Oedipus, oracles, and meaning : from Sophocles to Umberto Eco

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The Samuel James Stubbs Lecture Series

Oedipus, Oracles, and Meaning From Sophocles

to Umberto Eco

Walter Burkert

University College

X- The University ofToronco 1991

Editor's Preface On November 21, 1988, in response to an invitation from Principal Peter Richardson of University College, Toronto, Professor Walter Burkert gave the first in a series of annual lectures in the college dedicated to the memory of Samuel James Stubbs. The lecture is here published with some changes and with the addition of footnotes and a bibliography. Professor Burkert has called attention to the fact that the written version, tnough it contains the product of some further thought, reflects the intent of the original lecture in having also been composed with a general educateci !1t;dience in mind. He has therefore kept scholarly discussion to a minimum. Peter Richardson, now retired from service as Principal, has provided by way of preamble a reminiscence of Samuel Stubbs and of the epoch in College history that produced him. Michael J. O'Brien University College, December, 1990

© University College 1991 Typeset and printed at Coach House Printing, Toronto

The Samuel James Stubbs Lectureship The Samuel James Stubbs Lectureship is the result of a generous bequest of Helen Eunice Stubbs, who died 6 January 1987. Born in 1907, she graduated from University College in the University of Toronto in 1933 with a B.A. in English, and in 1939 with a Bachelor of Library Science. "Stubbsy," as she was known to her friends, was an outstanding librarian in the Toronto Public Library system who spent all of her working life in Boys' and Girls' House. She has also established through another bequest the Helen E. Stubbs Memorial Lectureship in the Toronto Public Libraries on some aspect of children's literature. The first lecture was recently published and contains a fuller appreciation of Miss Stubbs. Her father, Samuel James Stubbs (16 May 1870 - 1 February 1930), was also a graduate of University College. He was part of a group of students who began their University education as the College was being rebuilt after the disastrous fire of 1890. 1 The College reopened in 1892, while Mr. Stubbs was in his second year. He graduated in 1895 among a group that included two future Prime Ministers of Canada - William Lyon Mackenzie King and Arthur Meighen. They all went through Canada's first and most notorious student strike, which came to a head over the University's hiring practices (or more correctly, over the provincial government's hiring practices on behalfofthe University), complicated by the subsequent dismissal ofa classics professor who dared to write a letter to the editor of The Globe complaining-very mildly as it seems from our distance - about the taint of nepotism in the government's practices. As a student in classics the young Mr. Stubbs cannot have been unmoved by these events; he may even have been one of the actors, though we have no record of that. The social setting is well described by B.K. Sandwell, a slightly younger student in the College: I For a fresh account of the fire and its consequences, see D.S. Richardson, J.M. Careless, G.M. Craig,A Not Unsightly Building: University College and its Hisrory (1990).

The leadership of the strike came entirelyfrom UniversityCollege. Psychologicallyit represented the revolt of a new type of student against conditions which had worked well enough with the old type but were destined to become outmoded. The new students were no longer mainlyproducts of a few endowed schools or grammar schools,nurtured in well-to-do homes. They were young men who had gone through the new high schools or collegiates which were just beginning to be capable of turning out first-classmatriculation material. They hated privilege and nepotism as the worst of public crimes, and they thought they detected a good deal of both in the University structure. Whether this description fits Mr. Stubbs in every particular I cannot say; but it fits what little is known of him. His schooling was at one of the new collegiates - Stratford Collegiate Institute - and he taught in a rural school-S.S. #5, Bertie, County of Welland- for three years in order to be able to come to the University. He became a classicist and a "prominent teacher," as The Globe described him in an obituary, teaching in schools in St. Mary's, Smith's Falls and Peterborough. But he made his real mark as Editor of Text Books for the Department of Education, located at the Toronto Normal School, where he also held a teaching appointment. The Lectureship in his memory is devised to reflect his varied interests - in Greek and Latin and English. The description is deliberately broad, so that under the auspices of the Lectureship the College can invite to the University ofToronto distinguished scholars whose interests might be literature, history, art, philosophy, religion or science of Greece or Rome, or the classical tradition in English literature. While at the University for a week or more, the visitor will give at least one public lecture, offer other seminars or colloquia, and meet with undergraduate and graduate students, all within the setting ofUniversity College. Professor Walter Burkert of Zurich was the ideal person to inaugurate this Lectureship.No one has written more creatively and compellingly on classical religion and mythology than he. The College was able to make these arrangements because the University of Toronto had already seen fit to offer him an honorary degree (22 November 1988) for his creative contribution to classical scholarship. Peter Richardson University College, September 1990

