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eyes (ommata, 974; cf. agria ossa, 'savage eyes', 1231). These 'savage eyes' turned against the father by the son ironically echo the bitter father-son conflict earlier, where Haemon shouted out his bitter threat, 'Never will you see my face as you look upon me with your eyes' (764). 'Eyes' mark a progression from angry looks to deeds of bloody vengeance. Now 'the evils in the house', ta en domois kaka (1279-80), are the last blow to the king's totteringstrength. Deeper father-son hostilities lurk in the background (cf. the Freudian equation, eyes = penis), but we cannot discuss those here.
When Creon uses the language of procreation, it is only to reinforce his authoritarian principles. Thus in his encounter with Haemon, he praises 'obedient offspring', literally 'obedient births' (gonai, 642). 'Begetting (phiteusai) useless offspring', he generalizes in his favorite mode of speech, only 'sires' (physai) trouble for oneself and laughter for one's enemies (645-647). Haemon's replyjabout the gods^planting' (phyousi) wits in men (683) takes a very different view of the process of birth as a metaphor for man's relation to nature.16 This verb,phyein, involving growth, birth, procreation, not only points back to more mysterious aspects of birth (cf. 144, 866) but also includes Antigone's utterly opposite attitude toward birth, kinship, and 'inborn nature' or physis (see 523$ 562). j
Creon's demand for obedience assimilates the order of the house to the order of the city and levels out the difference between them: lack of authority, anarchia, 'destroys cities and overturns houses' (672-674). Scornfully dismissing ties of kinship with a slur on Antigone's reverence for 'Zeus who looks after kindred blood' (658-659), he asserts his principle that the man who is good in the realm of the house will also be just in the city (661 -662). Creon's word for 'order' here, as elsewhere in this speech, is kosmos (660, 677, 730), the word used to describe Antigone's burial of the corpse (396, 901). The one subordinates kin ties to the 'order' of the polis; the other defies the polis to 'order' the rites owed to a dead kinsman.
14
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E. R. DODDS
i
On the last occasion when I had the misfortune to examine in Honour Moderations at 'Oxford I set a question on the Oedipus Rex, which was among the books prescribed for general reading. My question was 'In what sense, if in any, does the Oedipus Rex attempt to justify the ways of God to man?' It was an optional iquestion; there were plenty of alternatives, gut the candidates evidently considered it a gift: nearly all of them attempted it. When I came to sort out the answers I found that they fell into1 three groups. j
The first land biggest group held that the play justifies the gods by showing j- or, as many of them said, 'proving' - that we get what we deserve. iThe! arguments of this group turned upon the character of Oedipus.j Some considered that Oedipus was a bad man: look how he treated Greoh — naturally the gods' punished him. Others said 'No, not altogether bad, even in some ways rather noble; but he had one of those fatal hafhartiai that all tragic heroes have, as we know from Aristotle. And since he had a hamartia he could of course expect no mercy: the gods had read the Poetics? Well over half the candidates held views of this general type.
A second substantial group held that the Oedipus Rex is 'a tragedy of destiny'. What the play 'proves', they said, is that man has no free will but is a puppet in the hands of the gods who pull the strings that make him dance. Whether Sophocles thought the gods justified in treating their puppet as they did was not always clear from their answers. Most of those; who took this view evidently disliked the play; some of them were holiest enough to say so.
The third group was much smaller, but included some of the more thoughtful candidates. In their opinion Sophocles was 'a pure artist' and
From Greece & Rome 13 (1966), 37-49. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
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was therefore not interested in justifying the gods. He took the story of Oedipus as he found it, and used it to make an exciting play. The gods are simply part of the machinery of the plot.
Ninety per cent, of the answers fell into one or the other of these three groups. The remaining ten per cent, had either failed to make up their minds or failed to express^themselves intelligibly.
It was a shock to me to discover that all these young persons, supposedly trained in the study of classical literature, could read this great and moving play and so completely miss the point. For all the views I have just summarized are in fact demonstrably false (though some of them, and some ways of stating them, are more crudely and vulgarly false then others). It is true that each of them has been defended by some scholars in the past, but I had hoped that all of them were by now dead and buried. Wilamowitz thought he had killed the lot in arj article published in Hermes (34 [1899], 55 ff.) more than half a century ago; and they have repeatedly been killed since. Y6t their unquiet ghosts still haunt the examination-rooms of universities — and also, I would add, the pages of popular handbooks on the history of European drama. Surely that means that we have somehow failed in our duty as teachers?
It was this sense of failure which prompted me to attempt once more to clear up some of these ancient confusions | If the reader feels — as he very well may — that in this paper I am flogging a dead horse, I can only reply that on the evidence I have quoted the animal is unaccountably still alive.
