Oedipus Rex — themes & analysis

The structural question of Oedipus Rex is whether anyone in it could have chosen differently. The oracle warned Laius and Jocasta that their son would kill his father. They pierced the infant's ankles and gave him to a herdsman to be exposed on Mount Cithaeron. The herdsman, pitying the child, gave him to a Corinthian shepherd; the Corinthian carried him to King Polybus, who raised him as his own. The act meant to prevent the prophecy was the act that made it possible.

Oedipus learned the same prophecy in Corinth and fled, believing Polybus and Merope were his parents. He met an old man at a crossroads, quarreled with him, killed him. He came to Thebes, solved the riddle of the Sphinx, was given the throne and the widowed queen. Every choice he made to escape his fate was the choice that delivered it. The play does not say the gods compelled the killing or the marriage; the men and women acted freely. It says they acted exactly as the prophecy required, and that the freedom and the prophecy do not contradict each other.

Sophocles is precise about this. Tiresias does not warn Oedipus and watch him resist; he warns Oedipus and watches him press on. Jocasta has the truth in her hands two scenes before Oedipus does and cannot make him stop. The mechanism by which fate works in the play is the characters' own integrity — Oedipus the good king who must save his city, Jocasta the pragmatic queen who tries to soothe her husband with a memory, Creon the loyal brother who brings back the oracle his king demanded. Take any of these virtues away and the catastrophe does not arrive on schedule.

The play does not let either side of the question win. The prophecy holds. The choices were real. What it leaves the audience with is the unsettling possibility that the two are not opposites — that fate, in the Greek sense, is the shape that free choices make when seen from the outside. Bernard Williams, in his last book, argued that this is precisely what twenty-four centuries of philosophy have not been able to dissolve.

Where to follow it: Prologue (the oracle returns), Third Episode (the crossroads), Fourth Episode (the Corinthian), Fourth Stasimon (the herdsman).

The play turns on a single inversion. Oedipus has the clearest eyes in Thebes — he is the man who saw what no one else could see, who solved the Sphinx's riddle when better men had died trying. Tiresias is blind. He has been blind since the gods took his sight in exchange for the gift of prophecy. When Tiresias enters in the First Episode, Oedipus mocks his blindness; Tiresias answers that the king with two good eyes does not see what is around him, and that before the day is out he will be the one in the dark.

Sophocles holds the inversion through the rest of the play. The seeing king pursues the truth; the blind prophet speaks it and is dismissed. Jocasta, who begins to see, looks away. Oedipus, who refuses to look away, is the last one to understand what he has seen. The chorus calls Time the all-seeing — chronos panta horon — and watches what time uncovers when light is finally let into the corners of the house.

The recognition arrives, and Oedipus walks into the palace, finds Jocasta hanged, takes the gold brooches from her gown, and drives them into his own eyes again and again. The Exodos messenger reports it without softening: the blood ran down his beard in a black storm of hail. He blinds himself because he cannot bear to look at his children, his city, his dead. The man whose sight was his pride has chosen blindness as the only honest response to what he has now seen.

What he gains in exchange is the seer's vision. When he comes out of the palace blind, he is finally able to speak about himself with the accuracy Tiresias spoke about him in the First Episode. Sophocles does not say that physical sight is a delusion or that blindness is wisdom; he says that one is sometimes the price of the other, and that Oedipus, having spent his life seeing, has now paid.

Where to follow it: First Episode (Tiresias), Third Stasimon (the chorus on insolence), Fourth Stasimon (the chorus laments), Exodos (the brooches).

The plague that opens the play is not a metaphor. The Greek concept of miasma — ritual pollution — held that a serious crime, especially shed kindred blood, polluted not only the doer but the soil, the herds, and the women's wombs of the place where it lived unpunished. The Priest of Zeus describes the plague in those exact terms in the Prologue: the crops fail, the cattle sicken, the women die in childbirth. The land itself is sick because something unclean is at its center.

Apollo's oracle, brought back by Creon, names the cause precisely. The murderer of Laius is still in Thebes, and Thebes will not be clean until he is driven out. The logic is not legal but ritual. The crime cannot be paid off; it can only be expelled. This is the premise on which Oedipus issues his great proclamation in the First Episode — a curse on the killer, sweeping and binding, with no clause that exempts the man pronouncing it.