Oedipus, Oracles, and Meaning From Sophocles to Umberto Eco Oedipus is a name from the ancient Greek tradition which has remained in common use up to the present day. Nowadays, however, it is not the Greek heritage which will come to most people's minds upon hearing this name, not Greek tragedy and Sophocles, but rather psychology and psychoanalysis: Oedipus - the Oedipus complex - Sigmund Freud. Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, was chosen by Freud in his book Die Traumdeutung, published in 1900, to designate a complex which he had encountered in his psychiatric practice, and Freud went on to generalize the thesis - and to scandalize the public - by saying that it was an unconscious desire of any child, or rather any boy, to get rid of his father and make love to his mother. 1 Since then psychology has classified Oedipal and pre-Oedipal phases in a child's development. I am not going to criticize or to discuss the theory itself. Whether it will tell us something about Greek myth or even about Sophocles is a different question. Freud had enjoyed a classical education, and his reference to the play of Sophocles is explicit. In the 88 years that have passed since then, there have been general and scholarly, even philological, discussions of the issue. 2 One simple objection to Freud, which is perhaps too simple, is to point out that Oedipus did not know he was killing his father and marrying his own mother; in the world of his psyche his father and mother would have been his foster parents at Corinth. Oedipus without complex, 'Oedipe sans complexe', is the title of an article by Jean-Pierre Vemant. 3 But the question about Oedipus' psyche is, of course, unimportant, since we are not Works listed in the Bibliographical Note are identified in the footnotes by author and date alone. 1 S. Freud, Die Traumdeurung (Vienna 1900) 18off. = Standard Edition IV 261-264. 2 SeeJ. Glenn, "Psychoanalytical Writings on Classical Mythology and Religion: 19091960", Classical World70 (1976/77) 225-247; Edmunds (1985); P.L. Rudnytsky, Freud and Oedipus (New York 1987). 3 Vernant (1967).

dealing with a real patient but with a character in a traditional tale and in a work ofliterature. Freudians can point out that what must have been the center of interest for the poet and for the public was the extraordinary event, unspeakable, nearly unthinkable, and all the more fascinating murder and incest; and that the whole complicated and improbable story about exposure of the child, foster parents etc. is just a detour of narrative to bring about the most secret and most forbidden act of wish-fulfillment, one meant to be punished cruelly. The detail that Oedipus is not killed but blinded in consequence seems to conform to psychological requirements: blinding as retaliation for sexual transgression is in fact a recurrent motif. 4 Within the framework of ancient culture one can point out that mother incest is regularly associated with a king's or a tyrant's grasp for power: 5 Brutus, who was to overthrow the Tarquin dynasty of Rome, was told by the Delphic oracle that sovereignty would go to the man who was first to kiss his mother; he fell down and kissed Earth, the common mother, and established the new form of rule (Livy r.56.ro-12). A kind of parody of this is the story about the tyrant Hippias in Herodotus (6.107). Exiled from Athens, this tyrant had been told by the seers that he v:ould regain power, and thus he accompanied the Persian army to Marathon; upon landing, the old man coughed and lost a tooth, which fell into the sand and could not be found again - and then he knew that the prophecy had already been fulfilled, now that his tooth had been mixed with the maternal soil, and that he was not to subdue this land any further. Caesar, the story goes, in the night before he crossed the Rubicon, dreamt he was having sexual intercourse with his mother in an 'unspeakable' way, i.e. orally: this is an image for what he was doing to Rome (Plutarch, Caesar, 32.9). Even in modern Greece, during the dictatorship of the Junta (19681974), Greeks could say that the generals were 'screwing Mother Greece.' 6 All this is a very Freudian sort of symbolism: it shows the 4 G.Devereux (1973), cf. id., "Thamyris and the Muses", AmericanJournal of Philology 108 (1987) 199-201; Pucci (1979). 5 M. Delcourt, Oedipeou la legendedu conquirant(Paris l 944). Artemid. l, 79 has this and many other meanings for dreams of mother incest. How far Oidi-pous,'Swell-Foot', is to be taken as a significant aame, and in which sense exactly, isunclear, cf. Maxwell-Stuart (197 5); Edmunds (1981); Calame (1986). 6 M. Herzfeld, Anthropologythroughthe Looking-Glass(Cambridge 1987) 180.

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ambivalence of awe and attraction, wish-fulfilling power fantasy and transgression in the image of mother-incest. Let us add a glimpse of the medieval transformation of the Oedipus legend: it becomes attached to Judas, who betrayed Christ. This Judas, he who committed the most repulsive and inexplicable crime - what kind of a person can he have been? The answer is: He had killed his own father and married his own mother; he is the most abject of all men in the world. 7 So far we have been concerned with myth, i.e. a traditional type of story with a characteristic structure of'motifemes' and a definite psychological impact, 8 a story which is still variable in its precise form, tendency, context, even in the names used; it can be elaborated again and again by storytellers and poets. One among these elaborations is the tragedy of Sophocles, which has survived and has remained famous in world literature, a tragedy which can still be produced on a modern stage. In a way this is a miracle, considering the gap of 2400 years, or about 1oo generations, that separates us from the world of Sophocles. The play was originally produced between 440 and 430 B. C., some years after the Antigone; the exact date remains unknown to us. 9 The story of Oedipus was well known to the public when Sophocles produced his play. There had been earlier tragedies about Oedipus; -·---_!i.esc_hylushad treated the subject in a frilogy-of 467, of which only the concluding-play has survived, Seven-against Thebes. Before Aeschylus, there had been elaborations in the form of Stesichorean lyrics, lO and these in turn had been dependent on epics in the Homeric style. 11 These are lost, but from the information we have we may still make out one

