The plot of Sophocles’s “Oedipus the King”

Companion piece to “Finding Ourselves in Oedipus Again and Again”

Zeteo / forthcoming: Spring 2012 / zeteojournal.com

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By William Eaton Warner

eaton0824@gmail.com

http://members.authorsguild.net/wmwarner/

January 2012

THE ORACLE OF APOLLO at Delphi is interpreted as saying that King Laius of Thebes

would die at the hands of his son. In response, shortly after the birth of his son Oedipus,

Laius, with his wife’s Jocasta’s help, binds the infant’s ankles and gives him to a shepherd

with orders to leave the boy on a mountainside to be killed by beasts or birds or die of thirst,

cold and starvation. (As was an ancient Greek practice with unwanted infants.) Perhaps 20

years later Laius and all the several henchmen then travelling with him are killed in a fight at

a crossroads. The one henchman who escapes reports that the killers were a band of

robbers.The crime is not carefully investigated. “The singing, riddling Sphinx. . . . persuaded

us to let the mystery go and concentrate on what lay at our feet,” Creon later tells Oedipus

and Sophocles’s audience.* (As noted in the main piece, this is itself a riddle as Oedipus’s

scarred, lame feet are the essential clue to his identity.)

* Sophocles, Oedipus the King, in Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, translated by Robert Fagles (Penguin Books, 1982), lines 147-49.

The Sphinx, a creature with the shape of a winged lion and the face of a woman, had

been terrorizing Thebes and the countryside around it. She lay in wait for wayfarers along the

roads to the city and said she would only let go those who could answer her riddle: What

creature goes on four feet in the morning, on two at noonday and on three in the evening? For

a long time no one could come up with the answer; each wayfarer was devoured in turn; the

gates of Thebes were closed; and the Thebans were threatened with starvation.

Along came Oedipus, the son of King Polybus of Corinth. Told in youth that Polybus

was not his real father (i.e., birth father), he had consulted the oracle at Delphi and had taken

its message as being that he was fated to kill his father, marry his mother and have children

men would shudder to look upon. So Oedipus had left Corinth and his parents forever.

Wandering the plains west of Athens, he had come to the Sphinx and had produced the right

answer: Man. Whereupon the Sphinx killed her and the Thebans were saved. Oedipus was

made King and married the dead King’s wife, Jocasta. They had two sons and two daughters

and Oedipus reigned in peace and honor for a long time.

But after about twenty years, Thebes is visited by a terrible plague. Apollo is again

consulted via the priestess at Delphi, and the interpretation is that the plague will end when

the person who killed Laius is identified and punished.

All this might be considered perverse on Apollo’s or the priestess’s part since the

domestic violence was set in motion by their own decreeing and since Oedipus’s killing of

his father, however accidental, might be considered just revenge. Secondly, I have used this

word “interpretation” as regards the oracle because ancient Greek history reveals both the

power of and the variability in interpretations of the oracle.† In Oedipus’s/Sophocles’s case,

† Perhaps the most famous example concerns the “wall of wood” prophecy in Herodotus’s Histories (Book 7). Very briefly here, a prophetess’s pronouncement of “a wall of wood to be alone uncaptured” was widely and officially interpreted as meaning that only the Acropolis, surrounded by thorn bushes, would survive a battle with the Persians. But Themistocles proposed that the defeat prophesied was of the Athenians’ enemies and the “wall of wood” referred to the Athenians’ ships, which would be triumphant. “The Athenians realized,” Herodotus tell us, “that Themistocles’s opinion was far preferable to that of the official interpreters who would not allow them to prepare for a naval battle”. And so Themistocles’s interpretation and strategy carried the day, and indeed the battle.

Warner/Oedipe/Story:

the interpretation is delivered by Creon, Jocasta’s brother, a fellow ruler of Thebes and rival

of Oedipus’s. As Edith Hamilton reports Creon’s message from Delphi: “ . . . Let no one of

this land give shelter to him [the killer of Laius]. Bar him from your homes as one defiled,

companioned by pollution. And solemnly I pray, may he who killed wear out his life in evil,

being evil.”‡ This “I” is presented as Apollo.

Sophocles’s play begins here: telling spectators of the plague and having Creon

delivering his news from Delphi. Oedipus begins doggedly to search without, as opposed to

within, for the answer to this riddle: Who killed Laius? He presses the old blind prophet

Tiresias, but Tiresias refuses to say what he knows. Jocasta, too, is dismissive, but reveals

that one man survived the fight at the crossroads, and Oedipus begins to wonder if Laius

could have been the leader he had killed, long ago, before he came to Thebes, in a fight at a

crossroads.

News comes from Corinth that Polybus, Oedipus’s putative father, has died, and the

bearer of this news reveals that Polybus was not Oedipus’s birth father.Rather, long ago this

very same messenger, having been given the infant Oedipus by a wandering shepherd, had in

turn given the infant to Polybus. The old shepherd is summoned and reveals that long ago he

had been asked to abandon the infant on a mountainside on account of a Delphic

prophecy . . .

In Thucydides, too, one finds stories of alternate interpretations of oracles. For example (from section 1.126), an Athenian aristocrat and Olympic champion named Cylon believed he was told by the oracle at Delphi to seize the Acropolis on the grand festival of Zeus. But “whether the grand festival that was meant was in Attica or elsewhere was a question which [Cylon] never thought of”, and his seizure of the Acropolis ended in disaster, Cylon’s troops all killed and only Cylon and his brother escaping alive.

Herodotus, The Histories, edited by Walter Blanco and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, translated by Walter Blanco (W.W. Norton, 1992). Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, translated by Richard Crawley, in The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, edited by Robert B. Strassler (Simon & Schuster, 1996).

‡ Mythology, 379; ellipses in original, versification here changed to prose. Robert Fagles (Sophocles, Oedipus the King, lines 108-11 and 114-15) renders this: “Apollo tell us — he was quite clear — ‘Drive the corruption from the land, and don’t harbor it any longer, past all cure, don’t nurse it in your soil — root it out. . . . Banish the man, or pay back blood with blood. Murder sets the plague-storm on the city.”

Warner/Oedipe/Story:

The news, or its public revelation, causes Jocasta to kill herself, and Oedipus finds

her hanging dead in her room. Hamilton’s reading concludes:

Standing beside her he too turned his hand against himself, but not to end his life. He changed his light to darkness. He put out his eyes. The black world of blindness was a refuge; better to be there than to see with strange shamed eyes the old world that had been so bright.§

The End.

§ Edith Hamilton. Mythology (Little, Brown, 1942).

Warner/Oedipe/Story: