face; invading armies had wrecked the fertility and shattered the peace of the Attic countryside. A Theban cavalry raid, just a few years before the production of the play, had been routed close to Athens, perhaps at Colonus; it is certain that the annual procession along the sacred way from Athens to Eleusis had been prevented for some years past by the Spartan force, which held a permanent strongpoint in Attica at Decelea. The olive trees of the farms had long since been chopped down and burned by the invaders; the young horsemen of the frieze were long since dead, fallen in the inconclusive land battles of the middle years of the war or worked to death as prisoners in the quarries at Syracuse; and Athenian sea power was outfought and soon to be annihilated by a Spartan fleet financed by Persian subsidies.

Yet the sadness in these lines is not that of despair. For the same details that hint at death speak also of immortality. The mysteries of the Great Goddesses promised the initiates a blessed existence in a future life, and the olive is “a creation self-creating, never conquered” (794); Herodotus tells the story of the sacred olive tree on the Acropolis which, burned by the Persians, grew fresh shoots the very next day. The Athens Sophocles knew in his youth and manhood is to die, but become immortal; he sings of his city in the last grim days of the war as he remembered it in the time of greatness and glory and, partly thanks to him, this is how we remember it still. At Colonus now there is a bus garage surrounded by an industrial slum. But to those whose ears have been charmed by Sophocles’ siren song the name will always suggest horses, the nightingale, the laurel and the olive, and, though the words in their context refer to Colonus, Athens itself, “the noblest home on earth / ... glistening, brilliant in the sun” (763-64).

Oedipus had warned Theseus (745-48) of trouble to come, and the great ode in praise of Athens is hardly finished when it appears—in the person of Creon, accompanied by an armed bodyguard. His reassuring speech to the chorus—“I haven’t come here with any thought of force” (830)—is as big a lie as his offer to Oedipus—“return to Thebes, the house of your fathers!” (861). Ismene has already told her father what the Thebans really intend, and Oedipus rejects his invitation with anger and contempt. The fierce accusation that follows reminds us of his equally fierce attack on Creon in the earlier play. Their final interview is like their first. In both Creon is condemned out of hand, with the same vindictive wrath, but this time the sentence is just. In Oedipus’ scornful rejection of Creon in this scene we see some of the reasons for his bitterness against Thebes, but his indictment ends with a new manifestation of some more than human strength that is growing in him, a new prophecy, more explicit.

The source of this, as of all he knows, is “Apollo and Zeus himself, Apollo’s father” (904). This knowledge is imparted, not to the proud, vigorous and successful royal figure of the first play, but to the blind, decrepit old man who cannot even see, much less prevent, the violence offered to himself and his daughters. At the end of the scene Creon has Antigone dragged off to join Ismene, whom he has already seized, and is about to lay hands on Oedipus himself when Theseus comes to the rescue.

His harsh indictment of Creon as a violater of the laws of hospitality is the other side of the generous welcome he extended to Oedipus. The Athenians are mobilized for the pursuit, to recapture the daughters, but Creon is not finished yet. He now tries to drive a wedge between Theseus and Oedipus by dwelling on the polluted nature, the criminal past, of the suppliant Athens has taken in; he supports his glib self-justification—that he never dreamed Athens would protect “a creature so corrupt” (1077)—with a reference to “the Mount of Ares,” where mankind’s first court of law, the Areopagus, was inaugurated by Athena herself. Oedipus’ wounds are not allowed to close; after the recital of his past misfortunes dragged from him by the insistent chorus, he now has to listen while his enemy presents him as an object of loathing and disgust in an attempt to turn his only friend against him.

He reacts with vigor. And his long speech takes up the question that the earlier play had raised implicitly by the background of its action, but did not explicitly discuss: the question of hiresponsibility for the things he did and which the god predicted. His crimes were committed, he says, against his will. Perhaps the gods were exacting from him punishment for the crimes of his fathers (a familiar doctrine in archaic Greek literature), but he rejects vehemently the idea that there was “something criminal deep inside” him which demanded such punishment (1104). He puts to Creon the question raised by the earlier play:

tell me: if, by an oracle of the gods,
some doom were hanging over my father’s head
that he should die at the hands of his own son,
how, with any justice, could you blame me?
I wasn’t born yet ... (1106-10)

And the actions that were predicted were committed in ignorance; he killed his father “blind to whom I killed” (1115) and married his mother, both of them unwitting—“I knew nothing. she knew nothing” (1123). He places the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the gods: “And the gods led me on” (1140). This defense is not contested, by Creon or anyone else; Oedipus stands cleared, in his own eyes and those of Athens, of any moral guilt.