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7 W. Puchner, "Europaische Odipusi.iberlieferung und griechisches Schicksalsmarchen", in W. Siegmund, ed.,Antiker Mythos in unserenMarchen(Kasse:l1984) 52-63. 8 Cf. W. Burkert, Structureand Historyin GreekMythologyand Ritual (Berkeley 1979) 134. The fullest study of the Oedipus myth remains C. Robert, Oidipus,2 vols. (Berlin 1915). A remarkable addition to the documentation was the 'Lille Stesichorus' (see below). Cf. also M.H. Jameson, "Labda, Lamda, Labdakos", in: Corinthiaca.Studies in Honor of D.A. Amyx (Columbia 1986) 3-u. 9 Surveyofopinions in Hester (1977) 60. Anew argument has been brought into the discussion by Mi.iller (1984), whose option is 433 B.C.; doubts in N.G.Wilson, ClassicalReview 35 (1985) 181. 10 P.J. Parsons, "The Lille Stesichoros", Zeitschriftfar Papyrologieund Epigraphik26 (1977) 7-36. 11 Fragments in A. Bernabe, PoetaeEpici Graeci(Leipzig 1987) 17-31; M. Davies, EpicorumGraecorumFragmenta(Gottingen 1988) 20-27.

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important fact. _i\lltbe rrearments of this myth before Sophocles had been concerned with the story of a family, a concatenation of events spanning three generations, with the main accent on the final catastrophe, the attack of the Seven against Thebes, which brings about the mutual fratricide of two brothers, Eteokles and Polyneikes. It is the image of autogenous annihilation, annihilation of a royal family, that catches archaic fancy: this is the worst thing that can happen to a family. At the same time, this mutual murder has the function of a substitution sacrifice: as the brothers kill each other, the city of Thebes remains intact. Myth steps in to trace back this event to its origins: how could brothers get involved in such a catastrophe? The answer, from an archaic point of view, is this: because of a curse, a curse emanating from the highest family authority, a curse of the father. It was Oedipus who cursed his sons, saying that they should divide their heritage by iron, and that they should kill each other in the end. But, the myth has to explain, what kind of father was able to pronounce such a curse? The answer, similar to that found in the medieval Judas legend, was that this man had slain his own father and married his own mother and had become blind in consequence. Falling back to the origin from which he himself had sprung, he had taken away the future of his line. "Let it go with a fair wind toward the wave ofKokytos which is its due, detested as it is by Phoebus-the whole clan of Laios", as Aeschylus has it (Seven against Thebes 690 f.). The singularity - indeed the audacity- of Sophocles' play is that this whole family context has nearly become invisible. Eteokles and Polyneikes do not appear in the play, and there is no discussion about what Laios could or should have done. It is Oedipus alone who dominates the stage, and he remains the central character, however his situation may change. The plot, as has often been seen, is a typical mystery story: A murder has been committed; the question is 'who done it'; the king is leading the investigation. The dramatic complication is that the investigator is identical with the culprit, yet he does not know what the audience is bound to know from the start; thus with all his energy and intelligence he is seen to move infallibly toward his own downfall. Let us recall the play with some quotations and comments. It opens with a ritual which is strange for us, although familiar to the Athenians of IO

the time, a supplication by the people at the palace of the king. They fall down at its steps as they would at an altar. Oedipus, coming from his palace, is superior, fatherly, almost divine. "Children", is how he addresses his people (r, 6), and he bids them to tell him what he knows already, that plague is devastating the country, a plague of an all-pervading character; plants are withering, animals are languishing, women cannot give birth, men and women are dying. But Oedipus has already taken the initiative: he has sent an envoy to the oracle of Delphi to ask how prosperity can be restored to his country. And behold-the poet is free to arrange times- the messenger is just coming back, Kreon, brother-in-law of Oedipus. The Delphic response is simple: crime is the cause of the plague, the murder of Laios, former king of Thebes, which has been left unprobed and unatoned. Hence the evolution of the plot is determined: Oedipus is to lead the investigation, the result of which is known to the spectators in advance. The investigation takes four moves, separated by choral odes; three times a move ends with a deceptive stalemate, with a new stage of illusion; and then unimpeachable truth comes out in the end. In the process the poet makes use of linguistic ambivalence in a most sophisticated manner, so that again and again the words of Oedipus are true, too true in a sense of which he is unaware, a sense which is devastating for himself. He says to his people: "You are all afflicted, and none more than myself' (60 f.); he is to help his country and adds, "not from distant friends but from myself! shall dispel this pollution" (137 f.). He speaks in terms of compassion while inaugurating his own 'passion'. Exeunt suppliants; enter The ban elders to form an assembly-the chorus of the play. Oedipus, responsible and energetic, takes up the task which he still thinks is 'foreign' to him (219 f.). First of all he pronounces a frightful curse on the murderer of Laios, in the name of the city. Oedipus is a man made to utter curses. "Expelled from every house, unclean, accursed (241) ... an evil man, in evil ways he shall lucklesslywear out his life" (248); and once more that specific irony: "If, with my knowledge, house or hearth of mine receive him, upon my head shall come the curses I have just pronounced" (249-51). Yet curses will not yield results. The elders propose what once more has been anticipated by Oedipus: that the seer Teiresias must know. II

