Oedipus at Colonus — themes & analysis

When the play opens, Oedipus has been blind for twenty years. He has been an exile for twenty years. He has begged at the doors of foreign cities, slept on stones, lived on what his daughter could carry. He has not become a better man during this time in any conventional sense. He has not done penance, has not sought wisdom, has not written hymns. He has simply lasted. Sophocles is exact about this. Oedipus's first speech in the play names suffering as his teacher — not a teacher of moral progress but of endurance. He has learned to put up with what cannot be changed.

What the play then does is unexpected. It treats this long endurance as something the gods are willing to receive. The new oracle from Delphi declares that the land that holds Oedipus's body will be blessed; the man whose name was a byword for pollution turns out to be a blessing. Sophocles does not say Oedipus has earned this. He has not. The crimes are still the crimes. What has happened is that the gods, who broke him, have decided — late, without warning, without explanation — that he has carried enough.

The play is unusual in Greek tragedy in refusing the standard moral architecture. Most tragic heroes are punished for what they have done; Oedipus has already been punished, in Oedipus Rex, beyond what any law would require. Sophocles asks a different question here. What happens to a man who has been broken, kept alive, made to wait, and who has neither denied his story nor been crushed by it? The answer the play gives is strange and quiet. He becomes someone whose body is a gift to the place that takes him in. The earth opens for him. The play does not call this redemption. It calls it the end of his suffering.

It is also a question about the disposition of late life. Sophocles was in his nineties when he wrote it. The play has the particular knowledge of an old man who has seen friends die, cities lose wars, ideas exhaust themselves. Oedipus's voice is not bitter. It is steel without violence. He curses his sons because they earned it; he refuses Creon because Creon is dishonest; he accepts Theseus because Theseus is what Athens used to be. The endurance has not made him meek. It has made him exact.

Where to follow it: Scene 1 (the arrival, suffering as teacher), Scene 4 (Oedipus tells the chorus his story), Scene 11 (the death is reported).

Greek xenia is older than Athens, older than Thebes, older than anything in this play. It is the unwritten obligation that a stranger arriving at your door must be received, fed, and offered shelter before you ask his name. The Iliad and the Odyssey already turn on it. Sophocles takes it up here in its most extreme form. The stranger arriving is not just a stranger. He is Oedipus — the man who killed his father and married his mother, the most ritually polluted name in Greek myth. Can xenia reach him? Can a city take him in?

The play stages the question in stages. The first man Oedipus meets, the local stranger, tells him to get up — he is sitting on holy ground — but does not drive him off; he goes to fetch the elders. The chorus of elders, when they learn his name, panic. Their first instinct is to expel him from the borders. Antigone has to plead. The chorus wavers. Theseus, when he arrives, does not waver. He recognizes Oedipus, accepts him without ceremony, grants him the protection of the city before he has heard the whole story. This is not because Theseus does not know what Oedipus did. It is because he understands what xenia requires of a king who keeps his word.

Sophocles is not sentimental about it. The chorus's fear is real. Pollution in Greek thought was not a metaphor; it was something that could spread. To take Oedipus in was to risk the city. Theseus takes the risk. Creon, by contrast, comes to Athens and breaks every rule of xenia in five minutes — he seizes a guest's daughters, threatens force, lies about his intentions. The contrast is the play's political argument. A city is not what it claims; a city is how it treats the stranger at its boundary.

The image at the play's heart is the polluted stranger who turns out to be a blessing. The man no one wanted to receive becomes the body whose presence will protect the land. Sophocles, writing in a city losing a war, was making a hard claim. Athens is not its empire and not its fleet. Athens is the place that, on a certain morning in a certain grove, took an old, blind, broken man at his word and let him stay.

Where to follow it: Scene 2 (the chorus learns his name), Scene 5 (Theseus grants sanctuary), Scene 7 (Creon breaks the laws of xenia).

The play is, among other things, a portrait of two cities. Thebes, in the world of the play, has produced Creon — calculating, soft-spoken, willing to use force and disguise it as concern. It has produced Eteocles and Polyneices, who are at war over the throne, neither willing to share. It is the city that wants Oedipus's body for the strategic advantage but will not let him cross its border because his pollution still frightens it. Thebes uses people. It does not commit to them.

Athens, in the play, has produced Theseus. Theseus arrives, hears Oedipus's story, asks no recital of his crimes, and grants him refuge with the full authority of the city. When Creon abducts the daughters, Theseus rides out and brings them back. When Polyneices comes as a suppliant, Theseus protects his right to speak even though he and Oedipus both find him hateful. Theseus keeps his word. He does not boast. He does not threaten. He does what the city he serves is supposed to do.

