First Stasimon
The Chorus of Theban Elders weighs what the prophet has said and refuses to abandon the king who saved the city from the Sphinx.
Summary
The chorus is alone on stage and sings. The first part of the ode acknowledges that Apollo has spoken: somewhere a killer is in flight, hunted by the Fates as by sleuth-hounds, with no shelter that can hide him. The image is of a sullen bull wandering through forest thickets and upland groves, unable to escape the doom that flits always over his head, driven on by avenging Phoebus, that divine voice from the central shrine of Earth. The elders accept that the killer exists and is fated to fall.
The second part is harder. Tiresias has named the king, and the elders cannot accept it. They speak of being sorely troubled by the master seer's words but having no way to test them — no quarrel they remember between the house of Labdacus and the house of Polybus, no recent crime visible in Oedipus's record, no proof that anyone has ever known. Wisdom belongs to Zeus and Apollo, they say; mortal seers are not always right. They will not condemn the king on a prophet's word.
The ode closes by returning to what they remember about Oedipus himself. He came as a stranger and faced the winged maiden — the Sphinx — when better men had failed. They tested him with their own eyes and found him wise. They will not turn against him for an unproved charge, even from a man who speaks for Apollo. The ode is the play's first portrait of the chorus's loyalties tearing at each other. They are loyal to the gods and they are loyal to the king, and the play is going to make them choose.
- Scene 1The plague has Thebes by the throat. Suppliants of every age sit at the altar before the palace doors with olive branches. Oedipus...
- Scene 2The Chorus of Theban Elders enters and sings the play's opening ode. They have heard an oracle has come back from Delphi and they...
- Scene 3Oedipus comes back out and pronounces a sweeping curse on the killer of Laius — no fire, no water, no household will accept him....
- Scene 4The chorus is left alone on stage and weighs what Tiresias has said. Apollo's word has named the killer; somewhere a man is in...
- Scene 5Creon comes out to defend himself against Oedipus's charge of treason. Oedipus is contemptuous from the first word. Creon answers...
- Scene 6A short bridge rather than a full ode. The chorus exchanges lines with Jocasta, urging her to take her husband inside. She asks...
- Scene 7Jocasta tries to soothe her husband by dismissing prophecy. An oracle once said Laius would be killed by his own son, she says...
- Scene 8After Jocasta has dismissed oracles as worthless, the chorus sings in defense of the gods — the play's most quoted lyric. May my...
- Scene 9A messenger from Corinth arrives with what seems to be good news. Polybus, king of Corinth, has died of old age, and the...
- Scene 10The herdsman is broken. Confronted with the Corinthian, he confesses he received the infant from Jocasta herself with orders to...
- Scene 11A second messenger reports what no one on stage has seen. Jocasta rushed to the bridal chamber, locked the doors, called out the...