I shall take Aristotle as my starting point, since he is claimed as the primary witness for the first of the views I have described. From the thirteenth chapter of the Poetics we learn that the best sort of tragic hero is a man highly esteemed and prosperous who falls into misfortune because of some serious {megale) hamartia;. examples, Oedipus and Thyestes. In Aristotle's view, then, Oedipus' misfortune was directly occasioned by some serious hamartia;and since Aristotle was known to be infallible, Victorian critics proceeded at once to look for this hamartia. And so, it appears, do the majority of present-day undergraduates.
What do they find? It depends on what they expect to find. As we all know, the word hamartia is ambiguous: in ordinary usage it is sometimes applied to false moral judgements, sometimes to purely intellectual error — the average Greek did not make our sharp distinction between" the two. Since Poetics 13 is in general concerned with the moral character of the tragic hero, many scholars have thought in the past (and many
ON MISUNDERSTANDING THE OEDIPUS REX 179
undergraduates still think) that the hamartia of Oedipus must in Aristotle's view be a moral fault. They have accordingly gone over the_pjay with a microscope looking for moral faults in Oedipus, and have duly found them — for neither here nor anywhere else, did Sophocles portray that insipid and unlikely character, the man of perfect virtue. Oedipus, they point out, is proud and over-confident; he harbours unjustified su^piciohs"against Teiresias and Creon; in one place (lines 964 ff.) he goes so far as to express some uncertainty about the truth of oracles. One may doubt whether this adds up to what Aristotle would consider megale hamartia. But even if it did, it would have no direct relevance to "the question at issue. Years before the action of the play begins, Oedipus was already an incestuous parricide; if that was a punishment for his unkind treatment of Creon, then the punishment preceded the crime — which is surely an odd kind of justice.
'Ah,' says the traditionalist critic, 'but Oedipus' behaviour on the stage reveals the man he always was: he was punished for his basically unsound character.' In that case, however, someone on the stage ought to tell us ;so: Oedipus should repent, as Creon repents in the Antigone; or eke another speaker should draw the moral. To ask about a character in fiction j'Was he a good man?' is to jask a strictly meaningless question: since OedipuS'never lived we can answer neither 'Yes' or 'No'. The legitimate question is 'Did Sophocles intend us to think.QfX*edJ£usj5jjgood man?' This can be answered — not by applying some ethical yardstick of our own, but by looking at what Ithe characters in the play say about him. And by that test the answer is 'Yes'. In the eyes of the PriesUn the openihg scene he is the greatest! m^ noblest of men» ^ne saviour ,of Thebes who -with divine aid rescued the^ city from the Sphinx,. The Chorus has the same view of him;_ he has proved his wisdom, he is the darling of the city, and never will they believe ill of him (504 ff.). And when thexatastrophe comes, no one turns round and remarks 'Well, but it was your own fault: it must have been; Aristotle says so.'
In my opinion, and in that of nearly all Aristotelian scholars since Bywater, Aristotle does not saysorit is only the perversity of moralizing critics that has misrepresented him as saying so. It is almost certain that Aristotle was using hamartia here as he uses hamartema in the Nico-macheah [Ethics (1135b12) and in the Rhetoric (1374b6), to mean an offence committed in ignorance of some material fact and therefore free from poneria or kakia.1 These parallels seem decisive; and they are confirmed by Aristotle's second example - Thyestes, the man who ate the flesh of his own children in the belief that it was butcher's meat, and who subsequently begat a child on his own daughter, not knowing who she was. His story has clearly much in common with that of Oedipus, and
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Plato as well as Aristotle couples the two names as examples of the gravest hamartia {Laws 838c). Thyjstesjind Oedipus are both of them men who violated the most sacred of Nature's laws and thus incurred the most horrible of all pollutions; but they both did so without poneria, for fhey knew not what they did — in Aristotle's quasi-legal terrninology, it was a hamartoma, not an adikema. This is why they were in his view especially suitable subjects for tragedy. Had they acted knowingly, they would have been inhuman monsters, and we could not have felt for them that pity which tragedy ought to produce. As it is, we feel both pity, for the fragile estate of man, and terror, for a world whose laws we do not understand. The hamartia of Oedipus did not Hem losing his temper with Teiresias; it lay quite simply in parricide and incest — a megale hamartia indeed, the greatest a man can commit.
The theory that the tragic hero must have;a grave moral flaw, and its mistaken ascription to Aristotle, has had a lorigdisastroushistory.lt was gratifying to Victorian critics, since it appeared to fit certain plays of Shakespeare. But it goes back much further, to the seventeenth-century French critic Dacier, who influenced the practice of the French classical dramatists, especially Corneille, and was himself influenced by the still older nonsense about 'poetic justice' — the notion that the poet has a moral duty to represent the world as a place where the good are always , rewarded and the bad are always punished.; I need not say that this puerile idea is completely foreign to Aristotle and to the practice of the Greek dramatists; I only mention it because on the evidence of those Honour Mods, papers it would appear that it still lingers on in some youthful minds like a cobweb in an unswept room.
