oedipus (the greek tragedy in new translations)

Oedipus at Colonus

SOPHOCLES

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

THE GREEK TRAGEDY

IN NEW TRANSLATIONS

GENERAL EDITORSPeter Burian and Alan Shapiro

SOPHOCLES: Oedipus at Colonus

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SOPHOCLES

Oedipus atColonus

Tran s l a t ed by

EAMON GRENNANand

RACHEL KITZINGER

12 0 0 5

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataSophocles.[Oedipus at Colonus. English]Oedipus at Colonus / Sophocles ; translated by Eamon Grennanand Rachel Kitzinger.p. cm.(The Greek tragedy in new translations)Includes bibliographical references.ISBN-13: 978-0-19-513504-0ISBN-10: 0-19-513504-01. Oedipus (Greek mythology)Drama.I. Grennan, Eamon, 1941 II. Kitzinger, Rachel, 1948III. Title. IV. Series.PA4414.O5G74 2004882'.01dc222004046500

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

To the memory of Ernst Kitzinger (19122003)and for our daughter, Kira.

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ED I TORS FOREWORD

The Greek Tragedy in New Translations is based on the convictionthat poets like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides can only be prop-erly rendered by translators who are themselves poets. Scholars may, itis true, produce useful and perceptive versions. But our most urgentpresent need is for a re-creation of these playsas though they hadbeen written, freshly and greatly, by masters fully at home in the En-glish of our own times.With these words, the late William Arrowsmith announced the pur-

pose of this series, and we intend to honor that purpose. As was trueof most of the volumes that began to appear in the 1970srst underArrowsmiths editorship, later in association with Herbert Golderthose for which we bear editorial responsibility are products of closecollaboration between poets and scholars. We believe (as Arrowsmithdid) that the skills of both are required for the difcult and delicatetask of transplanting these magnicent specimens of another cultureinto the soil of our own place and time, to do justice both to theirdeep differences from our patterns of thought and expression and totheir palpable closeness to our most intimate concerns. Above all, weare eager to offer contemporary readers dramatic poems that convey asvividly and directly as possible the splendor of language, the complexityof image and idea, and the intensity of emotion of the originals. Thisentails, among much else, the recognition that the tragedies weremeant for performanceas scripts for actorsto be sung and dancedas well as spoken. It demands writing of inventiveness, clarity, musi-cality, and dramatic power. By such standards we ask that these trans-lations be judged.This series is also distinguished by its recognition of the need of

nonspecialist readers for a critical introduction informed by the bestrecent scholarship, but written clearly and without condescension.

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E D I T O R S F O R E W O R D

Each play is followed by notes designed not only to elucidate obscurereferences but also to mediate the conventions of the Athenian stageas well as those features of the Greek text that might otherwise gounnoticed. The notes are supplemented by a glossary of mythical andgeographical terms that should make it possible to read the play withoutturning elsewhere for basic information. Stage directions are suf-ciently ample to aid readers in imagining the action as they read. Ourfondest hope, of course, is that these versions will be staged not onlyin the minds of their readers but also in the theaters to which, after somany centuries, they still belong.

a note on the series formatA series such as this requires a consistent format. Different translators,with individual voices and approaches to the material in hand, cannotbe expected to develop a single coherent style for each of the threetragedians, much less make clear to modern readers that, despite thedifferences among the tragedians themselves, the plays share many con-ventions and a generic, or period, style. But they can at least share acommon format and provide similar forms of guidance to the reader.

1. Spelling of Greek namesOrthography is one area of difference among the translations that re-quires a brief explanation. Historically, it has been common practiceto use Latinized forms of Greek names when bringing them into En-glish. Thus, for example, Oedipus (not Oidipous) and Clytemnestra(not Klutaimestra) are customary in English. Recently, however, manytranslators have moved toward more precise transliteration, which hasthe advantage of presenting the names as both Greek and new, insteadof Roman and neoclassical importations into English. In the case of sofamiliar a name as Oedipus, however, transliteration risks the appear-ance of pedantry or affectation. And in any case, perfect consistencycannot be expected in such matters. Readers will feel the same discom-fort with Athenai as the chief city of Greece as they would withPlaton as the author of the Republic.The earlier volumes in this series adopted as a rule a mixed or-

thography in accordance with the considerations outlined above. Themost familiar names retain their Latinate forms, the rest are transliter-ated; os rather than Latin us is adopted for the termination of mas-culine names, and Greek diphthongs (such as Iphigeneia for LatinIphigenia) are retained. Some of the later volumes continue this prac-tice, but where translators have preferred to use a more consistent prac-tice of transliteration or Latinization, we have honored their wishes.

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E D I T O R S F O R E W O R D

2. Stage directionsThe ancient manuscripts of the Greek plays do not supply stage direc-tions (though the ancient commentators often provide information rel-evant to staging, delivery, blocking, etc.). Hence stage directions mustbe inferred from words and situations and our knowledge of Greektheatrical conventions. At best this is a ticklish and uncertain proce-dure. But it is surely preferable that good stage directions should beprovided by the translator than that readers should be left to their owndevices in visualizing action, gesture, and spectacle. Ancient tragedywas austere and distanced by means of masks, which means that thereader must not expect the detailed intimacy (He shrugs and turnswearily away, She speaks with deliberate slowness, as though to em-phasize the point, etc.) that characterizes stage directions in modernnaturalistic drama.

3. Numbering of linesFor the convenience of the reader who may wish to check the trans-lation against the original, or vice versa, the lines have been numberedaccording to both the Greek and English texts. The lines of the trans-lation have been numbered in multiples of ten, and those numbershave been set in the right-hand margin. The (inclusive) Greek nu-meration will be found bracketed at the top of the page. The Notesthat follow the text have been keyed to both numerations, the linenumbers of the translation in bold, followed by the Greek line num-bers in regular type, and the same convention is used for all referencesto specic passages (of the translated plays only) in both the Notes andthe Introduction.Readers will doubtless note that in many plays the English lines

outnumber the Greek, but they should not therefore conclude that thetranslator has been unduly prolix. In some cases the reason is simplythat the translator has adopted the free-owing norms of modern Anglo-American prosody, with its brief-breath-and emphasis-determined lines,and its habit of indicating cadence and caesuras by line length andsetting rather than by conventional punctuation. Even where translatorshave preferred to cast dialogue in more regular ve-beat or six-beatlines, the greater compactness of Greek diction is likely to result in asubstantial disparity in Greek and English numerations.

Durham, N.C. Peter BurianChapel Hill, N.C. Alan Shapiro

xi

CONTENTS

Introduction, 3Conventions of the Ancient Greek Theater, 23Translators Note, 29Characters, 36Oedipus at Colonus, 37Notes on the Text, 107Glossary, 119Further Reading, 123

OEDIPUS AT COLONUS

3INTRODUCT ION

The Oedipus at Colonus, written by Sophocles in the last years of hislife (he died in 406 bce) and not produced until after his death (per-haps in 401 bce), is a powerful exploration of what survives endingsthe ending of an individual life (Oedipus dies at the end of the play);the ending of a city (in 404 Sophocles native city, Athens, came to theend of its role as the primary political presence in the Mediterraneanworld through its defeat by Sparta and its allies after a long and costlywar); and the end of the poets own life (Sophocles was probably ninetywhen he wrote the play). The play is composed out of this sense offamiliar and known things coming to an end, as it looks back at thegure of Oedipus as a young man and at Sophocles treatment of hisstory in his earlier plays, Antigone (442?) and Oedipus Tyrannus (430?).But the play also looks forward to a future that Sophocles offers hisplay as a way of facing and even welcominghowever unknowableand strange that future might be.

the two earlier playsBy 406 bce Sophocles had written about 125 playstragedies and satyrplaysto be performed at the City Dionysia, the annual civic celebra-tion in Athens of the god Dionysus. Seven of these 125 plays havesurvived, and three of these seven center on the myth of Oedipus. In442?, Sophocles wrote the Antigone, whose story comes at the end ofthe myth of the Labdacids, the family of Laius and his son, Oedipus.Oedipus male children (and brothers), Eteocles and Polyneices, areengaged in a dispute over succession to the kingship of Thebes. Poly-neices makes an alliance with neighboring Argos and brings an armyto attack Thebes. In the course of the battle the brothers kill each other,fullling their father/brothers curse on them. The Antigone begins onthe day after the battle when Creon, the boys uncle, has decreed that

