Oedipus myth: analysis

As remarked above, there are numerous versions of the Oedipus story from classical
civilisation: plays, poems, and other artistic depictions. Details of the Oedipus myth vary from
one telling to the next. For instance, here’s a question for you: what was the name of Oedipus’
mother?

Jocasta? Yes … and no. It all depends. In fact, although we have followed the most famous
version of the Oedipus story above, and called his mother Jocasta, she is only so named in the
tragedies – that is, in the plays about Oedipus. In his Odyssey, Homer calls her Epicaste. In the
epic version of the Oedipus cycle, she is named Eurygania or Euryanassa, and in yet another
version she is named Astymedusa.

What the moral of the Oedipus story is perhaps depends on which version we read, too. In the
tragedians’ version of the tale, it is Oedipus’ hubris, his pride, that contributes to the
altercation on the road between him and Laius, the man who turns out to be his real father: if
Oedipus was less stubborn, he would have played the bigger man and stepped aside to let
Laius pass. And thus he would (or at least could) have avoided killing his father and fulfilling
the prophecy. Our actions have consequences, but that doesn’t mean that a particular action
will lead to a particular consequence: it means that one action might cause something quite
different to happen, which will nevertheless be linked in some way to our lives.

However, another school of thought says that, to the ancient Greeks, fate was far too powerful
to be overridden by human agency: Oedipus’ card was stamped from the start. He was
doomed. Laius’ attempts to do away with the child so it could never grow up to murder him
failed, because Oedipus survived. Oedipus’ attempts to avert the prophecy by leaving home
failed, because he was unwittingly fleeing to his natural parents, not from them. Perhaps the
ultimate hubris is in thinking one can cheat the gods.

To conclude this analysis of the Oedipus myth, let’s return to that riddle. Or rather, riddles.
The most famous one, you’ll remember, asked ‘What goes on four legs in the morning, two
legs at midday, and three legs in the evening?’ The answer is ‘man’ – because we are born as
babies that crawl on all fours, walk on two legs as adults when in the prime of life (‘midday’),
and then walk with an artificial ‘third leg’, a walking stick, in old age or the ‘evening’ of our
lives. As William Empson pointed out in his notes to his brilliant poem ‘Four Legs, Two Legs,
Three Legs’, Oedipus’ solution was ‘man’ but it told us nothing about mankind.

What of the other riddle that exists in some alternative versions of the Oedipus story? A
Gascon version of the myth has the Sphinx posing this follow-up question: ‘There are two
sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first. What are they?’

Any ideas? How can two sisters give birth to each other? Clearly ‘sisters’ here is meant to imply
some sort of complementary relationship. If we think along the same lines as the first, more
famous riddle, which talks of times of day, that might help. These two sisters are ‘day’ and
‘night’, which ‘give birth to’ each other because one follows the other. Simple, eh?

About Greek mythology

The Greek myths are over two thousand years old – and perhaps, in their earliest forms, much
older – and yet many stories from Greek mythology, and phrases derived from those stories,
are part of our everyday speech. So we describe somebody’s weakness as their Achilles heel,
or we talk about the dangers of opening up Pandora’s box. We describe a challenging
undertaking as a Herculean task, and speak of somebody who enjoys great success as
having the Midas touch.

However, as this last example shows, we often employ these myths in ways which run quite
contrary to the moral messages the original myths impart. The moral of King Midas, of course,
was not that he was famed for his wealth and success, but that his greed for gold was his
undoing: the story, if anything, is a warning about the dangers of corruption that money and
riches can bring. (Or, as the Bible bluntly puts it, the love of money is the root of all evil.)

Similarly, Narcissus, in another famous Greek myth, actually shunned other people before he
fell in love with his own reflection, and yet we still talk of someone who is obsessed with their
own importance and appearance as being narcissistic.

And this points up an important fact about the Greek myths, which is that, like Aesop’s fables
which date from a similar time and also have their roots in classical Greek culture, many of
these stories evolved as moral fables or tales designed to warn Greek citizens of the dangers of
hubris, greed, lust, or some other sin or characteristic. The messages they impart are
therefore timeless and universal, and this helps to explain why, more than two millennia after
they were first written down, they remain such an important influence on Western culture.