To return to the Oedipus Rex, the moralist has still one last card to play. Could not Oedipus, he asks, have escaped his doom if he had been more careful? Knowing that he was in danger of committing parricide and incest, would not a really prudent man have avoided quarrelling, even in self-defence, with men older than himself, and also love-relations with women older than himself? Would he not, in Waldock's ironic phrase, have compiled a handlist of all the things he must not do? In real life I suppose he might. But we are not entitled to blame Oedipus either for carelessness in failing to compile a handlist or for lack of self-control in failing to obey its injunctions. For no such possibilities are mentioned in the play, or even hinted at; and it is an essential critical principle that what is not mentioned in the play does not exist. These considerations would be in place if we were examining the conduct of a real person. But we are not: we are examining the intentions of a dramatist, and we are not entitled to ask questions that the dramatist did not intend us to ask. There is only one branch of literature where we are
entitled to ask such questions about ta ektos tou dramatos, namely the modern detective story. And despite certain similarities the Oedipus Rex is not a detective story but a dramatized folktale. If we insist on reading it as if it were a law report we must expect to miss the point.2
In any case, Sophocles has provided a conclusive answer to those who suggest that Oedipus could, and therefore should, have avoided his fate. The oracle was unconditional (line 790): it did not say 'If you do so-and-sd you will kill your father1; it simply said 'You will kill your father, ypu will sleep with your mother.5 And what an oracle predicts is bound to happen. Oedipus does what he can do to evade his destiny: he resolves jievér to see his supposed parents again. But it is quite certain from the first that his best efforts will be unavailing. Equally unconditional was the original oracle given to Laius (711 ff.)" Apollo said that He must \(chr,enaf) die at the hands of Jocasta's child; there is no saving clause. Here; there is a significant; difference between Sophocles and Aeschylus. Of Aeschylus' trilogy on the House of Laius only the last play, the Septem, survives. little is known of the others, but we do know, from;Septem 742 ff., that according to Aeschylus the oracle given to Laius was conditional: Doinot beget a child; for if you do, that child will kill you.' In Aeschylus the disaster could have been avoided, but Laius sinfully disobeyed and his sin brought ruin to his descendants. In Aeschylus! the story was, like thslOresteia, a tale of crime and punishment; but Sophocles chose otherwise — that is why he altered the form of the oraclL There is no suggestion in the Oedipus Rex that; Laius sinned or that Oedipus was the victim of an hereditary curse, and the critic must n'pt assume what the poet has abstained from suggesting. Nor should we leap to the conclusion that Sophocles left out the hereditary curse because he thought the doctrine immoral; apparently he did not think so| since he used it both in the Antigone (583 ff.) and in the Oedipus at Colonus (964 ff.). What his motive may have been for ignoring it in the Oedipus Rex we shall see in a moment.
I hope I have now disposed of the moralizing interpretation, which has been rightly abandoned by the great majority of contemporary scholars. To mention only recent works in English, the books of Whitman, Waldock, Letters, Ehrenberg, Knox, and Kirkwood, however much they differ on other points, all agree about the essential moral innocence of Oedipus.1
II
But what is the alternative? If Oedipus is the innocent victim of a doom which he cannot avoid, does this not reduce him to a mere puppet?
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Is not the whole play a 'tragedy of destiny' which denies human freedom? This is the second of the heresies which Tset out To reTuteT Manyreaders have fallen into it, Sigmund Freud among them;3 and you can find it confidently asserted in various popular handbooks, some of which even extend the assertion to Greek tragedy in general — thus providing themselves with a convenient label for distinguishing Greek from 'Christian' tragedy. But the whole notion is in fact anachronistic. The modern reader slips into it easily because we think of two clear-cut alternative views — either we believe in free will or else We are determinists. But lifth-century Greeks did not think in these terms any more than Homer did: the debate about determinism is a creation of Hellenistic thought. Homeric heroes have their predetermined 'portion ofhfe'.(mow"a);they must die on their 'appointed day' (aisimon emar); but it never occurs to f&e poet or his audience that this prevents them from beinglree agents. Nor did Sophocles intend that it should occur to readers of the Oedipus Rex. Neither in Homer nor in Sophocles does divine foreknowledge of certain events imply that all human actions are predetermined. If explicit confirmation of this is required, we have only to turn to lines 1230 f., where the Messenger emphatically distinguishes Oedipus' self-blinding as Voluntary' and 'self-chosen' from the Involuntary' parricide and incest. Certain of Oedipus' past actions were fate-bound; but everything that he does on the stage from first to last he does as a free agent.