4I N T R O D U C T I O N

one, Eteocles, is to be buried with full honor, as he died defendingThebes, while Polyneices corpse is to be left to rot, as Creon considershim a traitor to Thebes. Their sister, Antigone, refuses to acknowledgethe political distinction between the brothers, buries Polyneices, andis condemned to death by Creon. Rather than waiting to die in thetomb in which Creon has buried her alive, Antigone kills herself, thusessentially ending the line of Oedipus and the story of Oedipus tragicmarriage to his mother, Jocasta (although Ismene, Oedipus otherdaughter, survives, her story ends with Antigones death).Ten years later Sophocles writes the Oedipus Tyrannus, which dram-

atizes Oedipus own discovery of the fact of that marriage and his earliermurder of his father, Laius. The setting of this play is again the unfor-tunate Thebes, this time being devastated by a plague. Oedipus, asThebes king, is determined to save the city and its inhabitants fromthis destruction. As he relentlessly follows the clues the god Apollo hasgiven him about the cause of the plague, he uncovers the story of hisown past: his chance meeting with his (unknown) father whom he killsin a dispute over a right of way, and his marriage to his (unknown)mother, Jocasta, as a result of his inspired answer to the Sphinxs riddle.Marriage to Jocasta was his reward from a grateful Thebes, which hadbeen devastated by the attacks of the Sphinx. She could be stoppedonly by an answer to her riddle, What walks on four legs in the morn-ing, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening and has a singlevoice? Oedipus answermanhe will spend the rest of his lifecoming to understand. The reward the Cadmeians (another name forthe Thebans) offer him for ridding them of the Sphinx is the throneof Thebes and marriage to the queen, Jocasta, Oedipus mother. AsOedipus relentlessly pursues the truth about this past, Jocasta is the rstto understand what has happened, and, anticipating her failure to stopOedipus from discovering and revealing the whole story, she hangsherself. When Oedipus nally reconstructs the story and recognizesthat he is both the destroyer and the savior of Thebes, he fullls thecurse he himself has placed on the person responsible for the plagueby blinding himselfin essence exiling himself from human society.The play ends with his unsuccessful attempt to persuade Jocastasbrother Creon, who has become king in his place, to complete theexile by banishing him from Thebes.In these two plays we see the richness of this story for Sophocles

exploration of what tragedy as a genre can offer its audience. Againstthe backdrop of an extreme threat to a citys well-being, individualsstruggle with each other and themselves to understand the limits ofhuman action and understanding in the light of the patterns of an order


outside their control. Neither play offers answers. Rather, both dram-atize, in radically different ways, the dynamic struggle to make senseof the world through the choices humans make, the values they upholdby those choices, the limits of language to articulate and to persuadeothers of the correctness of those choices, and the irresolvable conictsthat ensue. The structure of the plot in each play arises out of thetension created by the power and futility of human attempts, throughlanguage and action, to construct a meaningful world. In the Antigone,the conict between Antigones and Creons understandings of whatthe death of Polyneices and Eteocles demands of them, and how tofulll those demands, is viscerally represented in the pushing of eachside to destructive extremes, out of which a restorative compromise canbe imagined only as the product of extreme suffering. The action ofthe play is structured around a series of confrontations between twocharacters in which the opposition, which seems absolute and xed,in fact moves Antigone and Creon, the two main opponents, to seethe destructive results of their passionately held positions. In theOedipus Tyrannus Oedipus driving determination to keep asking ques-tions gives the play a powerful sense of precipitous linear movement,which, as it takes the audience into the future, in fact takes us backinto the past, until the two come together at the brink of a chasm ofdespair from which it is hard to imagine the possibility of recovery.

the structure of the oedipus at colonusThe structure of the Oedipus at Colonus is quite different. It movesforward neither by opposition nor by a driving, if complex, linear mo-tion. Rather, the Oedipus at Colonus moves in waves of arrivals anddepartures in counterpoint with the single arc of Oedipus falteringarrival at the beginning of the play, his seated presence at center stagethroughout the action until the very end, and his dramatic departureat the end, without assistance and accompanied by lightning, thunder,and the voice of a god. At issue in these waves of coming and goingare the laws, the patternsin Greek, the nomoi (a word that meansboth law, custom, and melody)by which we order our lives, in con-junction with a pattern we cannot know but which provides a kind ofcounterpoint, constantly transforming the meaning we think we arecreating. Oedipus serves as the focal point of this conjunction, and inthe paradoxes and judgments that arise from his presence the audiencecatches a glimpse of the ineffable harmony between what changes andwhat remains unchangingbetween the human and divine, the know-able and the unknowable, the powerless and the powerful.For the audience at the end of the fth century this play is


Sophocles gift to the city-state in which he had lived and which hehad served his entire life. Athens attempt at a new form of government,democracy, seemed to be reaching a crisis in its nal defeat by theoligarchic Spartans, with whom Athens had been at war, on and off,for twenty-ve years. In this play the death of Oedipus in Colonus,Sophocles own birthplace and a town within sight of the Acropolis,promises to the Athenians the protection of the hero forever, some kindof eternal life for the city. The citys survival is perhaps not to beimagined as the preservation of the laws that have ordered its existenceor the continuity of its political hegemony but as the manifestation ofa spirit that the play only suggests, adumbrates like a mystery, in thecomplex interplay of the rhythms of its plot.In the opening scene two gures enter the theater: an old, blind

man and a young woman. They are travelers, beggars without homeor possessions, and their arrival in this place, as in every place theycome to, poses the question: How will they nd what they need tosurvive? Stripped of everything that denes a life, what does their ex-istence mean? Oedipus opening speech begins to explain the sense hehas made of this stage of his life, one so different from the complexlayers of his earlier history, as Sophocles portrays it in the OedipusTyrannus, where everything turned out to mean more than it seemed,and all understanding led only to more mystery. He says of himself:who asks little and gets less, though even less / than little is enough(56/56). He goes on to explain the things that allow him to be con-tent, to be at peace with this bare existence . . . the long / compan-ionship of time, and bitter trouble, / and beyond that the manner Iwas born to, teach me / to be easy with whatever happens (69/78).While these things allow him inner ease, he explains in the last linesof the speech the means by which he interacts with others to get whathe needs: As strangers / weve learned how to listen to the natives ofa place / and to act according to what we hear (1315/1213). He haslearned an openness to the laws and habits of the particular place hecomes to and a willingness to comply with the circumstances of themoment. This opening speech gives us the world of the play, the back-drop against which all that will happen is to be understood. Oedipushas dened the rhythms that nally, after years of struggle, allow himto live in some kind of difcult but resolved accommodation to theworld and his own history. It is a life stripped to its essentials: thecharacter one is born with, the accumulated experience of acting andsuffering, the rhythm of change that time brings and an openness towhatever happens.Against this backdrop is played out a series of encounters between


Oedipus and others, where others actions, ambitions, and desirestheir ways of being in the worldare tested and judged by the touch-stone of Oedipus achieved wisdom. In this way Oedipus turns out tobe once again, as he was in the Oedipus Tyrannus, a riddle: the com-bination of his apparent destitution and his enormous hidden powerserves as a test of others humanity, as each newcomer responds to thepresence of the old, blind beggar seated on a bare rock. The Greeksunderstood all suppliants, as Oedipus is, as a test: those who are inneed of protection challenge those with power to take the correct mea-sure of their power as provisional and limited. It is out of an under-standing that any human, however secure, could easily become as help-less as the suppliant and that all human power pales in comparisonwith the divine and eternal power of the gods, and especially of Zeus,who protects suppliants, that one is moved to put oneself at risk in theservice of those who are powerless. But Oedipus is a different kind oftest because he is, in fact, not helpless, although he seems to be, andin this way the Oedipus at Colonus is not merely a suppliant play.His interactions are based not on a vivid disparity of power betweenhimself and others, but rather on others ability to understand the dis-crepancy between his appearance and the power he embodies, thediscontinuity between his past and his future, the coexistence of hisdependence and autonomy.Oedipus power comes not only from the understanding he has strug-

gled to achieve. The rst indication that the pattern of Oedipus life isalso shaped by something beyond his own understanding and the lawsand customs of those he encounters comes in the second half of theopening scene, when Oedipus learns from an unnamed citizen of Co-lonus that he has taken a seat in the grove of the dread goddesses(Furies, Erinyes, Eumenidesthey have many names and yet often gounnamed, just referred to as the Dread Ones). For the citizen of Co-lonus his presence there is a violation: the Eumenides are divinities sopowerful that one must not even speak out loud in the vicinity of theirsacred grove, much less walk into it and sit down. They are ancientearth goddesses whose role is to bring punishment to humans whocommit the most basic and intense of crimes: violation of the natural,unalienable bonds between members of a family, the very basis of ourcommon humanity. They are erce and implacableaccepting no ex-cuse, no explanation to moderate their punishment of violations intheir sphere. For Oedipus, this grove is the place that he has known,from Apollos prediction, would be the end of his journey, the placewhere nally he can rest. Here again is the riddle, now not on thelevel of human interactions with Oedipus but on the level of the


rhythms and patterns outside human control that order the world: whywould Oedipus, the greatest violator of family ties that we can imagine,nd peace at last in the grove of the Eumenides?What about Oedipus can make sense of this disparity between his