Enter Teiresias, and he in fact speaks out: "You are the unholy polluter of this land" (353), he says to Oedipus; "the killer you are seeking is yourself' (362). The dramatist's trick is that, because of the seer's initial and protracted unwillingness to speak, Oedipus gradually becomes enraged to such a degree that he does not accept the plain statement ofTeiresias. He suspects a political conspiracy-oracles can be manipulated- and rapidly concludes that Kreon is involved in high treason. Thus he has no ear for Teiresias' last words: "The man for whom you are searching ... is here ... he will be shown to live with his children as brother and as father, son and husband to the woman from whom he was born, pouring his seed into the same place as his father, and his murderer" (449-460). All has already been said that can be said, but the question remains: Who will accept the truth, and when, and how. The chorus, in the following ode, is not willing to do so: "By my thought Oedipus will never be judged guilty of evil things" (510 f.). The next act follows a false trail: Kreon comes to defend himself; Oedipus, in stubborn self-righteousness, is about to pronounce a sentence of death, when his wife Iokaste enters to intervene. The chorus, too, intercedes in favor ofKreon, and Oedipus has to give in: his energy has been thwarted; he becomes unsure. "You make my heart remiss and blunt", he says to the elders (688). Energy now is on the side oflokaste, who turns against Teiresias: no mortal man should be believed to possess supernatural ·gifts of 'seeing', she says; for proof, she tells the story of how it had been predicted that Laios should be slain by his own son; but he was killed by robbers at the crossroads, long after the new-born child had perished, exposed on Mount Kithairon. Yet this information, meant to soothe, starts a new track of investigation: the killing of Laios, shortly before Oedipus' arrival at Thebes, at the crossroads in Phokis between Thebes and Delphi, while Laios was traveling with a chariot and four servants, one of whom escaped -such an event is in fact well known to Oedipus; he himself perpetrated a deed of this kind. Oedipus tells the story of his life, how he left his parents and Corinth when the oracle had told him he was to marry his mother and kill his father. He has killed four men at the crossroads: Is he the murderer of Laios? He is close to breaking down: "It appears I have just cast myself, without knowing it, under dreadful curses ... I am terribly disheartened" 12

(744-747). One detail remains to which hope may cling: the servant who escaped had reported that a number of robbers had attacked the king, whereas Oedipus had been traveling all alone. So the two events cannot be identical - if indeed the servant has told the truth. That servant, still alive, is living as a herdsman out in the countryside. Oedipus at once decides that he must be summoned to confirm his statement to the court. Exeunt king and queen; there is a caesura marked by a choral ode. The new act starts with a new move, a sacrificial procession organized by the queen to propitiate the gods; it shows her loss of self-reliance, and it is not to attain its aim. A messenger from Corinth arrives to announce that the king of Corinth has died and Oedipus is to be his successor. Iokaste, however, sees just one thing: the father whom Oedipus was afraid to kill has died a natural death: "Oh oracles of gods, where are you now?" she exclaims (946 f.). "What should a man be afraid of for whom chance rules and there is no clear foreknowledge of anything?" (977 f.). And Oedipus concurs: "Why should one look to the oracular hearth of Pytho, or to the birds that scream above, which announced that I was to kill my own father?" (964-967) "He has taken with him the predictions that failed, and he, Polybus, lies in Hades - they were worth nothing" (971 f.). There remains one reason for caution, the prophecy of mother-incest. He had better not go back to Corinth. Here the messenger from Corinth takes the cue: he thinks he can dispel Oedipus' qualms - and thus definitely brings on catastrophe. He knows that Oedipus was not the legitimate son of the royal couple of Corinth, that instead he was a baby found on Kithairon and brought by the messenger himself to the palace of Corinth; for proof he refers to the pierced feet of Oedipus, 'swollen foot', Oiotnouc;.For Oedipus, this means that the main question of his investigation - Who is the murderer of Laios?- is pushed back for the moment by the other question - Who am I? Both questions, however, will lead to the same answer. A first step in the new investigation is to identify the herdsman from whom the man from Corinth got the baby; one finds out at once - it is the chorus leader speaking - that he is the very herdsman who has been summoned as a witness to the murder of Laios. At this moment Iokaste intercedes for the last time: Stop, for the gods' sake, stop! She has realized at 13