Even in calling the parricide and the incest fate-bound' I have perhaps implied more than the average Athenian ofjSophocles' day would have recognized. As A. W. Gomme put it, 'the gods know the future, but they do not order it: they know who will win the next Scotland and England football match, but that does not alter the fact that the victory will depend on the skill, the determination, the fitness of the players, and a little on luck'.4 That may not satisfy-the analytical philosopher, but it seems to have satisfied the ordinary man at all periods. Bernard Knox aptly quotes the prophecy of Jesus to St. Peter, 'Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.' The Evangelists clearly did not intend to imply that Peter's subsequent action was 'fate-bound' in the sense that he could not have chosen otherwise; Peter fulfilled the prediction, but he did so by an act of free choice.5
In any case I cannot understand Sir Maurice Bowra's6 idea that the gods force on Oedipus the knowledge of what he has done. They do nothing of the kind; on the contrary, what fascinates us is the spectacle of a man freely choosing, from the highest motives, a series of actions which lead to his own ruin. Oedipus might have left the plague to take its course; but pity for the sufferings of his people compelled him to consult Delphi. When Apollo's word came back, he might still have left
ON MISUNDERSTANDING THE OEDIPUS REX 183
the murder of Laius uninvestigated; but piety and justice required him to act. He need not have forced the truth from the reluctant Theban herdsman; but because he cannot rest content with a lie, he must tear away the last veil from the illusion in which he has lived so long. Teiresias, Jocasta, the herdsman, each in turn tries to stop him, but in vain: he must read the last riddle, the jiddle of his own life. The immediate cause of Oedipus' ruin is not 'Fate' or 'the gods' — no oracle said that he must discover the truth — and still less does it lie in his own weakness; what causes his ruin is his own strength and courage,.histloyalty to Thebes, and his loyalty to the truth. In all this we are to see him as a free agent: Kehce "the suppression of the hereditary curse. And his self-mutilation and self-banishment are equally free acts,of choice.
Why| does Oedipus blind himself? He tells us the reason (1369 ff.): he has done it in order to cut himself off from all contact with humanity; if he could'choke the channels ofhis other senses he would do so. Suicide would not iserve his purpose: in the next world he would have to meet his dea^l parents. Oedipus mutilates himself because he can face neither the living nor the dead. But why,iif he is morally innocent? Once again, we must lopk at the play through Greek eyes. The doctrine that nothing matters except the agent's intention is a peculiarity of Christian and especially bf post-Kantian thought. It is true that the Athenian law courts took account of intention :|they distinguished as ours do between murder and accidental homicide jor homicide committed in the course of self-defence. If Oedipus had been tried before an Athenian court he would have been acquitted — of murdering his father. But no human court could acquit him of pollution; for pollution inhered in the.act itself, irrespective of motive. Of that burden Thebes could not acquit Oedipus, and least of all could its bearer acquit himself.
The! nearest parallel to the situation of Oedipus is in the tale which Heroddtus tells about Adrastus, son of Gordies. Adrastus was the involuntary slayer of his own brother, and then of Atys, the son ofhis benefactor Croesus; the latter act,like the killing of Laius, fulfilled an oracle. Croesus forgave Adrastusbecause the killing was unintended (aekon), and because .the oracle showed that it was the will of 'some god'. But Adrastus did not forgive himself: he committed suicide, 'conscious' says Herodotus, 'that of all men known to him he bore the heaviest burden of disaster'.7 It is for- the same reason that Oedipus blinds himself. Morally innocent though he is and knows himself to be, the objective horror ofhis actions remains with him and he feels that he has no longer any place in human society. Is that simply archaic superstition? I think it is something more. Suppose a motorist runs down a man and kills him, I think he ought to feel that he has done a terrible thing, even if the accident is no fault of
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his: he has destroyed a human life, which nothing can restore. In the objective'order it is acts that count, not intentions. A man who has violated that order may well feel a sense of guilt, however blameless his driving.
But my analogy is very imperfect, and even the case of Adrastus is not fully comparable. Oedipus is no ordinary homicide: he has committed the two crimes which above all others fill us with instinctive horror. -Sophocles had not read Freud, but he knew how people feel about these things — better than some of his critics appear to do. And in the strongly patriarchal society of ancient Greece the revulsion would be even more intense than it is in our own. We have onlyto read Plato's prescription for the treatment to be given to parricides {Laws 872 c ff.). For this deed, he says, there can be no purification: the parricide shall be killed, his body shall be laid naked at a cross-roads outside the city, each officer of the State shall cast a stone upon it and curse it, and then the bloody remnant shall be flung outside the city's territory and left unburiedrin all this he is probably following actual Greek practice. And if that is how Greek justice treated parricides, is it surprising that Oedipus treats himself as he does, when the great king, 'the first of men', the man whose intuitive genius had saved Thebes, is suddenly revealed to himself as a thing so unclean that 'neither the earth can receive it, nor the holy rain nor the sunshine endure its presence' (1426)?