past and his destined future? We learn later, from Ismene his daughter,who is the rst visitor to approach Oedipus, that there is even more tothis riddle. For Apollo has now prophesied that wherever Oedipus dieswill be a source of eternal protection for the surrounding country, forwhoever has accepted him and not asked him to move on. Here againthe riddle: why is the polluted Oedipus to become a source of protec-tion and safety for those willing to embrace him? Andlooking beyondthe ending of the playwhat kind of protection does he offer, sincehis burial place in Colonusthe bulwark at the outskirts of Athenshas not kept the Athens of 402 bce (when the play is rst being per-formed, after Sophocles death in 406) from devastating defeat at thehands of the Spartans? How then is the audience to understand thepower that, in alliance with the divine world, Oedipus offers, which isso incongruent with his past story, his present state, and the imminentfuture of the audience watching the play?The substance of these riddles plays out in two interweaving strands

of action in the play. One corresponds to the riddle of the larger order:the transformation of Oedipus from helpless and blind old man whenhe rst enters the stage to guide and authority at the end of the play,one whose place of death will have power after his death, as the objectof a hero cult. This transformation is the mirror of, and answer to, thechange that Oedipus undergoes from king to polluted being in theOedipus Tyrannus, but now Oedipus is a knowing participant, in har-mony with the rhythm of the transformation, which he knows willhappen in its own time. The other strand is played out in the inter-action between Oedipus and all those who come into contact withhim, as he sits on his rock in the middle of the stage. Through theseencounters, unfolding in the uncertain immediacy of the moment,what becomes possible is an understanding of a human order that cantake account of Oedipus paradoxical power. For example, the citizenof Colonus, who approaches Oedipus and Antigone as soon as theyhave settled in the grove, is the rst to be tested by his presence. Hisresponse to the violation of the grove shows the kind of order he livesby. Despite all appearance he understands he must consult with all thecitizens of Colonus before deciding what to do with Oedipus: Staythere, / there where you rst appeared, while I / go to the citizens (wholive here, not in the city) / and tell them whats happened. For theywill decide / to take you in or send you away (8993/7780). This


citizen, despite his knowledge of the inviolability of the grove, knowsthe appropriate rhythm of judgment he must demonstrate in responseto Oedipus intrusion: as a citizen, he cannot act without the rest ofthe citizen bodyno matter how obvious it is that Oedipus is wherehe should not be.

the chorusWhen that body of citizens arrive, in the form of the chorus, they canclaim with appropriate authority that Oedipus must move in order forthem to talk to him, and Oedipus, on the basis of his openness to whatis taught to him by the inhabitants of whatever place he comes to, canput in abeyance the knowledge that he belongs in the grove, to complywith their demand. Here, too, the different rhythms are in harmony,with Oedipus moving between his own understanding and that of thechorus, but Sophocles dramatizes vividly the difculty in that harmonyby the excruciating slowness and effort with which Oedipus movesfrom the rock where he has placed himself within the grove to therock at its edge, where the chorus has insisted he sit to speak withthem. It is only when, at their insistence, Oedipus reveals his identitythat he becomes a test for the chorus; having accepted the anonymousbeggar as a suppliant, they now want to drive Oedipus away.The chorus is not, in Sophoclean tragedy, responsible for developing

the action of the play, but rather reects on that action from theirperspective, as interpreters through the particular medium of song anddance of what they see. From their perspective, the story they havealways heard of Oedipus past makes his presence among them intol-erable. Oedipus responds on their level, on the level of story and rep-utation, to question the validity of Athens reputation as a city thataccepts strangers, if the chorus demands that he leave:

Then whats become of reputation? What good isa good name if it fades like morning dew?What good is it if Athens stands alone, as they say,a god-fearing cityalone able to savethe sick, aficted stranger. Where is the good in this for me,seeingsince my name alone makes you trembleyoull drag me from this sanctuary hereand drive me away? (27582/25865)

Because of Oedipus challenge to the chorus to live up to the way theircity is spoken of, to be consistent with the laws and customs it is knownfor, the chorus agrees to summon Theseusthe legendary king of Ath-ensto make a decision about Oedipus. As the gure whose action

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

will represent Athens, what he does will reveal how Athenian law can,through actions based on the judgments it allows, respond to the riddleof Oedipus.But the chorus throughout the play articulates another level of order,

one that is abstracted from the mechanics of decision and action andcreates in song and dance a kind of understanding that mediates be-tween the human and divine worlds. As a body, the chorus, thoughcharacterized as older citizens of Colonus, is separated from the actorsnot only by performing exclusively in the orchestra, the circular areabetween the stage and the seats of the audience, but also by their formof expression: dance and choral song. While the chorus leader interactswith the characters in speech, when the chorus performs as a whole itis always in the form of sung lyrics and movement that follows therhythm of the song. Their mode of expression and their language, inboth form and content, remove the plays events from the contingencyof the moment. This way of responding to Oedipus is rst illustratedin the instructions that the chorus leader gives Oedipus so that he canperform a ritual of purication for his violation of the grove. In hisdetailed account of each step in the ritual, the chorus leader describesa series of actions abstracted from human choice, feeling, and evenunderstanding, but nonetheless meaningful in relation to the divinepower of the Eumenides and Oedipus violation, as the chorus under-stands it, of their grove.In their next four songs, when they lead Oedipus to tell the story of

his past, or sing a hymn to Athens that represents the city in terms ofits gods, their gifts to the city, and its natural beauty, or describe thebattle between Theseus and Creon over the possession of Antigone andIsmene as a battle of right against wrong, or describe the misery thatOedipus life represents as a headland beaten by waves from every di-rection, the chorus transforms the ever-changing, continuous struggleof human action into language whose rhythms, sound, and descriptivepower create an ordered, self-contained poetic narrative with a formalintegrity that is the closest humans can come to an expression of apermanent order. This, then, is the way the chorus responds to thechallenge of Oedipus presence. They leave the decision of what to doto Theseus, but they incorporate Oedipus story and Athens story intoan order of their own, in the rhythms and movement of their song anddance. Within the context of the action and the choices the othercharacters are engaged in, the limit of the choruss order is apparentin their restriction to the space of the orchestra and the movements ofdance. But what they express in their dance and song is an essentialdimension of the way humans make sense of their world.

11


episodesIn between the choruss songs, the episodes dramatize the arrival offour visitors, each in his or her own way drawn to respond to Oedipuspresence in Athens. Very roughly, they fall into categories of friendsand enemies. Ismene and Theseus give Oedipus what he needs tosurvive out of genuine feeling for him and a deep understanding ofwhat the laws they live by demand of them. Polyneices and Creoncome to gain control of Oedipus power for their own ends, althoughthey present themselves as acting out of pity for Oedipus suffering andin his interest and argue on the basis of positive norms of behavior. Ineach case Oedipus both interprets and judges these characters actions,culminating in the violent curse he places on his sona curse thatposes the deepest challenge to the audiences understanding of Oedi-pus judgment. As we watch each encounter, we see the complexity ofeach characters response to Oedipus, in the incongruity between theway the laws of society order their behavior and the way that Oedipus,from the perspective he describes in the prologue, responds to them.This series of comings and goings, all centered on the question ofwhere Oedipus belongs, creates a kind of dramatic fugue that plays outthe various rhythms by which we live, rhythms created by the interplayof feeling, understanding, experience, and values.At the center of these visitations is Creons forceful removal of An-

tigone and Ismene and Theseus return of them. This self-containedand unique action at the heart of the play has no apparent conse-quence: they are taken and returned within the course of two hundredlines or so, and there is no lasting effect of their departure. But it isanother manifestation of the rhythms of loss and gain, strength andimpotence, departure and return, violation and restoration, which rep-resent Sophocles understanding of what human experience must be.The rhythm of loss and restoration that Creons abduction of the twowomen dramatizes mirrors on the level of human action the mysteriousand divinely orchestrated transformation of Oedipus, from his entranceas a wandering beggar at the beginning of the play to his departurehome, summoned by a god, at the end.In the rst episode Ismene arrives to tell Oedipus of the oracles that

make explicit the nature of the gift he offers to those who take him inand to bring him news of his two sons struggle for the throne ofThebes. Her traveling alone through the countryside to nd Oedipusis an absolute violation of the behavior appropriate to an unmarriedwoman, as is Antigones wandering, which the care of her father re-quires. In fact, when Creon comes, he throws in Oedipus face thedebasement of the two women in the eyes of the world as an argument

12


for Oedipus return to Thebes. But Oedipus judgment of his daughtersand of his sons reveals the difculty of basing ones choice of how tobehave on social norms. He addresses his daughters about his sons:

Ach, those two! In their nature, in their way of life,they mimic Egyptian habits. For the men of Egyptsit indoors weaving, while their wivesgo out every day in the worldto provide what they need. So here you both are,while those t for the task do houseworklike maids. The two of you do their work, this hard workcaring for my suffering self. (37077/33745)