once who that baby with pierced feet was that had been brought to Kithairon. But her attempt to halt the proceedings is thwarted; with a cry she departs from the stage. Oedipus, as if blind to everything else, seems only concerned with his own identity: "It could not be that I, having got hold of signs like these, should not uncover my own origin" - my yevo;, he says, from where I sprang, where I belong (1058 f.). There is a last, short pause, a choral ode dwelling on the last illusion: Oedipus the unknown, a son of Luck, son of the Mountain, perhaps of divine descent .... Then things come out in rapid succession. Enter the herdsman. Oedipus, energetic as ever, questions him, threatening him with torture as he shrinks back. Piece by piece information accrues: Where was the child from? From Thebes, from the house of Laios, not from a slave .... Herdsman: "Woe, most close am I to saying the terrible thing" - Oedipus: "And I to hearing it- still it must be heard" (II69 f.). Oedipus, born from Iokaste, exposed in order that he should not kill his father, murderer of Laios, and his mother's husband. "Iou, Iou, everything must have come true" (1182); Oedipus darts off the stage. Among the fixed forms found in Greek tragedy are lamentation and the messenger speech; the extraordinary event is framed in convention. Thus a messenger appears to announce pollution which "neither the Danube nor the Phasis could sweep away" (1227 f.), horrible acts, "freely chosen, not unchosen" (1230). This sounds startling. We learn that Iokaste had run into her bedroom and locked the door; when Oedipus breaks in, he finds her strangled; whereupon "tearing the golden fibulae off her garment, reaching up he hit the frame of his own eyes, shouting that they should no longer see what he had suffered and what he had done ••." (1268-72). Now Oedipus is calling "to open the bolts and to show to all the Thebans the father's murderer, the mother's-using words which cannot be repeated .... The disease is greater than can be borne" (1287-90; 1293). Oedipus appears on stage, with a new mask, showing the eyes destroyed, and the blood, black and dripping. Ecce homo -yet in impeccable forms oflyrical song. A strange pronouncement by Oedipus: "Apollo this was, Apollo, oh friends, who brought evil, evil to perfection, my sufferings here, mine own; but he who struck with his own hand- this was nobody but I, stouthearted-miserable" - -c11.tjµwv, a word of characteristic ambivalence in Greek (1329-1332). This is the god, but man him-

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self is acting- freely chosen acts, the messenger had said, not unchosen. Oedipus wants to be led away, "the most wretched, the most cursed, most hated by the gods" (1344-6). "Now I am without the gods, son of unholy parents, consort of those from whom I was engendered and born .... If there is any evil excelling evil, this has fallen to Oedipus" (1360-6). The lyrics are followed by spoken verses in which Oedipus repeats that henceforth he will see nothing; the whole world, Thebes, Kithairon, mother, father, children, all are indissolubly linked with the horror that has befallen him. He remains all alone with himself - he has even called himself 'godless' ( &.ew; 1360) - shut in, sealed in his own sphere of consciousness. You must not be afraid of touching me, Oedipus says: "Nobody is capable of bearing this evil except me" (1415). Here horror suddenly seems to change into a claim to distinction. Ecce homo, all by himself: Is he not free, absolute, perfect? The German poet Friedrich Hoelderlin has a strange epigram on Sophocles: 'Many people tried in vain to express the most joyous in a joyous way- here finally, in mourn,ing, it declares itself to me'. Viele versuchten umsonst, das Freudigste freudig zu sagen. Hier spricht endlich es mir, hier in der Trauer, sich aus. Can we be more explicit? What does make this a good, a classical and perfect, a fascinating play? The story is improbable to the utmost, indeed absurd: nobody will think that similar things could happen to himself and yet we begin to identify with Oedipus. Freud has given his answer regarding the secret fascination of the play. But ifhe were right, it should apply to any Oedipus drama or even any Oedipus story, whereas the Sophoclean play evidently has a very special quality. So what is it about? Ever since Aristotle, and especially in modern theories of tragedy, the idea has loomed large that tragedy should be concerned with 'guilt', a special form of 'guilt', a 'poetical' or 'tragic' guilt. Aristotle's term was &.µapna. 12 In contrast with this is the concept of a 'tragedy of fate'. It seems inevitable that Sophocles' Oedipus the King should be one or the

12 Arist.Poet. 1453a10. On the unending discussion about this 'tragic fault' see esp. van Fritz (1962), Funke (1963), Sauer (1964), Vellacott (1964), Bremer (1969), Said (1978), Lefevre (1987), Cessi (1987); an exhaustive doxographywas given by Hester (1977) 49-57.