Oedipus analysis
The place of the Oedipus Tyrannus in literature is something like that of the Mona Lisa in art.
Everyone knows the story, the first detective story of Western literature; everyone who has read
or seen it is drawn into its enigmas and moral dilemmas. It presents a kind of nightmare vision of
a world suddenly turned upside down: a decent man discovers that he has unknowingly killed his
father, married his mother, and sired children by her. It is a story that, as Aristotle says in
the Poetics, makes one shudder with horror and feel pity just on hearing it. In Sophocles’ hands,
however, this ancient tale becomes a profound meditation on the questions of guilt and
responsibility, the order (or disorder) of our world, and the nature of man. The play stands with
the Book of Job, Hamlet, and King Lear as one of Western literature’s most searching
examinations of the problem of suffering.

—Charles Segal, Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge
No other drama has exerted a longer or stronger hold on the imagination than Sophocles’ Oedipus
the King (also known as Oedipus Tyrannus or Oedipus Rex). Tragic drama that is centered on the
dilemma of a single central character largely begins with Sophocles and is exemplified by
his Oedipus, arguably the most influential play ever written. The most famous of all Greek
dramas, Sophocles’ play, supported by Aristotle in the Poetics, set the standard by which tragedy
has been measured for nearly two-and-a-half millennia. For Aristotle, Sophocles’ play featured
the ideal tragic hero in Oedipus, a man of “great repute and good fortune,” whose fall, coming
from his horrifying discovery that he has killed his father and married his mother, is masterfully
arranged to elicit tragedy’s proper cathartic mixture of pity and terror. The play’s relentless
exploration of human nature, destiny, and suffering turns an ancient tale of a man’s shocking
history into one of the core human myths. Oedipus thereby joins a select group of fictional
characters, including Odysseus, Faust, Don Juan, and Don Quixote, that have entered our
collective consciousness as paradigms of humanity and the human condition. As classical scholar
Bernard Knox has argued, “Sophocles’ Oedipus is not only the greatest creation of a major poet
and the classic representative figure of his age: he is also one of a long series of tragic
protagonists who stand as symbols of human aspiration and despair before the characteristic
dilemma of Western civilization—the problem of man’s true stature, his proper place in the
universe.”

For nearly 2,500 years Sophocles’ play has claimed consideration as drama’s most perfect and
most profound achievement. Julius Caesar wrote an adaptation; Nero allegedly acted the part of
the blind Oedipus. First staged in a European theater in 1585, Oedipus has been continually
performed ever since and reworked by such dramatists as Pierre Corneille, John Dryden,
Voltaire, William Butler Yeats, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau. The French neoclassical tragedian
Jean Racine asserted that Oedipus was the ideal tragedy, while D. H. Lawrence regarded it as
“the finest drama of all time.” Sigmund Freud discovered in the play the key to understanding
man’s deepest and most repressed sexual and aggressive impulses, and the so-called Oedipus
complex became one of the founding myths of psychoanalysis. Oedipus has served as a crucial
mirror by which each subsequent era has been able to see its own reflection and its understanding
of the mystery of human existence.

If Aeschylus is most often seen as the great originator of ancient Greek tragedy and Euripides is
viewed as the great outsider and iconoclast, it is Sophocles who occupies the central position as
classical tragedy’s technical master and the age’s representative figure over a lifetime that
coincided with the rise and fall of Athens’s greatness as a political and cultural power in the fifth
century b.c. Sophocles was born in 496 near Athens in Colonus, the legendary final resting place
of the exiled Oedipus. At the age of 16, Sophocles, an accomplished dancer and lyre player, was
selected to lead the celebration of the victory over the Persians at the battle of Salamis, the event
that ushered in Athens’s golden age. He died in 406, two years before Athens’s fall to Sparta,
which ended nearly a century of Athenian supremacy and cultural achievement. Very much at the
center of Athenian public life, Sophocles served as a treasurer of state and a diplomat and was
twice elected as a general. A lay priest in the cult of a local deity, Sophocles also founded a
literary association and was an intimate of such prominent men of letters as Ion of Chios,
Herodotus, and Archelaus. Urbane, garrulous, and witty, Sophocles was remembered fondly by
his contemporaries as possessing all the admired qualities of balance and tranquillity. Nicknamed
“the Bee” for his “honeyed” style of fl owing eloquence—the highest compliment the Greeks
could bestow on a poet or speaker—Sophocles was regarded as the tragic Homer.