Oedipus here claims that his childrens behavior is uniquely counterto Greek social norms by evoking the counter culture of Egypt, whichthe Greeks viewed as a mirror image of their own society. By so doinghe exposes the provisional nature of a judgment based solely on socialnorms, since in Egypt the childrens behavior would be normal. Oe-dipus comparison raises a further complication: from another perspec-tive Antigone and Ismene are doing exactly what is expected of Greekwomen, caring for their male relation, while Eteocles and Polyneicesare pursuing their political ambitions, exactly what would be expectedof them as Greek men. By this comparison Oedipus wishes to condemnhis sons for staying at home and pursuing their own interests and topraise his daughters for their courage in wandering the world to takecare of him. If we understand his words simply on the level of socialnorms they fail to achieve his purpose, as they equate his sons and hisdaughters in the violation of those norms, and they also point to theways in which his children are, in fact, meeting, not violating, expec-tations of behavior. It is clear, then, that when Oedipus uses Egypt topoint to the alien behavior of his children, he is judging them noton the basis of a social order, the standards of which are relative andambiguous, but on the basis of values that he does not or cannot atthis point articulate but that become clear by the end of the play.A similar complexity is involved in trying to understand and judge

Theseus and Creons interactions with Oedipus. The two men can,from one perspective, be seen as examples of good and bad men inpositions of power. Theseus unquestioning acceptance of Oedipus andhis offer of protection and a home amply fulll Athens reputation asan open society, able to nd a place for whoever comes there. Hiscontrolled handling of Creons abduction of Antigone and Ismene at-test to his diplomacy and careful use of force, especially in contrast toCreons provocative rhetoric and rash violence. Yet Theseus, by ac-

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cepting Oedipus into Athens, establishes Thebes as a future enemy, achilling reminder, for the audience of the play, of the war that hasended in Athenian defeat. And Creon, who is, on the surface, a shame-less seeker after his own advantage, is acting on behalf of his city andat their request to bring Oedipus back as Thebes protector, a city thatcan legitimately lay claim to his loyalty as his mother city, a city thatin the Oedipus Tyrannus he destroyed himself to save. Even Oedipusfury at Thebes intention to settle him only on the boundary of thecity, not on Theban soil, is hard to understand from the perspective ofone kind of order, since there is no denying the fact that he is guiltyof incest and patricide and is therefore a polluted being whose presenceon his native soil is forbidden by law.In all of these conicting perspectives, or ways of ordering action,

Oedipus moves with a kind of moral certainty, even as he is engagedin the ebb and ow around him. First, he explains in detail the in-correctness of the choruss, and later Creons, understanding of his pastactions. The self-blame that led him, at the time of his discovery ofthose crimes, to blind himself has been replaced by a clear-sightedunderstanding of his own essential innocence, grounded in his igno-rance of what he was doing. This self-understanding does not makehim any less aware that he is a polluted beinghe does almost forgetwhen he tries to take Theseus hand, but he then stops himself, Soph-ocles clever way of dramatizing his awareness. But it does allow Oe-dipus to draw a distinction between an internal state and an externalone, the rst dependent on his own sense of himself, the second de-termined by the laws and judgments of society.When Creon tries to shame him into returning to Thebes by de-

picting him as one who can never escape his crimes, whose presencein the world is an affront to others, he tries to persuade not only Oe-dipus but the chorus and the audience to see Oedipus as the sum ofhis actions and what people say about them. For a character in a play,and for the Greeks of this time, that denition of what constitutes aperson is not obviously inadequate. Like characters in a play, who canbe known only by what they do and say in front of an audience, Ath-enians thought of themselves as fully dened by the way others viewedtheir actions and received their words. Oedipus insistence on some-thing like a conscience, achieved over long years by learning to drawa distinction between who he is and what he has done, between theidentity society gives him and his sheer physical existence in the world,is the center of his moral authority. The notion of an internal monitor,guided by the integration of thought, feeling, and actiona senseof a persons moral self separate from conformity to the laws and

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expectations established by societyis a new development in theGreeks sense of the individual, one to be fully realized only in thenext century by Socrates student, Plato. But it is at the heart of Soph-ocles intuition in this play about the gift that Oedipus has to offerAthens, and the Oedipus at Colonus has to offer its audience.Even Theseus, whose immediate acceptance of Oedipus, based on

his own experience as an exile, seems to reveal a man of deep under-standing, shows the limit of his point of view in comparison to Oedipus.He concludes his acceptance of Oedipus with the words For I know/ Im a man, and know / Ive no greater claim on tomorrow than you.(62729/56768). Here he shows an understanding of the relative extentof his own power, an understanding that leads him immediately to wantto protect the suppliant Oedipus. But later, when Oedipus warns himthat this acceptance will bring his city into conict with Thebes, atthis time Athens close ally, Theseus cannot understand how that couldcome about. His belief in the permanence of the laws of his city andthe alliances it constructs with other cities prevents him from seeingthe same limit to his citys power that he sees in himself. Yet for theaudience, in their current political situation, that limit is all too dis-tressingly apparent. This incomprehension evokes from Oedipus oneof the great speeches of the play, in which he points out to Theseusthe inevitable pattern of change and transformation that underlies allaspects of human life and that goes to the heart of the limit of humanpower:

Dearest son of Aegeus, none but the godsescape old age and death; all elsetime in its relentless ood sweeps away.The strength of earth and of the body fades,trust dies and distrust ourishes,and the same spirit never enduresbetween friend and friend, city and city.For some now, for others later,joy becomes bitter, then bitterness joy. (67179/60715)

Essential, then, to the kind of understanding Oedipus has, giving himthe ability to judge both himself and others, is an awareness of thefundamental impermanence of the natural and constructed world inwhich humans live. In the face of that impermanence, the challengeis to nd the solid ground on which to base the choices we make andthe actions we perform. Oedipus understanding of change and lossdoes not make him feel the loss any lesswhen Antigone and Ismeneare taken from him he is in despairbut it gives him an unerring

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sense of how actions conform to and violate the rhythms that constitutethe fragile fabric of human order. A man who has wandered withouta home for years, who has believed himself the son of two differentsets of parents, who has been the savior and destroyer of his city, hemakes manifest, in his unmoving position on his rock, the certaintythat arises out of radical uncertainty, the capacity to know the conti-nuity in ux, and the moral understanding that the endless years ofliving as an outcast in the eyes of the world with the knowledge of hisown innocence has brought him.His uncompromising moral sense emerges clearly and shockingly in

his encounter with his son. In Oedipus explanation to Theseus of thewrong Polyneices has done to him, he describes not only the way hissons did nothing to prevent his exilea fate that the Greeks viewed asa living deathbut argues that the timing of the exile was a particularaffront because it violated the change in his own understanding of hisguilt, which the passage of time had brought him. As he came to seethat his guilt was only to have physically committed the acts of murderand incest, not to have worked knowingly for the destruction of hisparents, the limit of his blame became clear to him, and he no longerfelt the need to go into exile. He was content to remain isolated in hisown home. The citys move to exile him, and his sons passivity, tookno account of his changed understanding. Oedipus sense of the propertiming of things is another aspect of his understanding of the naturalrhythm of change as a manifestation of an unchanging order, and it isthrough Oedipus that we understand something of what it means tobe in tune with both.When Ismene brings him word of the oracles prediction of the value

of his tomb, he says: So when I am no longer, then Im a man? (428/393), pointing to the paradoxical disparity between what humans con-sider the prime of life and that other rhythm his life illustrates. Hissense of urgency about Theseus arrivals throughout the play is theproduct of his knowledge that the moment when he can reveal theprecise facts of his gift to Theseus is not within his control, whileTheseus is fully immersed in the self-created rhythms of his politicallife. At the end of the play the thunder and lightning and the voice ofa god saying Why / do we put off our departure like this? What / along delay youre making! (18001802/162728) are dramatic manifes-tations of that larger order at work in Oedipus life. The human ex-perience of that rhythm is the passage of timethe long companion-ship of time, as Oedipus says in his opening speechwhich forsomeone like Oedipus has brought a fuller sense of the meaning of hisactions. He charges both Creon and Polyneices with violating that