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other, a 'tragedy of guilt' or a 'tragedy of fate'; yet, as E.R. Dodds has shown in a famous article, 13 it is neither one nor the other. Interpreters have searched for some guilt, at least some 6:µap·tia, in Oedipus, and they have found blameworthy things, either in the course of the play or in the earlier events presupposed in it: Oedipus is irascible, sometimes nearly blind to facts; he deals roughly with Teiresias, still more with Kreon, and is ready to torture the herdsman. The Greek title of the play is 0tobtouc:;Tupavv°';, and even ifwe do not know whether this title goes back to Sophocles, at any rate the word i:upavvo~occurs much more often in the text than the normal word for 'king', ~aoLAEUc:;. But nothing of this will suffice to make the fall of Oedipus appear to be 'just' retribution. Oedipus is called the saviour, he is met by trust from his people; it is smallminded to enumerate petty 'errors'. It is true Oedipus has become a killer at the crossroads, and we may wonder how lightly he seems to take this: "and I kill them all" (813), no comment- in Pasolini's film Edipo Re this has become a long, variegated, exciting sequence of fights. This is his guilt, some have said, and it was a fitting punishment that one of the victims should have been his own father. But this is not discussed in the play, not used for reproach, not even by Oedipus himself. The text dwells on the aggressiveness of Laios and his men. It has been stated repeatedly that any lawcourt in Attica would have acquitted Oedipus for an act of killing in self-defence without premeditation. 14 A rationalist might say that Oedipus, warned by the oracle, should have strictly avoided killing any elderly man or marrying any woman older than himself. 15 Yet this oracle, as Sophocles has it in this play, did not in fact give any warning, any advice, any command. There was only categorical - indeed apodictic - prediction: this will happen, this must happen. And it is Apollo's triumph that he was right: "This was Apollo". . Sue~ function of oracles is not in fact the normal one in Greece. It had ~en diffe~_entin the trilogy of Aeschylus. He had the god of Delphi give the command to Laio~three times~ he should refrain from begetting children in order to save the polis; yet Laios disregarded this, yielded to lust and thus "begot his own death, father-killing Oedipus" (Aeschy13 Dodds (1973, originally published 1966). 14 Funke (1963). 15 Vellacott (1964) is close to this position.

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!us, Seven against Thebes 745-52). Here we do find the 'guilt' from which the chain of disaster is seen to spring. Sophocles has consciously eliminated this aspect. This is not a tragedy of guilt. It is amoral. Does this mean that it is a tragedy of fate, as Freud held? A concept of 'fate' as a dominating power is not at all prominent in the play, and the persons involved are free in what they are doing; 16 they never appear as marionettes. To quote Dodds: 17 "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 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 iu turn tries to stop him but in vain .... The immediate q11,1s.~ of Oedipus' ruin is not 'Fate' or 'the gods' - no oracle said that he must discovertne truth ... what causes his ruin is his own strength and courage, his loyalty to Thebes, and his loyalty to truth." The 'freedom' of Oedipus is proclaimed most emphatically amidst catastrophe: "freely chosen, not unchosen", "this was nobody but I myself'. This is Oedipus. Once more the uniqueness of Sophocles is shown by comparing other Oedipus tragedies. The early epics probably, and Aeschylus definitely, / made the disaster the consequence of hereditary guilt, of a family curse. Euripides in addition brought in some homosexual transgression of Laios that opened the way to catastrophe. 18 In Aeschylus it was the whole 'clan of Laios' that was to "go with a fair wind toward the wave of Kokytos which is its due, detested as it is by Phoebus" (Seven against Thebes 690 f.) -the lines have already been quoted. The motif of the family curse occurs in Sophocles' own Antigone, staged a few years before Oedipus the King, and it recurs in the Oedipus at Kolonos, written so much later; there is also much argument about 'guilty or not guilty' in this later play. In Oedipus the King all this is conspicuously absent. Oedipus does not say: 'my father's curse has reached me', or 'fate has struck me'; what he says is: 'this am I 16 There are manystudiesof'fate' in Oedipus; see Winnington-lngram (1980) 150-178; Brody (1985). 17 Dodds (1973) 71. 18 Euripides Chrysippos, Fr. 839-844 Nauck.

myself'. To quote Dodds once more: 19 "Oedipus is great because he accepts the responsibility for all his acts, including those which are objectively most horrible, though subjectively innocent." Not a tragedy of guilt, not a tragedy of fate - so what is left? Merely a splendid drama, built on intellectual sophistication and theatrical antitheses? There is, as a recurrent motif, the subtle interplay of 'seeing' and blindness, of knowledge and illusion throughout the play; there is the spectacular and appalling contrast between Oedipus coming from his palace for the first and for the last time: first absolutely superior, fatherly, the center towards whom the others turn, even kneeling down before him - in the end the monster from whom they all turn away, shrinking even from touching him. The construction of the plot has been much admired, the way this machinery works, one move corresponding to another, so that deceptive chances to escape come up again and again, only to turn into steps towards definitive ruin. It is true the poet has allowed himself two quite improbable arrangements, that the witness to Laios' murder should be the same man who had brought the child to Kithairon, and that the messenger from Corinth should be the same man who had accepted the child. It is perhaps more important to realize those shifts of emphasis in the play which pass nearly unnoticed because of the art of the poet. At the beginning we see Oedipus as the paternal protector of the community, ofhis polis, resolved to help even against the plague; at the end both polis and plague seem to have vanished, and nobody asks whether the plague will stop - although this should be connected with the argument that evolves whether Oedipus is to be expelled from Thebes or to remain in the city. We have come to concentrate on Oedipus alone: as he finally stands before our eyes, blind, isolated, crying that he would even wish to bar his ears from all communication, we too have lost sight of anything or anybody else. A similar shift of emphasis occurs in regard to what Oedipus has done. It is exclusively the murder of the king that is mentioned in the beginning by the oracle, a murder said to have provoked the plague; incest is brought in by Teiresias, but remains unnoticed while Oedipus is pursuing his investigation. It comes up as a secondary motif for Oedipus' exile from Corinth; but only after the messenger from Corinth has arrived does this 19 Dodds (1973) 76.

