Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020
108 pp. $40 (hardcover)
Oedipus the King has been considered a masterpiece for two and a half millennia. No less a luminary than Aristotle called it the ideal tragedy. But today’s readers are often disturbed by its apparent injustice. How is it fair that the gods consign Oedipus—a genuine hero who strives to avoid committing the sins for which he is damned—to such an awful fate?
And it is surely among the most horrific fates suffered by any literary character. Over the course of Sophocles’s ingeniously structured plot, the hero—who becomes king of Thebes after having rescued the city from the curse of the enigmatic Sphinx—discovers a concealed truth that demolishes his family, his monarchy, and everything he once held dear.
When a mysterious plague falls upon Thebes, he consults the soothsayer Tiresias, who accuses Oedipus himself of bringing down the wrath of the gods for some unknown crime. At first, Oedipus dismisses this as a lie, but as the investigation progresses, we learn that it is true: When he was a child in his native Corinth, a fortune-teller prophesied that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother. To avoid committing these sins, he fled Corinth for Thebes as a young man. There, he defeated the Sphinx by solving its riddle and was rewarded with both the throne and the wife of the late King Laius, who had been murdered shortly before under mysterious circumstances.
The clues slowly add up: Oedipus learns that his “parents” were not the royal family of Corinth, as he thought; they adopted him after he was found abandoned as a baby. Laius perished at a crossroads where Oedipus remembers having killed a group of travelers who accosted him while he was fleeing Corinth. His wife, Jocasta, recalls ordering a servant to abandon her newborn son on a hill years ago, after she received a frightening prophecy that he would grow up to assassinate his father. When at last it is revealed that Oedipus is Jocasta’s child, and that it was Laius he killed on the road, Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus cuts out his eyes, before begging to be exiled from Thebes.
University of Virginia classicist David Kovacs translates all of this into a slightly elevated English meant to echo the sophisticated tone of Sophocles’s Greek. Alternating iambic pentameter with other meters to avoid monotony, he renders a competent and stolid verse that tries to balance between literal accuracy on one hand and the linguistic effects of the original on the other—effects that can be reproduced in English only by using poetic techniques that the ancient Greeks, naturally, did not employ. The goal, he says, “is to give readers who have no Greek a sense of how Sophocles’ language would have struck its first audience” (33). And he succeeds, as one can judge by considering a passage from the soothsayer Tiresias’s warning early in the play:
You’ve mocked my blindness, so I say: though sighted
you do not see what misery enfolds you
or in what place you’re living or with whom
(do you know your parents?). You’re at enmity
with blood kin both below the earth and on it. . . .
A throng of further woes you don’t perceive
will make you peer of father, peer of sons (56).
Compare this with David Mulroy’s 2011 verse translation:
You who belittled me for being blind
have eyes but do not see your evil state,
your dwelling place, or those you’re living with,
nor even know from whom you came. You miss
the fact that you’re your family’s enemy in life and death. . . .
A mass of other evils still unseen
makes you your father’s equal, children’s too.1
Or David Greene’s more literal version:
Since you have taunted me with being blind,
here is my word for you.
You have your eyes to see but not where you are
in sin, nor where you live, nor whom you live with.
do you know who your parents are? Unknowing
you are an enemy to kith and kin. . . .
And of the multitude of other evils
establishing a grim equality
between you and your children, you know nothing.2
Or Robert Fagles’s looser translation:
So,
you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this
you with your precious eyes,
you’re blind to the corruption of your life,
to the house you live in, those you live with—
who are your parents? Do you know? All unknowing
you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood,
the dead below the earth and the living here above. . . .
And a crowd of other horrors you’d never dream
will level you with yourself and all your children.3
Tiresias ultimately is proven right, of course, and the steps by which Sophocles structures that revelation are what led Aristotle to praise the tragedy so highly: It brilliantly depicts the reversal of fortune of a great man, who plunges from the height of success to the depth of torment.
It’s certainly fine drama. But is it fair? This objection was perhaps best expressed by classicist Eric Dodds, who wrote in 1966 that it was “surely an odd kind of justice” for the gods to condemn Oedipus for a crime he committed unknowingly while in the very act of trying to prevent that crime.4 Modern students, Dodds observed, often try to resolve their discomfort by scouring the text for some “tragic flaw” that will justify the punishment doled out to Oedipus. Finding none, or at least none deserving such severity, they often conclude that he is simply a puppet of forces beyond his control. Dodds found that answer unsatisfactory, however, because it seemed to make the play unjust. The solution, he thought, was that the gods foretell Oedipus’s fate but do not control it. Oedipus acts of his own free will, so although he is “morally innocent,” the “objective horror of his actions remains with him.”5
That argument has proven influential, but Kovacs finds it unpersuasive, and he refutes it in a meticulous introduction in which he points out that throughout the play, the characters recognize that the gods have dictated Oedipus’s fate. Most obviously, at the climax, Oedipus himself cries, “It was Apollo, my friends, Apollo, / who brought about these dreadful woes of mine” (91). Kovacs argues not only that such lines undermine Dodds’s theory, but that ancient Greek audiences would have come to the theater knowing the mythological backstory: Apollo decreed that Laius’s family line should end in punishment for Laius’s kidnapping and rape of his student, Chrysippus—a myth hinted at in other plays, such as Aeschylus’s Seven against Thebes. “Sophocles meant his audience to accept that this was the reason for Apollo’s hostility,” Kovacs concludes, and Apollo’s “destruction of Oedipus is merely a consequence of his hatred of Laius” (20).