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rhythm, Creon when he offers to take him back to Thebes, long after hisdesire to do so has disappeared, and Polyneices when he allowed his ex-ile, although Oedipus understood that it was no longer a necessity.But Oedipus cursing of Polyneices is based not onlynot largely,

evenon Polyneices ignorance of the changes that time brings, al-though Polyneices himself points to his guilt here: To my shame Ivecome too late / to see all this. . . . But since Compassion / shares thethrone with Zeus in all he does, / let her stand beside you also, father/ for the wrongs that are done have some cure / and theyre over now,therell be no more of them (138593/126470). His claim that thedamage is reparable perhaps indicates the shallowness of his under-standing of the rhythm of change, but Polyneices real crime is hisviolation of the one unchanging, inalienable fact of human existence:the relationships of blood. They are the only thing that neither timenor circumstance nor human will can change, as Oedipus discoveredto his enormous cost as a young man when his true parentage wasrevealed to him. What Oedipus sees is that Polyneices knowing re-pudiation of his father to secure his own political future removes fromPolyneices the only unchanging reality a human being has: the bondof children to those who gave them life. This violation is unforgivablein Oedipus eyes because that unchanging relationship provides a sta-bility that is the basis of human order and moral understanding.The strongest challenge to Oedipus point of view comes from his

daughter Antigone: he is your child; show him / some understanding.Other men have bad children / and feel deep anger; but rebuked / bythe gentle appeals of those dear to them, / they soften their hearts(131216/11921194). Although Antigones plea for compassion is enoughto persuade Oedipus to allow Polyneices into his presence, it has nopower to stop Oedipus from cursing him. Here nally we understandwhy Oedipus belongs in the grove of the Eumenides, the unforgivinggoddesses who punish violation of family bonds. Oedipus puts a humanface on that absolute judgment, one that comes from his deepest un-derstanding of the impermanence of human existence and the moralneed for humans, living within the ux of things, to keep their bearingsby paying attention to the one unchanging fact of our existence. Oe-dipus earlier discovery, despite his lived experiences, of the ineluctabletruth of his true parentage and the profound disorientation that resultedfrom his (unwilling) ignorance of that truth, makes him deeply awareof the way it must anchor peoples experience; his years of wandering,living in the constant movement of exile, have taught him the enor-mous difculty of being fully human in the world without that anchor.It is the combination of living through the two extremes of these experi-

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ences that makes him uniquely able to judge the way others deal withthe tension between the stability and change of a human life. Theepisodes, which bring the Citizen of Colonus, Ismene, Antigone, The-seus, and Creon within the sphere of Oedipus judgment, culminatein this encounter between father and son. Oedipus obliterates the kindof future for himself that men try to gain through their sons in orderto secure for Athens his guiding spirit. He condemns his son to deathfor the failure to establish for himself the necessary moral frameworkin which to actbased on an understanding of what cannot changeand what must change, and he bequeaths to Athens the protection ofhis own understanding.

sophocles gift to athensOedipus sense of the inviolability of the blood relationship of child toparent may give him the power of a Fury, but the protection thatOedipus will offer Athens after his death comes not from that poweralone but from the combination of impotence and power that makeshim so paradigmatically human. That impotence is manifest not onlyin his beggarly appearance, blindness, and dependence, but also in themoment of his greatest power, when he curses his son. Although Oe-dipus language has the force to make believable that his curse will befullled (as we know from myth and from Sophocles Antigone, it is),he does not have control over all the consequences of that curse. Afterthe curse, Antigone and Polyneices have a conversation in which An-tigone tries to persuade Polyneices not to pursue the war against hisbrother. Polyneices, as if already bound by the curse, can see no alter-native to walking straight into the disaster he knows awaits him atThebes. In this moment he provides an interesting contrast to his fatherin the Oedipus Tyrannus, who, when he received an oracle saying hewould kill his father and marry his mother, did everything he could toavoid what the oracle predicted and later pursued indefatigably thetruth of what he had done. Polyneices willingness knowingly to sac-rice his army and allies, while keeping them in ignorance, subtlyoffers evidence for the connection between his treatment of his fatherand his moral helplessness. He is unable to know the moment whenhe must act in keeping with, or in deance of, the opportunities thatpresent themselves. But he does ask Antigone to bury his body, afterhe is killed, and Antigone promises to do so. She thus binds herself tothe fate we see played out in the Antigone, which Sophocles deliber-ately evokes here. So Oedipus curse on his son is the indirect butnonetheless effectual cause of Antigones death; yet on the very groundshe curses his son he wishes absolutely to protect his daughter. This he

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cannot do. The combination of Polyneices passivity in the face of hisfathers anger, Antigones will to act out of her love for her family (themirror image of Polyneices weakness), and her move away from theprotecting inuence of Oedipus cult at Athens back to Thebes, withwhich the play ends, are all part of the web of change and ux inhuman life that will continue after Oedipus death and that he cannotstop or control.But the most vibrant and constant evidence of Oedipus extraordi-

nary combination of weakness and strength, and of his awareness ofthe double rhythm of the human and divine order, comes from hislanguage, as is only tting in a form of theater that was as dependenton the spoken word as Greek theatre was (see pp. 2327). Oedipus hasan extraordinary range of expression: from inarticulate cry to authori-tative argument, from song to speech, from command to pleading, fromcurse to blessing, from expressions of hatred to those of love, from angerto gratitude, from teaching to questioning. And beyond this he showsa clear understanding of a kind of speech that outlasts the moment ofspeaking (which perhaps is of particular importance for the effect thatSophocles hopes to create with the performance of the play itself). Thiskind of speech is embodied in the secret words that he passes on toTheseus, which he promises will teach things / which age can neverspoil (167374/1519), words that are to be repeated only once in alifetime, when Theseus, and then another in each generation, passesthem on at the moment of death. It is embodied in the curse, whichwill work its power long after the words themselves have faded. And itis to be found in Oedipus words that outlast his death, as the Messen-ger reproduces his nal speech to his daughters as a direct quote ratherthan reported speech, thus recreating Oedipus voice after his deathand perpetuating the power of his speech.In Oedipus mouth that most provisional and momentary act, the

act of spoken communication (it is important to remember that thistragedy was composed to be viewed only once), has also a permanencethat dees the fragility of sound. What is common to the whole rangeof Oedipus expression is its authority, the sense that the languagecomes from the depth of his understanding and the integrity of histhought, feeling, and action. It is unlike the speech of all the othercharacters in the play, whose words inevitably reveal also their limits.Ismene, for example, will not tell of her experience in traveling to ndOedipus because she does not want to experience the pain of it again.Antigone speaks consistently and exclusively out of her feeling for herfather and her brother and is persuasive and effective as far as thatfeeling goes, but her speech (and her action) expresses no other di-

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mension of character. Theseus, too, is limited in the range of what hecan express, as his speech always conforms to his political consciousnessand the role he must play within the polis. Polyneices fears to speakat all without some indication of his fathers good will. When Antigonepersuades him to speak despite Oedipus silence, he delivers a plea toOedipus to become his ally in the form of a catalogue of the six otherleaders who have joined him in his attack on Thebes. On many levelsthis catalogue betrays the poverty of Polyneices language: although itis a standard part of the story of the Seven against Thebes, it isstrangely out of place here, when Polyneices appeal to Oedipus cannotbe made on the basis of an epic portrayal of the battle he is aboutto ght; the audience knows that all six leaders die at Thebes, so italso sounds like an epitaph before the fact; and for Oedipus, so farremoved for years from the context in which these names would havemeaning, it is meaningless. Like his sense that he has no choice butto fulll his fathers curse, this speech marks Polyneices disorientationfrom the moral necessity of the moment.The most striking contrast to Oedipus speech comes from Creon,

whose insincerity is apparent from the moment he opens his mouth.Since Ismene has given Oedipus and the audience the informationthat Creon will be coming to try to inveigle Oedipus back to Thebesnot to bring him home but to control his power on Thebes borderCreons words are judged from the start by that knowledge. All thearguments he useshis appeal to Oedipus loyalty to Thebes, hisclaims of respect for Athens, his sense of shame about Antigones andOedipus state, and his desire to hide them away in their homeareall colored by the irony created by his hiding his true motive and ourknowing it. Polyneices, by contrast, who comes for the same reason, isquite open about his motivation: Becauseif were to believe theoracles / the power lies with those who have you / as their ally(146062/133132). But Creon tries to gain this goal by the force of hisentirely rhetorical arguments, and when they fail he resorts to force,the most denitive evidence of the emptiness of his words, in contrastto Oedipus. (And his force turns out to be as empty as his words, whenthe kidnapping of the girls is reversed within minutes of its happening.)Oedipus words, by contrast, are untouched by this kind of irony, an

irony that Sophocles used so effectively in the Oedipus Tyrannus toreveal the limit of Oedipus understanding. Like the arc of Oedipustransformation from helpless blind beggar to guide and benefactor ofAthens, his language is able to reect the full range of human expe-rience and, beyond that, his double consciousness of the world ofchange in which humans live and that larger order with its own rhythm

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that humans only glimpse, in oracles and seemingly random interven-tions in the course of their lives.The power that Oedipus lived experience and understanding give

his language is somehow captured in the Messengers speech, whichreports his last moments. Although the speech is a narrative of whattook place, the account moves three times into direct quotation ofOedipus words and once into quotation of a gods voice addressingOedipus directly. By this means Sophocles draws an analogybut onlyan analogybetween the human and divine voices. The rst of Oe-dipus words are addressed to Ismene and Antigone in response to theirweeping:

Children, on this day you have no father.All that was my life is destroyed on me now:You wont ever again have to labor for meor look after me as youve always done.I know, children, what a hard life its been.But theres one thing can dispel it all,one word is enough to wipe hardship away:Love, that this man had for youno mancan love you more. And now the two of youmust go on living the rest of your liveswithout him. (178090/161119)

Oedipus acknowledges the pain both of the loss his death will bringto his daughters and the hardship that living in the world as he hasdone has caused themthe constant instability and struggle that is anextreme version of the ux of all human life. And he also offers theman expression of the one unchanging truth, the love their life togetherhas created, which is the ip side of his hatred for his sons and theirbetrayal of that truth. In the second speech the Messenger quotes, hebinds Theseus with a promise to do his utmost to protect his daughters:give these children / the pledge of your hand (18067/1632). Here hislanguage acts, as it did in his curse, to overcome its impermanenceand fashion a future beyond his death (which we know, from Antig-ones story, cannot fully succeedhere is the limit of Oedipus power.)And nally, he orders his daughters to leave with the words you mustbe brave now, / and go away from this place, / and not judge it rightto see whats forbidden / or hear men say what must not be heard(181720/164042). His nal giftthe secret of his death-placebe-longs only to Theseus, the words that must not be spoken, that some-how come into contact with an order beyond the human, whichhuman language can approach only by silence.It is tempting to see the Messengers report of Oedipus words as a

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metaphor for Sophocles gift to Athens on his death: this play. Soph-ocles knows that the life of his city will have to change, as all humanforms must, and change perhaps radically with the end of the war. Buthis play captures not only what does not changethe bonds we createwith each other that can and must be protected against violationbutalso the way we can (with time, experience, character, and opennessto the world of change, an ability to learn and listen) come to knowsimultaneously the rhythm of that change and the rhythm of what isbeyond our comprehension but that we experience as the steady swayof some shaping power (1977/1779). And in the internalization of thisknowledge, Oedipus, and the Oedipus at Colonus, give us the modelfor the constancy of self that survives every change in political andsocial fortune.

Vassar College Rachel Kitzinger

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CONVENT IONS OF THE ANC I ENTGREEK THEATER

Much of the original experience of Sophocles audience is lost in en-countering a play like the Oedipus at Colonus in English instead ofGreek and on the page instead of on the stage. Not only is a great dealcommunicated by the spatial relationships, the physical gestures, thevocal intonations of the actors and the chorus, and the subtleties par-ticular to the Greek language that are so different from those of En-glish, but the conventions of the ancient theater are so different fromour own that we cannot even be condent of the way our imaginationsmay provide the missing aspects of performance as we read. To orientreaders to some aspects of the ancient theater that are particularly im-portant for an understanding of this play, I include here a brief sum-mary of the more important aspects of ancient theater production, asfar as we can reconstruct them.The plays performed in the city of Athens for the City Dionysia, as

this one was, took place in the open-air theater of Dionysus, on thesouthern slope of the Acropolis in the spring. The festival was a greatcivic occasion, lasting ve days. It included, among other things, threedays of theatrical contest (or four when the city was not at war). Oneach of these three days a poet would present three tragedies and asatyr play, followed, in wartime, by a comedy written by a differentpoet. In times of peace, an extra day was added for the performanceof the comedies. The fteen plays presented in this way were performedonce and once only. On very rare occasions a play would be awardeda rerun, sometimes years after its original single performance. The CityDionysia was attended by all sectors of the population of Athens, aswell as visitors from elsewhere, and all civic business was suspendedduring the festival. The poets who competed in the festival werethought of as teachers, and the plays performed were an importantelement in the creation of Athenian civic identity.

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C O N V E N T I O N S O F T H E A N C I E N T G R E E K T H E A T E R

Although the stone structures of the theater of which one can stillsee some remains date from a period later than the performances ofthe fth century, the basic elements of the fth-century theater, whichwere made of wood, can be largely reconstructed. The seats for theaudience of 15,000 to 17,000 climbed up the south slope of the Acrop-olis in a semi-circular arrangement. At the base of the seats, on groundlevel, was the circular orchestra, which may have had an altar at itscenter. This was the space in which the chorus performed. There ismore uncertainty about the space used by the actors. A likely proba-bilitybut only thatis that the actors moved freely between the or-chestra and a slightly raised rectangular stage, impinging on the or-chestra on its southern edge. Behind the stage rose the skene, whichprovided the backdrop for the action. We know nothing of the formof the skene at this point in its evolution except that it was a woodenbuilding with a central doorway and a at roof from which actors,especially those appearing as gods, could deliver lines. In most playsthe skene represents a palace, and the central door is one of three waysof entering and exiting the stage. The other two are the eisodoi, pas-sageways on stage right and left, between the skene and the edge ofthe seating. In any given play the right and left eisodoi are consistentlyassociated with the direction to different places relevant to the play. Inthe Colonus, for example, one eisodos leads to Thebes, the other toAthens, and the central door represents the pathway into the grove ofthe Eumenides.These are the basic elements of the physical theater. There was no

lightingperformances took place in daylightand minimal scenery(what there was took the form of painted panels that could be appliedto the front of the skene to change it from a palace to another venue).In the Colonus, paintings probably transformed the skene into the groveof the Eumenides. Other objects can also help to set the scene. In thisplay, for example, the statue of the horseman Colonus would havemarked the whole theatrical space as Colonus; in addition there wouldhave been two rock seats for Oedipus, one right up against the skene,which would be understood to be in the grove; the other at the edgeof the stage, which would be understood to be just outside the grove.For this play marking those boundaries for the audience is important;these kind of emblematic spatial arrangements are an important dy-namic that props create in the ancient theater.The abstracted physical symbol that the stage can become even

stretches, to a certain extent, to the physical presence of the actors. Thetheater is so large that audience members sitting in the back reachesof the theater are seeing tiny gures below them, over a hundred yards

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away. Clearly, the effect of the play does not depend on the audiencesbeing able to read minute shifts in body language and facial expressionto project the complex idiosyncrasies of a personality, as Western the-atrical experience leads us to expect. The actors on the Athenian stagewore masks and elaborately decorated costumes that often covered thewhole body. This allowed the three male actors who made up thespeaking cast to play multiple roles, both male and female. In this play,for example, the third actor probably came on as the Citizen, Ismene,Theseus, Creon, and Polyneices. In this theatrical situation the wordseach character delivers give that character a very specic and articu-lated presence, but the physical appearance is, to a large degree, ge-neric. The resulting combination lends characters in Greek tragedycompelling paradigmatic force: they are both textured and particularenough to be emotionally compelling, but they are also people in-volved in making decisions and acting them out in a process and withconsequences that any member of the audienceand particularly themale citizenscan see as instructive. Since the setting of the play isalmost without exception in the mythical past, and the plot is derivedfrom myth and therefore, in general outline, known to the audience,the experience that the audience has is not derived from the unfoldingof the plot per se. Rather, the intensity of the language and the conictsit plays out combined with the critical distance inherent in the physicalcircumstances of the theater and the focus on the mythical past createsa theatrical experience that excites, through the imagination, both feel-ing and thought. The effect of this experience has real consequencefor the audience members understanding of the role they must playin the running of a civic society.The language of the play was also far from the kind of realistic

communication that we are used to. Exchanges between actors arecomposed in an iambic rhythm, a regular alternation of syllables ofshorter and longer duration, usually twelve syllables to a line. SinceGreek also had a pitch accent, the sound of these rhythmic lines wouldto our ear seem more like chanting than conversational speech. Thechoruss songs (referred to as odes, or stasima) vary in their rhythms,almost all of which are taken from earlier choral lyric traditions. Thefteen chorus members sing the odes, and their rhythms determine thechoreography of the dance that the chorus members perform as theysing. The songs were accompanied by a double-reed wind instrument,called an aulos, which had particular associations with the worship ofthe god Dionysus. The play is structured by an alternation betweenepisodes delivered in the iambic rhythm, the poetic rhythm the Greeksconsidered closest to the rhythm of everyday speech, and choral odes,