He is still, however, a polluted being, stained with his father’s blood; and in ancient Greek belief the act of killing, even if no blame could be attached to it, cut a man off from communion with his fellow-men until ritual purification could confer a sort of absolution. But for Oedipus the facts of patricide and incest are beyond purification, and Sophocles emphasizes this with a dramatic scene. When Theseus returns with the daughters and restores them to their father, Oedipus, in an outpouring of gratitude moves, groping in the dark, toward the king to clasp his hand. And then suddenly checks his movement—

Yet this condition, almost intolerable for a human being, is not at all inappropriate for the wrathful hero he is to become. Many of the heroes whose tombs were sacred places had been, like Oedipus, men set apart from normal humanity because of the enormity of their violent actions or the strangeness of their end—the great Ajax, for example, who died by his own hand after an unsuccessful attempt to kill the commanders of the Greek host at Troy, or the lesser Ajax, who raped Athena’s priestess Cassandra in her temple and was drowned on his way home. And, in Sophocles’ own century, Cleomedes of Astypalaea, denied the prize in an athletic contest, went in a mad rage to the school on his native island and, like Samson among the Philistines, brought the roof down on the children, killing them all. He disappeared in the temple of Athena and the Delphic oracle told his bereaved fellow-citizens to pay him heroic honors. Oedipus, too, will disappear, to await the day when the descendants of Creon and his men will take their stand on his secret grave, and their blood will drain down into the earth to satisfy his wrath.

With Theseus’ return the action seems complete; it is time for the signs that Oedipus was told to expect—“earthquake, thunder perhaps, or the flashing bolt of Zeus” (116)—his final summons. But there is still one more trial he must face, one more test of his heroic resolution, a second challenge to his choice of Athens as beneficiary of his power over the future. Creon came with deceitful persuasion and resorted to force, but there is a new arrival who is alone, helpless, a suppliant at the nearby altar of Poseidon. Theseus has only to mention the name of Argos and Oedipus knows who it is: Creon came to enlist him on the side of Eteocles, but this is the other brother, Polynices, begging for the gift of victory his father can bestow. Oedipus does not want to hear him; the voice of his son is loathsome to him. He rejects Theseus’ urgent pleas on the suppliant’s behalf. It is Antigone who wins a hearing for the brother whose body she will one day bury at the cost of her own life. And she pleads with her father for more than a hearing; she is clearly asking for forgiveness, reconciliation.

But to the chorus Oedipus is still just what he seems to be—a broken blind old man; the first two stanzas of the song with which they close this scene are a melancholy descant on the miseries of extreme old age. “Not to be born is best / when all is reckoned in ...” (1388-89); this is a familiar Greek saying (it is found in almost this exact form in the sixth-century poet Theognis), but Sophocles adapts it to his dramatic theme: the chorus’ vision of the blind old man as the supreme example of man’s helpless misery “once his youth slips by.” Death comes as a release as “envy and enemies, rage and battles, bloodshed” assail him and last of all the naked feebleness of old age—“stripped of power, companions, stripped of love” (1392-97). The closing stanza compares Oedipus to “some great headland fronting the north” (1401) which must endure the buffeting of weather from every quarter. It is an image of suffering, but it is also an image of endurance—the headland will outlive the storms. And as the choral song dies away, the last assault on Oedipus’ resolve is unleashed: his son Polynices comes to enlist his aid for the attack on Thebes.

His shocked self-reproach when he sees the miserable condition of the father he has neglected, his call for forgiveness and his talk of “cures for all the past wrongs done” (1435)—all this is met by a stubborn silence; Oedipus will not speak to him. Polynices turns to Antigone for help, but all she can do is advise him to make his appeal; something he says may touch his father’s heart. And so he launches out on his long speech of self-justification, full of hatred for his brother, of vengeful pride in the might of the army he has marshaled against his own city, of condescending pity for his father: he can even compare their conditions—“we both fawn on the world for shelter, / you and I, we share the same fate” (1509-10). Nothing could be further from the truth. Oedipus comes to Athens not to beg but to give. And he maintains his contemptuous silence. The chorus leader implores him to say something, anything, before sending Polynices away.

It will not be what his son wants to hear, says Oedipus, but he will speak. And he turns on Polynices with a torrential hard rage that is the product of anger long pent up. His denunciation of both his sons for their dereliction of duty would seem even more justified to Greek ears than it does to ours today; sons were expected to repay their parents for their upbringing by supporting them in their old age. In Athens, one of the questions asked of all aspirants to public office was: “Do you treat your parents well?” The law prescribed penalties for those who mistreated their parents, and we know of suits brought by parents against children for failure to provide support. Beyond the laws made by men, the all-seeing Furies, in front of whose grove Oedipus arraigns his son, stood ready to punish transgressors, if the law should fail.

These are, as he says, the curses he had leveled at his sons before, and he calls on those curses now to stand beside him. But what was before a prayer, a wish, is now delivered as an unqualified prophecy; he knows the future and he predicts it, not in the name of Apollo and Zeus, but in his own. The man who in the earlier play cast scorn on oracular prophecy—“why look to the Prophet’s hearth, / the fires of the future?” (1054- 55)—and raged in anger at the blind seer Tiresias has become a prophetic voice himself.