Ill
At this point I am brought back to the original question I asked the undergraduates: does Sophocles in this playiattempt to justify the ways of God to man? If 'to justify' means 'to explain in terms of. human justice', the answer is surely 'No'. If human justice is the standard, then, as Waldock bluntly expressed it, 'Nothing can excuse the gods, and Sophocles knew it perfectly well.' Waldock does not, however, suggest that the poet intended any attack on the gods. He goes on to say that it is futile to look for any 'message' or 'meaning' in this play: 'there is no meaning', he tells us, 'in the Oedipus Rex; there is merely the terror of coincidence.'8 Kirkwood seems to take a rather similar line: 'Sophocles', he says, 'has no theological pronouncements to make and no points of criticism to score.'9 These opinions come rather close to, if they do not actually involve, the view adopted by my third and last group of undergraduates — the view that the gods are merely agents in a traditional story which Sophocles, a 'pure artist', exploits for dramatic purposes without raising the religious issue or drawing any moral whatever.
This account seems to me insufficient; but I have more sympathy with it than I have with either of the other heresies. It reflects a healthy
reaction against the old moralizing school of critics; and the text of the play appears at first sight to support it. It is a striking fact that after the catastrophe no one on the stage says a word either in justification of the gods or in criticism of them. Oedipus says 'These things were Apollo' — and that is all. If the poet has charged him with a 'message' about divine justice or injustice, he fails to deliver it. And I fully agree that there is no reason at all why we should require a dramatist — even a Greek dramatist — to be for ever running about delivering banal 'messages'. It is true that when a Greek dramatic poet had something he passionately wanted to say to his fellow citizens he felt entitled to say it. Aeschylus in the Oresteia, Aristophanes in the Frogs, had something to say to,their people and used the opportunity of saying it on the stage. But these are exceptional cases — both these works were produced at a timej of grave crisis in public affairs — and even here the 'message' appears to me to be incidental to the true function of the artist, which I should be disposed to define, with Dr, Johnson, as 'the enlargement of our sensibility'. It is unwise to generalize from special cases. (And, incidentally, I wish undergraduates would stop writing essays which begin with the words 'This play proves that. .;.'. Surely no work of art can ever 'prove' anything: what value could there be in a 'proof whose premisses are manufactured by the artist?)
Nevertheless, I cannot accept the view that the Oedipus Rex conveys no intelligible meaning and that Sophocles' plays tell us nothing of his opinions: concerning the gods.i Certainly it is always dangerous to use dramatic! works as evidence of their author's opinions, and especially of their religious convictions: we can legitimately discuss religion in Shakespeare, but do we know anything at all about the religion o/Shakespeare? StillJ I think I should venture to assert two things about Sophocles' opinions:
First, he did not believe (or did not always believe) that the gods are in any human sense 'just';
Secondly, he did always believe that the ,gods exist and that man should revere them.
The first of these propositions is supported not only by the implicit evidence of the Oedipus Rex but by the explicit evidence of another play which is generally thought to be close in date to it. The closing lines of the Trachiniae contain a denunciation in violent terms of divine injustice. No one answers it. I can only suppose that the poet had no answer to give.
For the second of my two propositions we have quite strong external evidence — which is important, since it is independent of our subjective impressions. We know that Sophocles held various priesthoods; that
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when the cult of Asclepius was introduced to Athens he acted as the god's host and wrote a hymn in his honour; and that he was himself worshipped as a 'hero' after his death, which seems to imply that he accepted the religion of the State.and was accepted by it. But the external evidence does not stand alone: it is strongly supported by at least one passage in the Oedipus Rex. The celebrated choral ode about the decline of prophecy and the threat to religion (lines 863-910) was of course suggested by the scene with Creon which precedes it; but it contains generalizations which have little apparent relevance either to Oedipus or to Creon. Is the piety of this ode purely conventional, as Whitman maintained in a vigorous but sometimes perverse book?10 One phrase in particular seems to forbid this interpretation. If men are to lose all respect for the gods, in that case, the Chorus asks, tideime choreuein; (895). If by this they mean merely 'Why should I, a TKeban elder, dance?', the question is irrelevant and even slightly ludicrous; the meaning is surely 'Why should I, an Athenian citizen, continue to serve in a chorus?' In speaking of themselves as a chorus they_step out of the play into the contemporary world, as Aristophanes' choruses do in the parabasis. And in effect the question they are asking seems to be this :Tf Athens loses faith in religion, if the views of the Enlightenment prevail, what significance is there in tragic drama, which exists as part of the service" of the gods?' To that question the rapid decay of tragedy in the fourth century may be said to have provided an answer.