Sophocles wrote this in 406 BCE. Athens was losing the Peloponnesian War. Its empire was breaking up, its fleet was being destroyed, its political life was tearing itself apart. In two years the city would surrender. The Theseus of Oedipus at Colonus is not a portrait from life. He is a portrait of what Athens once was, or what it had imagined itself to be. The play is a kind of letter to a city in collapse, reminding it of the standard it had set for itself, in case the standard outlived the empire that had claimed it.

The contrast between the two cities is sharpest in their treatment of strangers. Creon, in Athens, ignores its laws; Theseus, in his own city, honors them. The play does not pretend Thebes is unredeemable or Athens is pure. Antigone, at the end, says she will go back to Thebes if she still can, to try to stop her brothers killing each other. The cities are real, and contain both possibilities. The question Sophocles puts is which possibility a city chooses to embody, and what it costs when a city forgets.

Where to follow it: Scene 5 (Theseus accepts Oedipus), Scene 7 (Creon arrives with armed men), Scene 9 (Theseus protects Polyneices's right to speak).

The play is unsentimental about what Oedipus has become. He is not Lear on the heath; he is not a saint. He is an old man with a long memory and a steady will. He curses his sons in language so sharp that the chorus winces. He refuses to bless Polyneices when Polyneices kneels before him. He calls Creon by his name and tells him what Creon is. The voice has not softened from Oedipus Rex. The anger has matured. It is no longer the anger of a man who does not know who he is. It is the anger of a man who has known for twenty years.

Sophocles is making a claim that Greek tragedy rarely makes. The disposition of a holy man, in this play, is not gentleness. It is exactness. Oedipus knows what is owed to him and to whom; he knows what Polyneices did and did not do when his father was driven into exile; he knows what Creon's offer is worth. The judgment is not vindictive. It is precise. The blessing he gives Theseus is as exact as the curses he gives his sons. The two men have earned what they each get.

What makes him holy, in the play's terms, is that this exactness has been forged by twenty years of suffering and is no longer his to wield. He does not curse his sons because he is angry. He curses them because the curse is the truth. The play does not let him off the moral judgment any more than it lets his sons off, but it allows him the standing of a man whose words are now part of how the world is going to go. When he speaks, the thunder answers.

This is one of the deepest images in Western literature, and it has had a long afterlife. The figure of the broken stranger whose word matters because of what he has carried runs through Christian theology, through the prophetic tradition, through the modern ethics of witnessing. Sophocles invents it here, almost in passing. He does not call it holiness; he calls it the disposition of a man whom the gods have decided to receive. The play trusts you to feel the strangeness of it without explanation.

Where to follow it: Scene 3 (the curses on his sons), Scene 7 (Oedipus answers Creon), Scene 9 (the refusal of Polyneices).

The gods in Oedipus at Colonus are different from the gods of Oedipus Rex. In the earlier play they are an instrument of horror — Apollo's oracle has set the trap before Oedipus is born and watches him walk into it. In this play they are an instrument of release. The same Apollo who delivered the original prophecy delivers a new one, twenty years later, declaring that the land that holds Oedipus's body will be blessed. The gods have decided to receive him. Sophocles offers no theological account of why.

This is the play's hardest claim and its quietest. The gods are not consistent. They broke Oedipus for no reason that any moral system would call sufficient, and now, at the end, they are taking him in for no reason that any moral system would call sufficient either. The grace is as unaccountable as the original cruelty. Sophocles, in his last play, is not pretending the gods have a plan that we can read. He is suggesting that mercy, when it comes, comes the way disaster came: unannounced, without explanation, and outside the categories that mortals use to evaluate it.

The last act of the play stages this claim with care. The thunder comes; Oedipus knows what it means; he gathers his daughters and Theseus and walks into the grove. He bathes himself. He puts on clean clothes. He says goodbye. Only Theseus is allowed to follow him to the actual place. The messenger, when he reports what happened, says that Oedipus simply was no longer there. The earth had opened, gently, painlessly, and taken him in. There was no struggle. There was no shouting. The man who had screamed his way through Oedipus Rex went out without a cry.

What the play suggests, without saying it, is that the alternative to anger is not forgiveness; the alternative to anger is exhaustion plus reception. The gods do not forgive Oedipus and Oedipus does not forgive his sons. But the gods receive him, finally, and the play closes on that reception. The chorus's last line is not a moral. It is a request: let sorrow rest; all is ordered for the best. Sophocles, near death himself, was willing to write that line. The play believes him.

Where to follow it: Scene 3 (the new oracle), Scene 10 (the thunder), Scene 11 (the disappearance).