The Oedipus Cycle (Sophocles)

January 2, 2008

I revisited the Oedipus plays because I’d never read Oedipus at Colonus and the others were read first when I was too young and then as part of a University death-march through Ancient literature.

I was surprised how powerful the plays were in both mythological conception and language. I missed so much the first and second time around. If you’ve never read them– or only read them as required reading at some point, treat yourself and try them again. I recommend the Fagles or Fitzgerald translations… but good enough versions are freely available online.

There are a number of inconsistencies between the plays, most being incidental issues presumably stemming from Sophocles writing them out of order and across a number of years, but the one that nags at me is the inconsistency of the character Creon. In Oedipus the King Creon is exceedingly wise and compassionate, particularly when it comes to explaining why he has no desire for the throne:

“…Look at it this way first:
who in his right mind would rather rule
and live in anxiety than sleep in peace?
Particularly if he enjoys the same authority.
Not I, I’m not the man to yearn for kingship,
not with a king’s power in my hands. Who would?
No one with any sense of self-control.
Now, as it is, you offer me all I need,
not a fear in the world. But if I wore the crown…
there’d be many painful duties to perform,
hardly to my taste.”

How could kingship
please me more than influence, power
without a qualm? I’m not that deluded yet…”

But in Antigone he has become rigid, stubborn, almost deluded in protecting the honor of his word even at the expense of insulting the Gods. There and in Oedipus at Colonus he realizes too late, and with seeming little of the intellectual capability and contemplation that characterize him in the first play, that he is wrong.

It doesn’t detract much from the plays themselves because Sophocles is a kind of Greek Shakespeare, rife with quotable nuggets from the pithy:

“The ideal condition
Would be, I admit, that men should be right by instinct;
But since we are all likely to go astray,
The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach.”

and

“There is no happiness where there is no wisdom;
No wisdom but in submission to the gods.
Big words are always punished,
And proud men in old age learn to be wise.”

to the contemporary:

“Money! Nothing worse
in our lives, so current, rampant, so corrupting.
Money– you demolish cities, rot men from their homes,
you train and twist good minds and set them on
to the most atrocious schemes. No limit,
you make them adept at every kind of outrage,
every godless crime– money!”

to the poetic and powerful:

“Numberless wonders
terrible wonders walk the world but none the match for man–
that great wonder crossing the heaving gray sea,
driven on by the blasts of winter
on through breakers crashing left and right,
holds his steady course
and the oldest of the gods he wears away–
the Earth, the immortal, the inexhaustible–
as his powers go back and forth, year in, year out
with the breed of stallions turning up the furrows.

And the blithe, lightheaded race of birds he snares,
the tribes of savage beasts, the life that swarms the depths–
with one fling of his nets
woven and coiled tight, he takes them all,
man the skilled, the brilliant!
He conquers all, taming with his techniques
the prey that roams the cliffs and wild lairs,
training the stallion, clamping the yoke across
his shaggy neck, and the tireless mountain bull.
And speech and thought, quick as the wind
and the mood and mind for law that rules the city–
all these he has taught himself
and shelter from the arrows of the frost
when there’s rough lodging under the cold clear sky
and the shafts of lashing rain–
ready, resourceful man!

Never without resources
never an impasse as he marches on the future–
only Death, from Death alone he will find no rescue
but from desperate plagues he has plotted his escapes.”

Tags: drama, reading log