The Tragedies of King OedipusIn this lecture, we examine the myth of Oedipus, which has had a profound impact on 20th century thought.

The lecture begins by summarizing Oedipus’s story; we then look briefly at Freud’s famous interpretation of the myth as presented in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and at Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist reading. We

next consider two interpretations that are more widely accepted among classicists. The first of these sees the

central point of the play in the conflict between fate and free will, while the second connects it with the

philosophical movement Sophism, current in Athens when Sophocles was writing. The lecture concludes by considering the difficulties of disentangling the myth of

Oedipus from the presentation by Sophocles.

The story of Oedipus has become, in this century, the most famous of all Greek myths. The basic outline of the story as it appears in various ancient sources shows many motifs from the familiar test-and-quest pattern.

The hero’s birth and conception are surrounded by difficulty.

Oedipus’s parents know that their son will kill his father, Laios, either because of an oracle or because Laios was cursed by Pelops, whose son he had raped.

An elaboration of the story adds that the oracle says Oedipus will also marry his mother, Jocasta.

The infant Oedipus is exposed and expected to die—in the cultural norms of the time—but is instead rescued and brought up by foster parents.

He grows up in Corinth, ignorant of his true identity.

The young man performs exceptional feats of strength, cleverness, or both. These often involve encounters with monsters.

Oedipus shows exceptional strength when he kills Laios and all Laios’s attendants.

He shows exceptional cleverness when he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, a monster that terrorizes Thebes.

Successfully completing these “tests” gains the young man a bride.

When Oedipus solves the Sphinx’s riddle, he is granted the hand of the Queen of Thebes in marriage.

Unfortunately, she is his mother.

Oedipus’s discovery of the truth of his actions leads to Jocasta’s death and his own self-blinding.

We are most familiar with this story through Sophocles’s great play Oedipus the King. Two of this century’s most influential theorists of myth, Freud and Lévi-Strauss, have interpreted the Oedipus myth, and other scholars have followed in their tracks.

Freud assumes that Sophocles’s play represents the desires of the unconscious; thus, it appeals to modern audiences no less than to ancient ones as a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Scholars often object that Oedipus’s ignorance of his parentage is crucial to the myth and that if Oedipus felt oedipal desires, he would have felt them toward his adoptive mother, not Jocasta.

Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex, whether correct or not, does not tell us much about the myth itself, but offers a reason for its appeal.

The second main objection is the one we discussed as an objection to psychological theories of myth in general: Freud assumes that the unconscious operates the same way cross-culturally and through time.

Lévi-Strauss reads the myth as mediating between the two conflicting accounts of human origin, autochthony (“coming from the earth”) and sexual reproduction.

The riddles of the Sphinx and Oedipus’s uncertainty about his parentage both concern the essential nature of being human: What are human beings and where do they come from?

Lévi-Strauss finds traces of autochthony in the “lameness” characteristic of Oedipus’s family—very often in autochthonic stories, the people who emerge from the earth are lame.

The myth, which is about the origins of Oedipus, mediates between the theory of autochthonous human creation and the observed reality of sexual reproduction.

Few classicists have been persuaded by this reading of the myth.

Other scholars connect the Oedipus myth with initiation rites, which sometimes include symbolic killing of the father.

The most common reading of Sophocles’s play (if not of the underling myth) among literary critics and classicists is that its main topic is the conflict between fate and free will.

Max ErnstOedipus Rex

The actions taken by Laios, Jocasta, and Oedipus himself all lead to the inexorable working out of fate.

By trying to avoid fate, these characters guarantee its fulfillment.

They are fated to commit the deeds they commit, but this fate works through their own freely chosen actions.

The blind Oedipus goes into exile led by his daughter Antigone, 1835: King Oedipus and Antigone. Statue by Rudolph Tegner

Some scholars object that this is an anachronistic reading.

The conflict that moderns find between the idea of fate and free will does not seem to have troubled the Greeks.

Classical Greek, in fact, has no term for “free will.”

Another way to look at the play is to see Oedipus as the paradigm of a rationalist intellectual, seeking to establish truth through the use of his own intellect, rather than through relying on the god’s oracles.

Modern critics often assume that this is a good thing and see Oedipus as a kind of humanist hero, battling for truth for its own sake.

In the context of 5th-century Athens, however, most people would probably have seen such intellectual independence as a bad thing.

Sophocles is drawing on one of the most controversial movements of his day, the teachings of the “Sophists.”

Among other subjects, the Sophists, itinerant teachers, taught rhetoric and techniques of argumentation.

The most famous Sophist was Protagoras, best remembered for his dictum “man is the measure of all things.”

They questioned the validity of oracles, which implies questioning the existence or relevance of the gods.

Their opponents accused them of corrupting morals and weakening religious beliefs. Socrates was executed on just such grounds, although he vehemently denied being a Sophist.

In this context, Oedipus becomes an example of a Sophist.

His refusal to accept the oracle and the words of the prophet Teiresias shows the distrust of religious traditions that was characteristic of the Sophists.

He is also like a Sophist in his insistence on using his own intelligence and his determination to reason out the puzzles of his own origin and who killed Laios.

Sophocles’s play seems to indicate that the human intellect alone is not sufficient for understanding the world, that the gods’ oracles are valid, and that the gods must be taken into account.

The Plague of Thebes, oil on canvas,Charles François Jalabeat (French, 1819-1901)

All these reading show the difficulty in separating the Oedipus myth from Sophocles’s particular telling of it.

The text of Oedipus the King has become so central in Western literature that it has even overshadowed Sophocles’s retelling of the aftermath of Oedipus’s story in his last play, Oedipus at Colonos.

Can we cut through the later interpretations and around Sophocles’s hegemony to try to uncover the original significance of the myth?

The most unusual thing about this myth is its association of parricide and incest, two elements that are not normally part of the same classical myth.

Oedipus Cursing his Son, PolyneicesBy Henry Fuseli, 1741-1825

Many Greek myths can be found about sons killing or almost killing fathers and vice versa.

Parricide, and even lesser violence against fathers, was regarded with absolute horror as the worst imaginable crime.

We tend to see the incest with Jocasta as a worse crime that the killing Laios, but this may be anachronistic.

Jan Bremmer suggests that the incest was added to the story to underline the horror of the parricide.

Parricide, cannibalism, and incest are the worst imaginable transgressions.

Cannibalism does not appear in Oedipus’s story (unless we see it as displaced onto the Sphinx), but the incest here functions as the cannibalism does in the House of Atreus: to underline the horror of the murder.

As Bremmer puts it, “the monstrosity of the transgression is commented upon by letting the protagonist commit a further monstrosity.”

Oedipus’s eventual heroization at Colonos is a reminder that heroes, in the sense of guardian spirits, were not necessarily noted for good deeds.

Oedipus’s crimes mark him as different from the rest of humankind.

This difference qualifies him to be a hero.

In this context, it is interesting to consider Burkert’s reading of the myth.

Burkett connects the myth with the scapegoat or pharmakos, a person who is driven out of a city to free it from some disaster, such as a plague.

The pharmakos must be disgusting or foul in some way; this quality enables him to be able to divert the disaster from the city.

In this regard, Oedipus’s pollution enables him both to lift the plague from Thebes and to protect Athens.

Antoni Brodowski, Oedipus and Antigone, 1828.