In marked contrast to his secure and stable public role and private life, Sophocles’ plays
orchestrate a disturbing challenge to assurance and certainty by pitting vulnerable and fallible
humanity against the inexorable forces of nature and destiny. Sophocles began his career as a
playwright in 468 b.c. with a first-prize victory over Aeschylus in the Great, or City, Dionysia,
the annual Athenian drama competition. Over the next 60 years he produced more than 120 plays
(only seven have survived intact), winning first prize at the Dionysia 24 times and never earning
less than second place, making him unquestionably the most successful and popular playwright
of his time. It is Sophocles who introduced the third speaking actor to classical drama, creating
the more complex dramatic situations and deepened psychological penetration through
interpersonal relationships and dialogue. “Sophocles turned tragedy inward upon the principal
actors,” classicist Richard Lattimore has observed, “and drama becomes drama of character.”
Favoring dramatic action over narration, Sophocles brought offstage action onto the stage,
emphasized dialogue rather than lengthy, undramatic monologues, and purportedly introduced
painted scenery. Also of note, Sophocles replaced the connected trilogies of Aeschylus with self-
contained plays on different subjects at the same contest, establishing the norm that has continued
in Western drama with its emphasis on the intensity and unity of dramatic action. At their core,
Sophocles’ tragedies are essentially moral and religious dramas pitting the tragic hero against
unalterable fate as defined by universal laws, particular circumstances, and individual
temperament. By testing his characters so severely, Sophocles orchestrated adversity into
revelations that continue to evoke an audience’s capacity for wonder and compassion.

The story of Oedipus was part of a Theban cycle of legends that was second only to the stories
surrounding the Trojan War as a popular subject for Greek literary treatment. Thirteen different
Greek dramatists, including Aeschylus and Euripides, are known to have written plays on the
subject of Oedipus and his progeny. Sophocles’ great innovation was to turn Oedipus’s horrifying
circumstances into a drama of self-discovery that probes the mystery of selfhood and human
destiny.

The play opens with Oedipus secure and respected as the capable ruler of Thebes having solved
the riddle of the Sphinx and gained the throne and Thebes’s widowed queen, Jocasta, as his
reward. Plague now besets the city, and Oedipus comes to Thebes’s rescue once again when,
after learning from the oracle of Apollo that the plague is a punishment for the murder of his
predecessor, Laius, he swears to discover and bring the murderer to justice. The play, therefore,
begins as a detective story, with the key question “Who killed Laius?” as the initial mystery.
Oedipus initiates the first in a seemingly inexhaustible series of dramatic ironies as the detective
who turns out to be his own quarry. Oedipus’s judgment of banishment for Laius’s murderer
seals his own fate. Pledged to restore Thebes to health, Oedipus is in fact the source of its
affliction. Oedipus’s success in discovering Laius’s murderer will be his own undoing, and the
seemingly percipient, riddle-solving Oedipus will only see the truth about himself when he is
blind. To underscore this point, the blind seer Teiresias is summoned. He is reluctant to tell what
he knows, but Oedipus is adamant: “No man, no place, nothing will escape my gaze. / I will not
stop until I know it all.” Finally goaded by Oedipus to reveal that Oedipus himself is “the killer
you’re searching for” and the plague that afflicts Thebes, Teiresias introduces the play’s second
mystery, “Who is Oedipus?”
You have eyes to see with,
But you do not see yourself, you do not see
The horror shadowing every step of your life,
. . . Who are your father and mother? Can you tell me?
Oedipus rejects Teiresias’s horrifying answer to this question—that Oedipus has killed his own
father and has become a “sower of seed where your father has sowed”—as part of a conspiracy
with Jocasta’s brother Creon against his rule. In his treatment of Teiresias and his subsequent
condemning of Creon to death, Oedipus exposes his pride, wrath, and rush to judgment, character
flaws that alloy his evident strengths of relentless determination to learn the truth and fortitude in
bearing the consequences. Jocasta comes to her brother’s defense, while arguing that not all
oracles can be believed. By relating the circumstances of Laius’s death, Jocasta attempts to
demonstrate that Oedipus could not be the murderer while ironically providing Oedipus with the
details that help to prove the case of his culpability. In what is a marvel of ironic plot
construction, each step forward in answering the questions surrounding the murder and Oedipus’s
parentage takes Oedipus a step back in time toward full disclosure and self-discovery.

As Oedipus is made to shift from self-righteous authority to doubt, a messenger from Corinth
arrives with news that Oedipus’s supposed father, Poly-bus, is dead. This intelligence seems
again to disprove the oracle that Oedipus is fated to kill his father. Oedipus, however, still is
reluctant to return home for fear that he could still marry his mother. To relieve Oedipus’s
anxiety, the messenger reveals that he himself brought Oedipus as an infant to Polybus. Like
Jocasta whose evidence in support of Oedipus’s innocence turns into confirmation of his guilt,
the messenger provides intelligence that will connect Oedipus to both Laius and Jocasta as their
son and as his father’s killer. The messenger’s intelligence produces the crucial recognition for
Jocasta, who urges Oedipus to cease any further inquiry. Oedipus, however, persists, summoning
the herdsman who gave the infant to the messenger and was coincidentally the sole survivor of
the attack on Laius. The herdsman’s eventual confirmation of both the facts of Oedipus’s birth
and Laius’s murder produces the play’s staggering climax. Aristotle would cite Sophocles’
simultaneous con-junction of Oedipus’s recognition of his identity and guilt with his reversal of
fortune—condemned by his own words to banishment and exile as Laius’s murderer—as the
ideal artful arrangement of a drama’s plot to produce the desired cathartic pity and terror.
The play concludes with an emphasis on what Oedipus will now do after he knows the truth. No
tragic hero has fallen further or faster than in the real time of Sophocles’ drama in which the time
elapsed in the play coincides with the performance time. Oedipus is stripped of every illusion of
his authority, control, righteousness, and past wisdom and is forced to contend with a shame that
is impossible to expiate—patricide and incestual relations with his mother—in a world lacking
either justice or alleviation from suffering. Oedipus’s heroic grandeur, however, grows in his
diminishment. Fundamentally a victim of circumstances, innocent of intentional sin whose fate
was preordained before his birth, Oedipus refuses the consolation of blamelessness that
victimization confers, accepting in full his guilt and self-imposed sentence as an outcast,
criminal, and sinner. He blinds himself to confirm the moral shame that his actions, unwittingly
or not, have provoked. It is Oedipus’s capacity to endure the revelation of his sin, his nature, and
his fate that dominates the play’s conclusion. Oedipus’s greatest strengths—his determination to
know the truth and to accept what he learns—sets him apart as one of the most pitiable and
admired of tragic heroes. “The closing note of the tragedy,” Knox argues, “is a renewed
insistence on the heroic nature of Oedipus; the play ends as it began, with the greatness of the
hero. But it is a different kind of greatness. It is now based on knowledge, not, as before on
ignorance.” The now-blinded Oedipus has been forced to see and experience the impermanence
of good fortune, the reality of unimaginable moral shame, and a cosmic order that is either
perverse in its calculated cruelty or chaotically random in its designs, in either case defeating any
human need for justice and mercy.
The Chorus summarizes the harsh lesson of heroic defeat that the play so majestically dramatizes:
Look and learn all citizens of Thebes. This is Oedipus.
He, who read the famous riddle, and we hailed chief of men,
All envied his power, glory, and good fortune.
Now upon his head the sea of disaster crashes down.
Mortality is man’s burden. Keep your eyes fixed on your last day.
Call no man happy until he reaches it, and finds rest from suffering.
Few plays have dealt so unflinchingly with existential truths or have as bravely defined human
heroism in the capacity to see, suffer, and endure.