18

problem come to the fore, though it is still fended off by Iokaste - "many men in their dreams have slept with their mothers" (98 I f.). Yet when the full truth has been revealed, it is the sexual act which dominates the fantasy and the imagery; it is on account of this that Iokaste kills herself, that Oedipus pierces his eyes with his mother's brooch-pins, an act of retaliation, as has been seen; and in the final laments of Oedipus this is the most prominent, the 'unspeakable', pollution, the perversion of the most intimate family relations; through this he has become a monster, not through

I·

I

killing. King turned into monster: it is here that a more general pattern of interpretation takes hold. This drama, it has been said, is in fact enacting an age-old ritual, the ritual of the scapegoat. Rene Girard, in his book VioLeneeand the Sacred, claims that human society as such has been built on a process of scapegoating, of guilt alleged and guilt disclaimed. 20 Kings are held .responsible· for the welfare of their country; if this is seen to fail, on the occasion of a plague, for instance, the king is marked as 'guilty', 'polluted'; he is deposed, expelled, or even killed in a kind of'sacrifice'. There are examples from Thracian and from Germanic tribes for such proceedings, not to·speak of more exotic societies. 21 The Greek term for the scapegoat would be cpapµa.K6t;.Jean-Pierre Vernant has interpreted 22 Sophocles' dramR in this perspective: king turned into scapegoat. Psychologists have tried to describe an unconscious mechanism of 'scapegoating', by which everything felt to be dangerous or hateful in one's own psyche is projected onto another person. 23 Thus Oedipus the King, held responsible for the plague, is credited with what appears to be most horrible and hateful, with acts of murder and incest, murder of the father, 20 R. Girard, La violenceeclesacre(Paris 1972), Engl. transl.: Violenceand cheSacred(Baltimore 1977); cf. Leboucemissaire(Paris 1982), Engl.transl.: TheScapegoac(Baltimore 1986). The scapegoat pattern had caught the attention ofJ.G. Frazer, TheGoldenBough VIII (Cambridge 19143), and J.E. Harrison, Prolegomenacothe Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge 192 23), 95-109; see also W. Burkert, StructureandHistoryin GreekMythologyand Ritual (Berkeley 1979) 59-77. • 21 Aenianians, Plut., Quaesc.Gr. 13, 294a; 16,297c; Burgundians, Amm. Marc. 28,5,14; in general, Episcleof Clement1,55,1. Further (not indisputable) evidence in J.G. Frazer, The GoldenBough I (Cambridge 19133), 353-355,366f. 22 Vemant (1970) = (1972) u4-131. The parallel between the Oedipus story and scapegoat ritual had first been seen by J.E. Harrison, Epilegomenato the Study of GreekReligion (Cambridge 1921) xii. 23 See E. Neumann, DepchPsychologyand a New Ethic (London 1969).

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incest with the mother- acts which still have an intimate connection with power and kingship, as I mentioned at the beginning. No man can be a king unless a king has died. When Theseus, victorious against the Minotaur, returns to Athens, his father Aegeus throws himself into the sea. The Egyptian Pharaoh is Horns, son of Osiris who reigns in the Underworld, and he has the title Kamutef, 'bull of his mother'. 24 It is the very qualifications of Oedipus as Tyrannos that make up his unextinguishable pollutions. King and apµaK6c;appear as two sides of the same medal. "Through his wounds we are healed", says a famous text of the Bible which has often been brought into connection with the scapegoat pattern. 25 "Nobody is capable of bearing this evil except me"; these were the words of Oedipus. One might further ponder the special situation of tragedy in a city such as Athens at the time of Sophocles. Is it not a paradox, as democracy finally comes to prevail - quite a self-conscious and radical form of democracy - that tragedy, following the old mythical tradition, persistently makes kings the main characters on stage, kings who by title and costume recall the king of Persia, the paOLAE'l>c; tour court of the time? 26 Thus the king on stage is bound to be quite an ambivalent figure for the model citizen, embodying what no Athenian is allowed or should even want, the illicit wish-fulfillment of'tyranny•; 27 and he is relentlessly made to pay for it through all the outrageous crimes and sufferings that occur on stage. Should we say that tragedy itself is, in this sense, a form of 'scapegoating', getting rid of inappropriate emotions through tragic katharsis? I would like to leave this an open question. The scapegoat pattern apparently reveals essential aspects of drama, especially of this drama of Sophocles. Yet it is far from explaining the whole. It is rather the start of the play that is suggestive of the pattern. But such a pattern oughtto result in the expulsion or even the killing of the victim, along w_ithan experience

of'otherness' that constitutes the unanimous 'self' of the community; the poet, however, twists the perspective towards identification with Oedipus, as he has to twist the plot in the end in order to conform with a tradition that had Oedipus remaining at Thebes after the catastrophe. Thus the plague vanishes from view as the play evolves. In the end, the interrelation of polis and king has receded into the background, and there is no 'scapegoat' left to carry away the evil; there is just Oedipus himself, appalling and fascinating. The sc~oat pattern is an in"troductory device rather than a fundamental principle of this play in its entirety. If we follow the transformations towards catastrophe as they appear in this drama, we may be strangely reminded of a much more general pattern: of the phases of dying as described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. 28 She found first a stage of denial and isolation, then a stage of anger; there follows petty 'bargaining', then depression; finally, acceptance may be achieved. This is indeed a close description of the moves and reactions of Oedipus, caught between denial, wrath, depression, and some tiny hope - until his fully personal acceptance comes out in the end. Eugen Dont once also drew a comparison between the structure of Oedipus and the novel The Trial by Franz Kafka. 29 Both could be termed metaphors for the sudden, complete and relentless breakdown of a human being, a helpless victim to powers beyond his reach, or even termed descriptions of the hopeless human situation as such. But where the modern poet uses an anonymous and impenetrable bureaucracy, in Sophocles there are the gods. One god especially, Apollo, is continuously present in Sophocles' play, in his double function: he is the god of healing and purification, and he is the god of seers and oracles, especially of the shrine at Delphi. 30 The first verses of the play refer to Apollo's Pai an (5), and the first scene is concluded by the prayer of the priest that Apollo should come, as a saviour and reliever of illness (150).

24 Cf. B.H. Stricker, "Camephis", Med. Kon. Nederl.Akademie van Wetenschapen,Afd. Lctterkunde38,3 (1975). 25 Isaiah 53,5. 26 Cf. A. Alfoldi, "Gcwaltherrschcr und Thcaterkonig", in: Late Classicaland Medieval Studiesin HonorofA.M. Friend(Princeton 1955) 15-55. 27 For 'tyranny' as supreme wish-fulfillment see e.g. Eur. Phoen. 504-506, Plat. Gorg. 469c.

28 E. Kubler-Ross, OnDeathandDying(NewYork1969); she admits,however, that the sequence is not necessarily the same in every case, in QuestionsandAnswersonDeath and Dying (New York 1974) 25. 29 Dont (1979). 30 On the role of the oracles in Oedipus, sec Weil (1968), Dyson (1973), Kane (1975), and esp. Bushnell (1988), with reference to contemporary discussions and to the poetic symbolism of 'sign and voice'.

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And indeed Apollo does come: "This was Apollo, Apollo, oh friends", the blinded Oedipus exclaims. In between, however, as discussion turns on Delphi and the pronouncements made by the oracle, more and more doubts are raised about the allegedly divine knowledge of seers. It is especially Iokaste who denies the credibility of human 'seers', because she is sure she and her husband had thwarted the earlier Delphic prophecy about their baby (709). Later on, when the Corinthian messenger brings the news about the king's death, Oedipus is prone to triumph even more than Iokaste (946 ff., 964 ff.). And yet Iokaste had made an attempt to organize a procession of supplication to Apollo, feeling the threat that comes from the god- a procession that does not achieve its purpose: it is the god who decides how he is to be encountered. Before this scene there is a remarkable choral ode, 31 which forms in fact the centerpiece of the drama (863-910). It even seems to transcend the drama through general pronouncements - although there are schools of interpretation which would not allow one to think of such a possibility. The chorus professes piety and respect for laws "begotten in the aether of heaven .... A god in them is great, and he does not grow old". The chorus warns of hybn·s that 'breeds a tyrant' 32 but is bound to collapse in a sudden downfall. "For if doings such as these stand in honor, why should I dance?" (896). This question, n OEtµEx.opEuetv,comes at the end of a strophe, when dancing on stage must come to a stop. This means that at this moment, all of a sudden, the chorus breaks out of the world ofillusion and makes the audience reflect on the chorus dancing in the theatre, a chorus dancing in honor ofDionysus: 33 This would all be endangered if the honors of the gods were taken away. "No longer", the antistrophe begins, "no longer shall I go in veneration to the untouchable navel of the earth" - to 31 The ode has been much discussed; see, e.g. Gellie (1964), Kamerbeek (1966), Muller (1967), McDevitt (1968), Holscher (1975), Winnington-lngram (1980) 179-204, Burton (1980), Scodel (1982), Carey (1986). I take it-with Carey (1986) 179-that "the ode does not offer a detailed comment on the preceding scene"; it draws the outline of a more general and generally accepted background, 'the divine' -the question how Oedipus relates to it remains to be answered as the drama proceeds. 32'Y~ptu1:EUEt 1:upavvov. Against the conjecture u~ptv