In saying this, I am not suggesting with Ehrenberg that the character of Oedipus reflects that of Pericles,11 or with Knox that he is intended to be a symbol of Athens:12 allegory of that sort seems to me wholly alien to Greek tragedy. I am only claiming that at one point in this play Sophocles took occasion to say to his fellow citizens something which he felt to be important. And it was important, particularly in the period of the Arcliidamian War, to which the Oedipus Rex probably belongs. Delphi was known to be pro-Spartan: that is why Euripides was.given a free hand to criticize Apollo. But if Delphi could not be trusted, the whole fabric of traditional belief was threatened with collapse. In our society religious faith is no longer tied up with belief in prophecy; but for the ancient world, both pagan and Christian, it was. And in the years of the Archidamian War belief in prophecy was at a low ebb; Thucydides is our witness to that.
I take it, then, as reasonably certain that while Sophocles did not pretend that the gods are in any human sense just he nevertheless held that they are entitled to our worship. Are these two opinions incompatible? Here once more we cannot hope to understand Greek literature if we persist in looking at it through Christian spectacles. To the Christian
it is a necessary part of piety to believe that God is just. And so it was to Plato and the Stoics. But the older world saw no such necessity. If you doubt this, take down the' Iliad and read Achilles' opinion of what divine justice amounts to (xxiv. 525-33); or take down the Bible and read the Book of Job. Disbelief in divine justice as measured by human yardsticks can perfectly well be associated with deep religious feeling. 'Men', say Heraclitus, 'find some things unjust, other things just; hut-in the eyes of God all things are beautiful and good and just.'13 I think that I Sophocles would have agreed. For him, as for Heraclitus, there is an objective world-order which man must respect, but which he cannot hope, fully to understand.
; rv
Some': readers of the Oedipus Rex have told me that they find its atmosphbre stifling and oppressive: they miss the tragic exaltation that one gets'from the Antigone or'thePrometheus Vinctus. And I fear that what! I have said here has done nothing to remove that feeling. Yet it is not a feeling which I share myself. Certainly the Oedipus Rex is a play about the blindness of man and the desperate insecurity of the human condition: in a sense every man must grope in the dark as Oedipus gropes, hot knowing who he is or what he has to suffer; we all live in a world ojf appearance which liides from us who-knows-what dreadful really. But surely the Oedipus Rex is also a play-about human greatness. Oedipus is great, not in virtue of a great worldly position — for his worldly position is an illusion which will vanish like a dream — but in virtue of his inner strength: strength to pursue the truth at whatever personal cost, and strength to accept and endure it when found. 'This horror is mine,' he cries, 'and none but I is strong enough to bear it' (1414). Oedipus is great because he accepts the responsibility for all his acts, including those which are objectively most horrible, though subjectively innocent.
To me personally Oedipus is a kind of symbol of the human intelligence which cannot rest until it has solved all the riddles — even the last riddle, to which the answer is that human happiness is built on an illusion. I do not know how far Sophocles intended that. But certainly in the last lines of the play (which I firmly believe to be genuine) he does generalize the case, does appear to suggest that in some sense Oedipus is every man and every man is potentially Oedipus. Freud felt this (he was not insensitive to poetry), but as we all know he understood it in a specific psychological sense. 'Oedipus' fate', he says, 'moves us only because it might have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us
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E. R. DODDS
before birth the very curse which rested upon him. It may be that we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses towards our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and violence.towards our fathers; our dreams convince us that we were.'14 Perhaps they do; but Freud did not ascribe his interpretation of the myth to Sophocles, and it is not the interpretation I have in mind. Is there not in the poet's view a much wider sense in which every man is Oedipus? If every man could tear away the last veils of illusion, if he could see human life as time and the gods see it, would he not see that against that tremendous background all the generations of men are as if they had not been, isa kai to meden zosas~(1181)t That was how Odysseus saw it when he had conversed / with Athena, the embodiment of divine wisdom. 'In A'ja'x' condition', he says, 'I recognize my own: I perceive,that all men living are but appearance or unsubstantial shadow.'15
So far as I can judge, on this matter Sophocles' deepest feelings did not change. The same view of the human condition which is made explicit in his earliest extant play is implicit not only in the Oedipus Rex but in the Oedipus Coloneus, in the great speech where Oedipus draws the bitter conclusion from his life's experience and in the famous ode on old age.16 Whether this vision of man's estate is true or false I do not know, but it ought to be comprehensible to a generation which relishes the plays of Samuel Beckett. I do not wish;to describe it as a 'message'. But I find in it an enlargement of sensibility. And that is all I ask of any dramatist.