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and were thus multimedia productions. Occasionally, the chorus andan actor sing together, in responsion not unison (a kommos), or theactor performs a solo song. The chorus leader also exchanges iambiclines with actors during the episodes. The language of tragedyitsdiction and sentence formationis, as far as we can tell, more stylizedthan that of everyday speech, although there are traditions familiar tothe audience from their everyday life that inuence tragic forms ofspeech: for example, arguments delivered in law courts or the publicassembly and songs sung in celebration of a god or to accompany cer-tain kinds of work or on ritual occasions such as weddings. The factthat most of the audience did not use a written form of language inthe regular course of their lives and were therefore completely attunedto the spoken word made them sophisticated and subtle receivers ofthe complex poetic language in which the plays were composed.The actors and the chorus also, of course, used their bodies to com-

municate to the audience. Although they had to face the audiencemore or less frontally to project their voices to the back of the theater,the use of large, expressive gestures, choreography that mimed the im-ages of the songs, the angles of the actors heads and the subsequentshifts in shading on the mask, and the positioning of bodies in relationto each other had great iconic power in the physical space of the the-ater and created a dynamic complement to the effect of the words. Inthis play, for example, it is easy to imagine the communicative signif-icance of the simple act of Oedipus rising from the stone on whichhe has been sitting throughout the play and walking without help intothe central door of the skene to the accompaniment of thunder (theyused a thunder machine) to bring the play to its concluding moments.Perhaps the greatest differenceamong manybetween this theater

and many contemporary theatrical traditions is the function the playsperformed in creating civic identity. The production was paid for bywealthy citizens as a form of taxation; the festival was run and carefullycontrolled by Athenian magistrates; various rules were established toensure that the contest between the three playwrights who competedat the festival was as fair as possible; the judges who chose the winnerwere selected by lot from citizenship rolls; young male citizens per-formed as the choruses of the plays; and the penalty for anyone dis-rupting or corrupting the festivals procedures was death. Why did thecity expend so much energy on what is to us a form of entertainment?Not only was the theater festival a form of worship of the god Dionysusand thus had strong religious dimensions to it, but the content of theplays dramatized, in a mythical setting, contemporary issues that werevery important for citizens and others members of the community of

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Athens to think about and debate. The combination of the emotionalpower of the plays and the formal and abstract qualities of their pro-duction effectively engaged the audience in a unique combination ofemotional and intellectual turmoil that generated serious thought anddebate. The conicts of the plays revolve around issues that were es-sential for members of the community to struggle to understand andto debate with each other. The familiarity of the stories, which formedboth the informal and formal basis of every citizens education, gavethe audience the opportunity to encounter themselves and rethink theircollective identity. And the ambiguities and unresolved conicts, theironies and multiple points of view that the play gives voice to gavethe citizens whose decisions and actions governed the stateand itsempirean intense awareness of the difcult process of taking actionin complex human situations.

Vassar College Rachel Kitzinger

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ON THE TRANSLAT ION

Theoretically, it is impossible. One has to try.w. h. auden, on translation

Translators should probably say nothing about their work, since what-ever they say will most likely sound defensive or, at best, like specialpleading. Ideally, the translation should speak for itself, embodying thetranslators particular theories (too specic a word for what are sooften ad hoc determinations, choices of a moment and determined bymany factors, including personal taste and linguistic capacity), ratherthan making them explicit. For if they are explicit they open themselvesdistractingly to opposition and/or dismissal as either betraying the orig-inal in unforgivable ways or as simply inadequate. Still, a little forewordis probably useful, if only to suggest that the translation has been per-formed by someone with opinions and certain commitments, and notby a value-neutral machine.Echoing the title of a poem by Yeats (The Fascination of Whats

Difcult), one of the most accomplished and satisfying modern trans-lators of the Oedipus at Colonus speaks of the fascination of what is,strictly speaking, impossible. (One has only to consider the dynami-cally operatic pitch- and cadence-play of the original Greek, impossibleto duplicate in English, to recognize the truth of this more or lessuniversal sentiment.) What Robert Fitzgerald (whose edition of the playrst appeared in 1941, revised 1956) was referring to was the translatorsobligation to write in the English of Sophocles, remembering, Iguess, Holderlins pithy ambition as a translator of Pindar to writeGreek in German. This present version tries to perform the sameimpossible task. For me, it has been a task made easier (if no lessimpossible) by the fact that it is the result of a collaboration with Rachel

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O N T H E T R A N S L A T I O N

Kitzinger, whose exacting lexical and semantic scrupulosity, as well asher scholarly and practical knowledge of the plays language, drama-turgy, and relevant contexts made it possible or at least more plausiblefor me, lacking knowledge of the language, to attempt this task of trans-lation (what Ezra Pound calls a thankless and desolate undertaking)in the rst place.What Rachel and I have tried for is a readable and, more important,

a speakable text. In doing that, we have not wanted a transformationinto a contemporary colloquial mannerinventing an English thatwould be out of tune with the plain dignity and rhythmic buoyancy,speed, and at the same time solidity of the original. Instead, we havesought an idiomatic English without either antiquarian effects, on theone hand, or too contemporary, colloquial a feel, on the other. Tospeak only for myself, my purpose was to remain as true as I could towhat she offered as the literal (and/or possible) meanings of the words,the lines, and the speeches, while at the same time trying to enactthese meanings in an English that had the capacity to be plain, blunt,passionate, and lyrical by turns: to be an instrument capable of con-ducting an exchange of information, managing an outburst of anger orgrief, directing a narrative tale. In addition, I wanted it to be capableof ascending in as natural a manner as possible to a register of some-thing nearer song or chant than ordinary speechas it has to do (indifferent ways) in the choruses and in those various moments where,in Sophocles text, the characters themselves shift from the register ofspeech to that of metrical song.And while I might have imagined an Irish-accented countryman

speaking the lines of the Citizen at the start and the Messenger at theend, and imagined a smoothly (if sinisterly) uent Creon, a solidlyrational Theseus, a young, heroic, and confused Polyneices, an emo-tionally quick and sympathetic Antigone, a chorus more tense and rit-ualized than any character, and an Oedipus as volatile in his self-certain mood-swings as Lear or Prospero, none of these imaginings(phantom voices in my head) prompted me to turn any of Sophoclespersonae into an idiosyncratic speech manner. What I sought in theend was a language that might achieve a different level of rhythmicintensity as it moved from character to character and from episode toepisode, neither ascending to too-obviously rhetorical heights nor de-scending into overly colloquial, contemporary familiarity. In that way,I hoped that anyone who had to speak the lines on stage or radio wouldfeel neither embarrassment nor disgust. The intention was to composea literary script capable of being competently acted or read withpleasure.

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I have not, however, tried to make the choral odes, epodes, or thechoral dialogues songs in any overt way. (Although an imaginativecomposer/choreographer could perhaps give the odes, in particular,some effective musical accompaniment. Yeatss Chorus, for example,with anachronistic Yeatsian bravura, chanted in the Gregorian mode.)While Fitzgerald reluctantly chose rhyme and/or regularly patternedstanzas to do this work for him, this seemed to me to sacrice thestrangeness and speed of the Greek to a very different and more light-weight (and over-regulated) kind of lyrical effect. And Robert Fagleschoice (in his 1982 edition) to give the choruses an obviously lyricalcontent, but in free verse lines that have little appeal to the ear, alsoseems to me to miss something of the Greek effect, its rhythmic andsonic sense of ritualized utterance. What I have done is try to makethe expression of these parts of the play different in effect from thevarious extended speeches and stichomythic passages. I have done thisby giving them what I hope is a more pronounced lyrical feel andrhythmic presence than the roughly iambic/roughly pentameter/roughly natural speech pattern of the rest. (I reiterate roughly here,since I havent tried anywhere in the play to establish a consistency ofany English meter nor to duplicate the metrics of the original, eitherof which choices would ensure, at least for me, spectacular failure. Infact, in the latest drafts, I chose to loosen considerably the sense of theline, unsettling itseven phantomiambic beat and lengthening orshortening it as the sense and speech occasion seemed to demand.) Inthe choral parts of the play, however (whether belonging solely to thechorus or shared with one or more characters), I have tried to enhancethe sense of the rhythmic unit of the line, whereas in the passages ofspeech the rhythmic sense of the line is more absorbedthough I hopenot too dilutedby the sense units of the sentences. This accounts inthe song passages for the deliberate elimination of most punctuation,for the lines being slightly indented, and for their being set in italics.The aim, whatever the outcome, was to give a separate rhythmic feelto these choral utterances (and to those passages where, in the original,the characters move into metric song), thinking this might help thedirector of a production (whether a performance on stage or on radio)to realize this unique and, for a contemporary audience, perhapsstrangest element in the drama as a whole.One other choice needs a brief word. Whenever I read a translation

of a Greek play, I always feel that the expressions of passionate distress(in Greek, oimoi, oimoi talaina, pheu pheu, and other such ejacula-tions), which seem to me simply full-throated utterances of emotionacoustic units of pure feeling rather than explicitly semantic units