Moreover, as he delivers the curse that he has summoned to back his repudiation of his son, the tremendous lines Sophocles puts in his mouth express a fury that is more than human; this is the outraged voice of some unearthly power, intent on exacting the full price for injustice, of that grim spirit which, hidden in the ground, will one day drink Theban blood. Creon could argue and return threat for threat, but to this inhuman wrath no reply is imaginable and Polynices makes none. He recognizes at once that this is true prophecy; his cause is doomed and so is he. But he will not turn back, nor will he breathe a word of the dreadful knowledge he now possesses to his comrades in arms. He rejects his sister’s plea to give up the attack on Thebes, and as he recovers from the initial shock inflicted by his father’s overwhelming curse, he begins to regain courage; as in all Greek stories of destiny and prediction, he resolves to ignore the prophetic voice and avoid the doom it has foretold. To Antigone’s agonized appeal—“Don’t you see? / You carry out father’s prophecies to the finish!” (1614-15)—he replies by dismissing the prophecy as a mere wish (1618). But it is not just a wish, as it was in Oedipus’ earlier speech; it is the true shape of the future, as Polynices must realize when he asks his sisters to see to his burial. He cannot, however, go to lead his army in this mood; since the prophecy is against him he will dismiss it and with it prophecy in general. As for his future—“that’s in the hands of a dark power, destiny—/ whether we live or die, who knows?” (1641-42). The Greek word translated “a dark power, destiny” is daimôn, which can mean both “destiny” and “a supernatural being.” Polynices does not realize the sense in which his words are true, that the daimôn in whose hands his future lies is the blind old man who has now assumed the powers that should rightly be his only when he is buried in a hero’s grave.

And almost at once the thunder sounds; Oedipus is summoned by the gods. Theseus must be with him in his last moments, to receive the gift: “the power that age cannot destroy, / the heritage stored up for you and Athens” (1718-19). And Oedipus, as if the gods had given him back his eyes, leads Theseus and his daughters off the stage. The girls move to guide his steps as they have for so long and over so many roads, but he does not need them now.

He will guide them, as we learn from the messenger later, to a place in the Colonus countryside, midway between a bowl scooped out in the stone and the Rock of Thoricus (Sophocles’ audience knew these places, though they mean nothing to us). There he prepares his living body for its last journey, with the bathing and libations administered to the dead. The thunder comes again, this time from below, and Oedipus takes leave of his daughters and sends them away. The chorus, after his exit, had prayed that Oedipus’ passing would be an easy one: “Not in pain, not by a doom / that breaks the heart with mourning” (1771-72). And so it is. He simply vanishes, and leaves Theseus, the one man who knows the secret site where he lies,

shielding his eyes,
both hands spread out against his face as if—
some terrible wonder flashed before his eyes ... (1872-74)

Before Oedipus goes to his eternal home, however, the gods speak to him; these are the only words, apart from the riddling prophecies of Apollo, that the gods speak in either play. “‘You, you there, Oedipus—what are we waiting for? / You hold us back too long! We must move on, move on!’ ” (1844-45). Though he does not become a god, that “we” defines him as one who is now no longer human, one who belongs to the realm of those unseen powers that preside in mysterious ways over the destinies of men and nations.

And in the last scene of all we see those destinies in the making; the play looks forward now to the future. As the daughters mourn their loss, their thoughts turn to home, to Thebes, where brother faces brother and Oedipus’ prophecies are to be fulfilled. The play ends with Theseus’ promise to send Antigone back to Thebes, as she requests, in a vain attempt to prevent the fratricidal duel on which Polynices is intent. She must know in her heart that she cannot prevent it; what she does after brother has killed brother we know from the earlier play, Antigone.

This is no happy ending, nor was it meant to be. That Oedipus has become a protective hero of the Athenian land, with power over his enemies, is perhaps some kind of recognition on the part of the gods that they had used him, to his cost, for a tremendous demonstration of the fact that human knowledge at its greatest is ignorance compared with theirs. But for the children of his doomed house there is to be no escape. The brothers will die by each other’s hand and Antigone will prove herself the most stubbornly heroic of them all. Like her father, both as king in Thebes and beggar at Colonus, she will pursue her purpose in the face of opposition, threats and death itself with that heroic courage which is the one shaft of light in the dark universe of Sophoclean tragedy. It is a universe governed by powers in whose justice man must assert, in ignorance and with little hope of confirmation, a desperate belief.

Yet in the last play of all, that belief seems more solidly based than in the first. Antigone dies without a sign from those gods whose laws she defended; she prays that her persecutor will be punished but she does not live to see that prayer fulfilled. In the first of the two Oedipus plays the god who predicted his strange destiny speaks only through prophecies but never explains them; Oedipus must work his way unaided to an understanding of his fate and ground whatever hopes he has for the future on an untutored intuition that he is reserved for some extraordinary end. But the last play is full of divine signs and wonders, of prophecies that promise rather than threaten, and in the end the gods speak directly to Oedipus in words which clearly imply that in some mysterious sense he now belongs to them. The last play is still tragic in its outcome—Oedipus dies, Polynices and Antigone are doomed—but in it, for one man and for one moment, the silent gods speak, and the gulf between human and divine is bridged.

INTRODUCTION