That seems clear enough, but it hardly resolves one’s intuitive sense that Oedipus is unjustly treated. However much Laius might deserve punishment, Apollo’s malice toward Oedipus—who, again, has taken extraordinary steps to avoid the crimes of murder and incest—still appears unwarranted, and one cannot wave away this objection, the way Kovacs does, as merely a function of “modern standards of justice” (22). The ancient Athenians were entirely aware that it was wrong to destroy the innocent to punish the guilty—it figures in much of their history and literature—and the tragedians were open about the fact that the gods are not always fair. In the last line of Prometheus Bound, for instance, Aeschylus has his title character accuse Zeus of treating him “unjustly.”6
A better answer is that Oedipus the King is not really about justice at all, but about man’s metaphysical freedom, and its lasting relevance comes from its commentary on some of the perpetual dilemmas of human life. Man is simultaneously a material being—a physical body, bound by the laws of physics and biology—and a consciousness that can transcend the limits of the present and imaginatively enter the nonphysical realm of memories, ideas, and dreams. Sometimes, people—especially when young—focus so much on the latter that they neglect the former, temporarily forgetting that as mortals, they will inevitably age and perish. The Greeks regarded that forgetfulness as a sin, primarily against Apollo, the god of balance, whose motto was “know thyself”—meaning: Remember one’s place in the hierarchy of the universe. They called this sin hubris, and it is the idea hinted at in the Sphinx’s riddle. What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening? Oedipus’s answer is man, who crawls as a child, walks as a youth, and uses a cane in old age. The cycle of mortality stands as a warning against disregarding the inevitable limits of mortality.
Is Oedipus guilty of hubris? Maybe, but no more than many other mortals. What distinguishes him instead is something else that is entirely within his choice: how he behaves when he finds himself in Apollo’s inescapable trap. As Friedrich Nietzsche argued, there is a kind of dignity, even a defiant joy, in how he confronts the awful truth. Sophocles “shows us a marvelously tied knot of a trial, slowly unraveled by the judge, bit for bit, for [Oedipus’s] undoing,” Nietzsche wrote. “The genuinely Hellenic delight at this dialectical solution is so great that it introduces a touch of superior cheerfulness into the whole work.”7
“Cheerfulness” might seem a bizarre word to use in Oedipus’s case, but Nietzsche supported his claim by pointing out that the character undergoes a “transfiguration” in the sequel, Oedipus at Colonus, which was Sophocles’s last play, written when he was ninety. In that tale, the blind and exiled Oedipus arrives at a village near Athens where it has been prophesied that he will die and leave the city mysteriously blessed. He maintains his innocence—and damns his sons for abandoning him in his misfortune—but he feels no bitterness toward the gods. Instead, he has attained inner peace. “I have discovered reverence, humanity, and lips that never lie,” he tells his daughter.8 “Acceptance . . . is the great lesson suffering teaches.”9
To Nietzsche, lines such as these proved that what gives the myth its meaning is the “metaphysical comfort” Oedipus experiences after first seeking the truth, then, upon seeing its full horror, learning to accept it with serenity instead of trying to evade it.10 The philosopher later developed this theory into the idea he called amor fati—the love of fate—meaning a kind of willful joy in the face of what he regarded as life’s meaninglessness. But one need not share his broader metaphysical views to appreciate the point that Oedipus’s “acceptance” is a kind of triumph, rather than the despair of a truly beaten man. “Even in these straits,” says Oedipus in the later play, “our life is not as pitiful as you’d think / so long as we find joy in every hour.”11
In other words, the sequel slowly rebuilds what the earlier drama tore down: the harmony of Oedipus’s spirit. And it accomplishes this through Oedipus’s acceptance that reality is as it is and cannot and should not be wished away. The king who swore that he would pursue the facts regardless of the consequences has suffered those consequences—and withstood them. “Oedipus is great,” Dodds wrote, “not in virtue of a great worldly position—for his worldly position is an illusion which will vanish like a dream—but in virtue of his inner strength: strength to pursue the truth at whatever personal cost, and strength to accept and endure it when found.”12
Like his ancient audiences, Sophocles thought the gods could and did control people’s destinies, and that they were often cruel to human beings, as Kovacs says, “for reasons that have little or nothing to do with personal desert” (3). They also frequently put people in no-win situations. In one sense, the Greeks viewed life itself as a no-win situation, given that we all inevitably die. Yet we have the choice of how to act and react when confronted by circumstances beyond our control. In the face of harsh destiny, Oedipus remains the master of himself, and although he is desolated, he is not defeated. By reminding us of such virtues, classics such as the Oedipus plays—especially when made accessible in skillful translations such as this—help us confront our own challenges with the same determination.
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Endnotes
1. David Mulroy, Odeipus Rex (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 27.
2. Sophocles I, edited by David Greene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 28.
3. Robert Fagles, Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays (New York: Penguin, 1984), 183.
4. E. R. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the ‘Oedipus Rex,’” Greece & Rome 13, no. 1 (April 1966): 37–49.
5. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the ‘Oedipus Rex,’” 44.
6. Prometheus Bound, translated by Deborah Roberts (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012), 53.
7. Basic Writings of Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 68.
8. Fagles, Sophocles, 352.
9. Fagles, Sophocles, 283.
10. Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 108.
11. Fagles, Sophocles, 331.
12. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the ‘Oedipus Rex,’” 48.