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are clumsily rendered by phrases such as, Alas! or Misery! or evenOh! or Ah! or some variants of these. So to translate oimoi as Alas!in fact weakens rather than strengthens the emotional effect, makesbland and prissily mannered what should be passionate, unleashed,extra-lexical. English is peculiarly poor in these ejaculative bits ofdictionwords that are emotive sounds. (Only in comic books, theconvention being intact, do they appear with any frequency or convic-tionwhere Ugh! Aaargh!, and so on are part of the convention.) Inher translation of the Electra, Ann Carson deals with this problem byleaving such utterances (often in that play the cries and screams of itsheroine) in their Greek form. While we found this an interesting strat-egy, and not without theatrical possibility, such a choice nally seemedtoo arbitrary, the sudden invasion of the English text by these Greekwords too unnatural, too much of the wrong kind of surprise. Thechoice we came to, therefore, was two-fold: to substitute a stage direc-tion at these points, stating With a loud groan or With a cry of terroror With a wail of despair and following it with a more or less innoc-uously generic Ohhh! or Aaahhh! Each of these then needs to be, inperformance, rhythmically integrated into the relevant passage. Thispasses on to the actor and director the task of inventing the particularregister of vocal utterance to t the particular moment, one that be-longs to the production in question. The reader, meanwhile, is notirritated by the use of old-fashioned locutions such as Alack! orAlas! That, at least, is the intention. As with other aspects of trans-lation, it is at best an imperfect solution to a problem that seems,nally, insoluble.When Ezra Pound speaks (in the Cantos) of the hard Sophoclean

light, he refers both to meanings (those poignantly difcult truthsenunciated and, more generally, summoned into being by the plays intheir text and performance) and to style. For all the interrogative shad-ows inherent in its moral implications, there is always an uninchingclarity in Sophocles expression, a clarity of expression that lets us ex-perience not only the most difcult human facts of physical, earth-bound existencehate, betrayal, and violence as well as love, loyalty,and tendernessbut also the ineffable, ineluctable presence of mys-tery. Of course, such functional clarity (as William Arrowsmith calledit), in two plays centered on a blind mans painful pilgrimage into thelight, is peculiarly appropriate both as theme and as medium. In theOedipus at Colonus (a play that takes place in the here and now oflast things; that begins with a particular question and ends with a uni-versal assertion), both the mysterious and the mundane are equallybathed in this hard light, and it is something of this clarity that Ive

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tried to convey in the translation. I am, in other words, trying to makesure that the language Ive used doesnt get in the way of the dramaticcontent by drawing undue attention to itself.In Sophocles text, moreover, such clarity endures despite a range

and a fabric of allusion that form a large part of the plays texture andits semantic implication. Both Rachel Kitzinger and I agreed that theseallusions should be held on to in the translated version and neithersoftened (by explanatory paraphrase) nor erased. Some glossing noteshave been included to illuminate such of them (mainly proper namesand places) as may especially darken the text for modern readers. Wealso decided to keep stage directions at a minimum, conning themto entrances, exits, and very occasionally a bare description of an action,where this is necessary to give the reader a minimal sense of whatstaking place (when this may not be entirely clear from the text). Sucha practice accorded with our sense that what we were providing was atext for readers, yes, but also a text that would be suitable for perfor-mance. Had we been over-explicit in our stage directionsattemptingto indicate where and how any movements might take place, as wellas how an actor might interpret any particular passage or momentwe would be getting in the way of the reader, whose imaginative re-sponse risked being limited to our interpretation. Furthermore, thereare no surviving stage directions in the original, so any we might addwould be of necessity interpretive and ill-suited to a play written underand out of such different theatrical conditions. We decided, therefore,that stage directions, beyond the most rudimentary, were not really ourbusiness but rightly the concern of a director interested in giving theplay an effective contemporary staging. Our wish is to see the text as athing in itself, capable of many actual renderings on the stage or inthe mind. Being as spare as possible with such directions lets the playas a textual experience possess a uency that would be damaged by theintrusion of too many and too fussy intrusions on the purely textualaction. For this reason, too, we decided to conne to a note thoseheadings that in some editions divide the play into its component Cho-ral Odestheir strophes and antistrophesand Episodes. Within thetext itself, such divisions are only a distraction to the general reader,and without them the play ows much more efciently and pleasinglyas an organic unit.Theres always a collaborative aspect to translation (aside from the

obvious one in this present case and in the series to which it belongs).One must take into accounteither to quarrel with or to be conrmedbysome at least of ones predecessors. I have mentioned two moderntranslators whose versions I admire: those of Robert Fagles and Robert

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Fitzgerald. Although the formal and interpretive choices made by Ra-chel Kitzinger and me differ from theirs, often in crucial respects, Istill have to acknowledgeas someone knowing almost no Greekthe degree to which their translations became part of my own intellec-tual and imaginative fodder as a translator engaged in the same strictlyspeaking, impossible task. Other nourishment was provided by theLoeb prose version by Hugh Lloyd Jones and the nineteenth-centuryversion by R. C. Jebb. The somewhat freer translation by Paul Roche(1959, revised 1991) was also one I returned to with interest, havingadmired it (and used it in the classroom) years ago. It remains a livelyand imaginative rendering. I decided not to consult the version byYeats, which is, if memory serves, too free to be useful, as well as, interms of its rhetoric and its verse, too dominantly Yeatsian to be any-thing but a fatal temptation to my own ear. It is an enviable recrea-tionnot in the English of Sophocles, however, but in that, mostdecisively, of Yeats.In the end, a translationindispensable as it may beis only a

version of the original (versions of possibilities, as Hans Magnus En-zensberger has said). In some ways, it resembles the Messengers speechin this play, attempting to present in a secondary language what deesexplanation or adequate representation. Like the performance of a playor a piece of music, a translation is a reading of the given text, andas such is provisional, absolutely provisional. All one can hope for it isthat it brings that foreign thing (script, score, text) somehow home tothose who encounter it in the new medium, the new language. TheMessengers speech, after all, does let the old men of the Chorus share,at a distance, the ineffable, mysterious facts he has scrupulously wit-nessed. In our case, the hope is that this version in English brings hometo those without Greek or to those English-speakers who may be stu-dents of Greek an experience that allows them to feel they have beenbrought into some enabling contact with the play: that they have hadin the reading of it or in attending it as performance (aural or theat-rical) someotherwise unavailableexperience of its inexhaustiblepresence, sense, and meanings.

Vassar College Eamon Grennan

This translation is based on the Greek text of the play edited by H.Lloyd-Jones and N. Wilson, published by Oxford University Press, 1990.In only a few instances have we chosen an alternate reading.

OEDIPUS AT COLONUS

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CHARACTERS

oedipus father and brother of Antigone, Ismene, Polyneices, and Eteocles;husband and son of Jocasta; former king of Thebes but now anexile

antigone daughter and sister of Oedipus who has accompanied him in hisyears of exile

stranger a citizen of Colonus

chorus of elderly citizens of Colonus

ismene sister and daughter of Oedipus who has remained in Thebesafter Oedipus exile

theseus legendary king of Athens

creon brother of Jocasta, uncle and brother-in-law of Oedipus

polyneices son and brother of Oedipus, brother of Ismene, Antigone, andEteocles, son-in-law of King Adrastos of Argos.

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A grove near Athens, in the district of Colonus. Entrance, stage left, leads toAthens, entrance stage right to Thebes. The grove stretches across the back of thestage. A large unhewn rock lies just inside the grove. Toward the front of the stagethere is a rock ledge. On one side stands an equestrian statue. From the directionof Thebes, enter oedipus slowly, leaning on antigone, both in ragged clothing.They stop at the unhewn rock in the grove.

oedipus What country is this? Antigone, childof a blind old man: Whose city is it?Wholl offer any pitiful gift todayto wandering Oedipus, the homeless man?He asks little and gets less, though even lessthan little is enoughsince the longcompanionship of time, and bitter trouble,and beyond that the manner I was born to, teach meto be easy with whatever happens. But child, if

you ndany resting place on this traveled road 10or in some grove set apart for the gods, lead meand seat me in safety there, so wemay nd out where we are. As strangersweve learned how to listen to the natives of a placeand to act according to what we hear.

antigone Father, poor Oedipus, unhappy man:I can see the roof-towers of the city a long way off,but Im sure this place were in is holy ground:its thick with olive trees, laurel, and bending vines 20andlisten!nightingalesrichly featheredand lling the air with their sweet voices.Rest yourself. Set down your bodyon this rough rock. For old as you areyouve been a long time traveling.

oedipus So . . . help me sit down. Mind the blind man!

He sits on the rock.

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O E D I P U S A T C O L O N U S [ 2 2 4 0 ]

antigone No need to tell me. Time has taught me that.

oedipus Do you know then, and can you teach mewhat this place is weve stopped in?

antigone I cant. But I know thats Athens over there.

oedipus Yes. Everyone we met said Athens . . . Athens. 30

antigone Should I go and see what place this is?

oedipus Do, child, if theres anyone living here.

antigone Im sure there is. . . . But no need to go:I see someone; hes not far off.

oedipus Coming this way? Has he set out in our direction?

Enter stranger (citizen of Colonus) from directionof Athens.

antigone Hes here, father, right beside us. Now askwhatever you think tting for the moment. Here he is.

oedipus Stranger, this woman, who is my eyesas well as her own, says y

oedipus (the greek tragedy in new translations)

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