15
, AMBIGUITY AND REVERSAL: ON THE ENIGMATIC STRUCTURE OF OEDIPUS REX
JEAN-PIERRE VERNANT
In his 1939 study of ambiguity in Greek literature, W. B. Stanford notes that |from the point of view of amphibology, Oedipus Rex occupies^ special position as a model.1 No literary genre in antiquity, in fact, uses so abundantly as tragedy expressions of double meaning, and Oedipus Rex jinciudes more than twice as many ambiguous forms as the other plays of Sophocles (fifty, according to the table that Hug drew up in 1872).2 The problem, however, is less one of a quantitative order than of nature and function. All the Greek tragedians had recourse to ambiguity as a means of expression and as a mode of thought. But double meaning; assumes quite a different role according to its place in the economy of the play and the level of language where the tragic poets situate itL i
It| can! be a matter of ambiguity in vocabulary, corresponding to what Aristjotle; calls homdnumia (lexical ambiguity); this type of ambiguity is made possible by the vacillations or contradictions of language.3 The playwright plays with them to translate his tragic vision of a world divided against itself, torn by contradictions. In the mouths of several characters, the same words take on different or opposed meanings, because their semantic value is not the same in the religious, legal, political, and common languages.4 Thus, for Antigone, nomos designates the opposite of what Creon himself, in-the circumstances in which he is placed, also calls nomos.5 For the young girl the word means religious rule; for Creon, an edict promulgated by the head of the state. And indeed, the semantic field of nomos is sufficiently extended to cover, among others, both of these meanings.6 Ambiguity then translates the tension between certain values felt as irreconcilable in spite of their homonymy. The words exchanged in the theatrical space, instead of establishing communication
Translated by P. du Bois, horn New Literary History 9 (1977-8), 475-501. Reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.
424
NOTES TO PAGES 172-181
NOTES TO PAGES 181-189
425
5. See Froma E. Zeitlin, The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia\Arethusa 11,(1978), 149-84.
6. See in general Emile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-europeennes (Paris, 1969), i, 212-15, 217-22.
7. Ibid., i, 222.
8. The relation of the phratry to the significant political unit of the deme under Cleisthenes is not entirely clear. There seems to have been some overlap, and the phratries had some political significance: see W. K. Lacey, Tlie Family m Classical Greece (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968), 92, 95-7.
9. See Lacey, 90-9.
10. For Greek views of filiation in the mid-fifth century and their relation to these issues see Zeitlin, passim, esp. 168-74 with the references in the notes on pp. 180-1.
11. For these contradictions in Creon's use of the family as a model of civic order (cf. 659 ff.) see Seth Benardete, 'A Reading of Sophocles' Antigone, IV, Interpretation 5.1 (1975), 32-5.
12. See Zeitlin, 160 ff.
13. See Seth Benardete, 'A Reading of Sophocles' Antigone, V, Interpretation ; 4.3 (1975), 152,176,183.
14. See e.g. 51-2, 56-7, 146, 172 of the two brothers; 864-5 of Oedipus' incest. Compounds in auto- also mark Antigone's defiant burial of her b:rother: : 503, 696, and also 821, 875, 900. Note Creon's use of autocheir in 306 to brand the criminal nature of the burial. Cf. also 700, 1175,1315, and Benardete (above, n.13), 149; Kamerbeek on 49-52 and 172; B. M. W. Knox, The Heroic Temper, \ Sather Classical Lectures 35 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964), 79;|W. H. Will,' "Autadelphos in the Antigone and the Eumenidef, Studies presented to\ D. M. Robinson (St. Louis, 1951), 553-8. For koinos of the family curse cf. 146. The ; word also describes Antigone's exclusive allegiance to kin ties in 539 and 546. Contrast Creon's political usage ('common decree', 162) and the larger sense of : the word beyond the perspectives of both protagonists in 1024, 1049, 112p.
15. The two passages contain the only occurrences of splanchna in this sense [ in the extant Sophocles. The word occurs one other time, in a different sense, at ■ Ajax 995. |
16. Note also Creon's use of physis as a criterion of authority in 727; contrast Haemon in 721. Goheen, 89 remarks Antigone's 'instinctive identification of physis and nomos as part of her identification of herself with a final order of things that is partly natural and partly divine.* I
I
E. R. Dodds: On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex (pp. 177-188) |
i
1. For the full evidence see O. Hey's exhaustive examination of the usage of these words, Phitol. 83 (1927), 1-17; 137-63. Cf. also K. von Fritz, Antike und moderne Tragödie (Berlin, 1962), 1 ff.
2. The danger is exemplified by Mr P. H. Vellacott's article, 'The Guilt of Oedipus', which appeared in Greece and Rome 11 (1964), 137-48, shortly after my talk was delivered. By treating Oedipus as a historical personage and examining his career from the 'common-sense' standpoint of a prosecuting counsel Mr Vella-cott has no difficulty in showing that Oedipus must have guessed the true story of his birth long before the point at which the play opens - and guiltily done nothing about it. Sophocles, according to Mr Veuacott, realized this, but unfortunately
could not present the situation in these terms because 'such a conceptionwasjim,£;impossible to express in the conventional forms of tragedy'; so for most of the ttrne'T he reluctantly fell back on 'the popular concept of an innocent OedipusTuredby: :: Fate into a disastrous trap'. We are left to conclude either that the play lis -a^ botched compromise or else that the common sense of the law-courts is not after all the best yardstick by which to measure myth.
3. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation'of Dreams (London, Modern Library, 1938), 108.
4. A. W. Gomme, More Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford, 1962), 211.
6. C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford, 1944), ch~v.
7. Herodotus I. 45. Cf. H. Funke, Die sogenannte tragische Schuld (Diss.
Köln, 1963), 105 ff.
8. A. J. A. Waldock, Sophocles the Dramatist (Cambridge, 1951), 158,168.
9. G. M. Kirkwood,^ Study of Sophoclean Drama (Ithaca, 1958), 271.
10. C. H. Whitman, Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), 133-5.
11. V. Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles (Oxford, 1954), 141 ff.
12. B.M.W. Knox, op. cit. ch. ii.
13. HeracÜtus, fr. 102.
14. Sigmund Freud, op. cit. 109.
15. Ajax 124-6.
16. O.C. 607-15; 1211-49.
Jean-Pierre Vernant: Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex (pp.189-209)
1. Ambiguity in Greek Literature (Oxford, 1939), 163-73.
2. A. Hug, 'Der Doppelsinn in Sophokles Oedipus Koenig', Philologus, 31 (1872), 66-84. \
3. 'Nouns are finite in number, while things are mfinite. So it is inevitable that a single noun has several meanings.' Aristotle, De Sophisticis Elenchis, 1, 165a11.
4. See Euripides, Phoen. 499-502: 'If all men saw the fair and wise the same men would not have debaters' double strife. But nothing is like or even among men except the name they give - which is not the fact' (tr. Elizabeth Wyckoff, in .Euripides V, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore [New York, 1968]).
5- The same ambiguity appears in the other terms which hold a major place in the texture of the work: dike, philos and philia, kerdos, time, orge, deinos. Cf. R. F. Goheen, The Imagery of Sophocles' Antigone (Princeton, 1951), and C. P. Segal, 'Sophocles' Praise of Man and the Conflicts of the Antigone', Arion, 3, 2(1964), 46-66.
6. Benveniste, in his Atoms d'agent et noms d'action en indo-europeen (Paris, 1948), 79-80, has shown that nemein retains the idea of a regular attribution, of an apportionment ruled by the authority of customary law. This meaning takes account of the two great series in the semantic history of the root *nem. Nomos, regular attribution, rule of usage, custom, religious rite, divine or civic law, convention; nomos, territorial attribution fixed by custom, pastureland, province. The expression ta nomizomena designates the whole of what is owed to the gods;
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PREFACE
This anthology is intended for the general reader as well as the classicist. All Greek quotations have therefore been translated, and footnotes segregated to the end of the book. Readers need not consult these to follow the arguments of the essays. For those unfamiliar with some of the terms commonly employed in discussions of Greek Tragedy, there is a glossary on p. 452.
This collection makes no claim to be either definitive or comprehensive. Indeed, no single volume could possibly treat all thirty-three extant Greek tragedies. Moreover, it seemed wise to devote more than one essay to some of the plays most often read (e.g., Oedipus, Medea). Several excellent articles had to be omitted, either because they were too specialized (metrical analyses, textual criticism) or incomprehensible without a thorough knowledge of Greek. Space limitations also precluded publication of excerpts from 'general' works like John Jones's On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, Walter Burkert's studies of tragedy and ritual, or Brian Vickers's Towards Greek Tragedy.1
Still, there is a reasonably broad spectrum of critical approaches, including structuralist (Vernäht, C. Segal), Marxist (Thomson), and even such 'contemporary' issues as the role of women in society (Winnington-Ingram, Knox). They were, however, chosen for their inherent merit, not with an eye on critical fashion.
Those seeking further reacting on Greek Tragedy may consult the excellent bibliographies in L'annee philologique, the Classical World Surveys1, Lustrum (often in! German), and the New Surveys in the Classics, published at intervalsjby Greece & Rome.
'Cf. John Jones, On Aristoth and Greek Tragedy, (London, 1962); Walter Burkert's work includes 'Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual', Gk. Rom, Byz. Stud. 1 (1966), 87-129, and, of related interest, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual, Sather Classical Lectures, Vol. 47 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979); Brian Vickers, Towards Greek Tragedy: Drama, Myth and Society (London, 1973).
^Aeschylus: A. G. McKay, 'A Survey of recent (1947-54) work on Aeschylus', CW 48 (1954-5), 145-50; 153-9; and 'Aeschylean Studies', Vol. 59 (1965-6), 40-8, 65-75. Sophocles: G. M. Kirkwood, 'A review of recent Sophoclean Studies' (1945-56), CW 50 (1956-7), 157-72. Euripides: H. W. Miller, 'A Survey of recent Euripidean scholarship, 1940-54', Of 49 (1955-6), 81-92;and 'Euripidean Drama 1955-65', CW 60 (1966-7), 177-87; 218-20.
The three surveys are contained in the Classical World Bibliographies: Greek