What the play asks is what this logic demands of a king. Oedipus is the city; his body and the city's body are bound together. If the pollution is in him, the cure is in his expulsion. He understands this before anyone has to explain it to him; in the Exodos his first request, after the blinding, is that Creon cast him out. He does not argue for clemency. He has made the curse himself, and the city will not heal until it is carried out.

Sophocles is unsentimental about what kingship is here. It is not power; it is exposure. The king holds the city's wellbeing in his body, and when his body turns out to be the source of the pollution, the city has no choice and neither does he. Creon, taking over at the end, is careful to wait on the gods before deciding the terms of the exile. The pollution belongs to the gods to release. The king does not.

Where to follow it: Prologue (the plague described), First Episode (Oedipus's curse), Exodos (Oedipus asks to be cast out).

The inscription over the entrance to the temple at Delphi was gnōthi seauton — know thyself. It was not a self-help slogan. It was a warning. The Greeks understood it to mean: know that you are mortal, know your limits, know what you are not. Oedipus Rex is a play about a man who obeys the inscription too literally and is destroyed by what he learns.

Oedipus's pursuit of the truth is, throughout, his most admirable quality. He is not weak. He is not corrupt. He is the king of a plague-stricken city who has sworn to find its cause and will not stop until he has. Every witness who tries to slow him down — Tiresias, Jocasta, the herdsman — is brushed past. He is the play's detective and the play's criminal, and the integrity of the detective is what destroys the criminal. There is no version of the story in which Oedipus stops asking and the city heals.

Jocasta, beside him, sees this earlier and tries to save him from it. In the Fourth Episode, when the Corinthian's news has begun to reveal what she now knows, she begs him to stop. He hears her as a queen embarrassed by his low birth, and presses on. Her last words to him are iou iou, dystēne — alas, doomed man — and she goes inside and hangs herself. She knew the truth one scene before he did and could not survive it. He survives it because he is harder, and because what is in front of him is unavoidable.

What the play suggests, without saying it, is that the deepest knowledge is sometimes the kind that cannot be carried. The Greeks did not romanticize this. The chorus, in the Fourth Stasimon, draws the conclusion plainly: count no man happy until he is dead, because what he learns about himself before he dies may unmake everything that came before. The Delphic inscription was about that kind of knowing. The play is what the warning meant.

Where to follow it: Third Episode (Oedipus's memory of the crossroads), Fourth Episode (the Corinthian's revelation), Fourth Stasimon (count no man happy), Exodos (the recognition complete).

The Chorus of Theban Elders is not decoration. They are the city's moral voice, present in every choral ode and present, half-silent, through every episode. Sophocles uses them as the play's conscience and its memory. They begin in fear, calling on Apollo to lift the plague. They listen as the king pronounces curses, as the prophet names the killer, as the queen dismisses prophecy and the king asserts the gods are dead. They keep their counsel longer than any of them — partly because the truth is too painful to face and partly because they understand that accepting it means accepting what their king has unknowingly done.

Their odes are calibrated. The First Stasimon cannot believe the seer; there is no proof, the elders say, and they will not abandon the king who saved the city from the Sphinx. The Second Stasimon, after Jocasta has dismissed prophecy, defends the oracles in the play's most famous lines — if these old prophecies fail, why should anyone dance the sacred dances anymore? The Third defends piety against insolence; the Fourth, when the truth has finally arrived, raises the lament that closes the play.

What the chorus is doing in all of this is staying loyal to two things at once — to the king who has been good to them, and to the gods whose word the king has begun to challenge. The two loyalties tear at each other through the middle of the play. By the time the Fourth Stasimon arrives, they have understood that the gods were right and the king was the price. Their grief is not abstract. They knew Oedipus. They cheered him when he came to Thebes a stranger. They have to live in the city he leaves behind.

Sophocles gives them the play's last words. Count no man happy, they say, until he has crossed the boundary of life free from pain. The line is not advice; it is what the play has spent eleven scenes proving. They are the audience inside the play, and what they have learned is what the audience outside has been shown.

Where to follow it: Parodos (the prayer to Apollo), First Stasimon (the elders defend the king), Third Stasimon (the elders defend the gods), Fourth Stasimon (count no man happy).