Classics and the Western Canon discussion

Next in the Theban trilogy (which it isn't exactly) is Oedipus at Colonus, which was written long after Oedipus the King and Antigone, when Sophocles was quite elderly (he lived to be about 90). The play was produced posthumously.

https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-sourc...

The Oedipus we meet in OC has been wandering in exile for many years, with his daughter Antigone as his guide. At the end of Oedipus the King he seems to be resigned to his fate, and he accepts responsibility for his actions in dramatic fashion by blinding himself and then asking Kreon to send him into exile. He has a different take on things after wandering homeless for years. He blames his sons in particular, to the point of disowning them, because they never called him back to Thebes when they had the power to do so. Is the Oedipus we meet in Oedipus at Colonus the same man as the one in Oedipus the King, or is the portrait Sophocles paints simply a different perspective?

Oedipus' death is a focal point in OC. He is evidently destined to become a cult hero with powers that are seen only after his death, so Kreon would like to bring him home to die near Thebes for the blessings or protection that he will bring after his death. But at the same time, Oedipus is certainly polluted. How does a man so thoroughly debased become a hero with divine powers? Does the way in which he dies reveal anything about who he was as a man?

When Polyneices receives the prophecy that he will fail in the attempt to take Thebes and be killed by his brother, he says, "The dark road is before me; I must take it,/Doomed by my father and his avenging Furies" (Fitzgerald trans.). Unlike Laius or Oedipus, when he receives a prophecy of doom he accepts it and does not try to avoid it. He'll end up just as doomed as the others, of course.

I've often wondered what Laius and Oedipus were supposed to do when they heard the dreadful prophecy. Just shrug and carry on like normal, figuring that their fate was unavoidable?

Oracles are notoriously vague, and they often predict the end without indicating how the end will be reached. When Oedipus hears that Polybus, whom Oedipus believes to be his father, has died, he thinks he is in the clear. He reasons that maybe he "perished out of longing for me" and that would fulfill the prophecy. This sounds like rationalization to me, but isn't this is a typcially human reaction?

Zeus and Apollo have understanding
and knowledge of mortal affairs;
among men, though there's no true way to judge
if a prophet's worth more than I am.
A man may outstrip cleverness
with cleverness of his own. (498, Blondell)

What is the alternative to denying the inevitable, if one is to go on?

Let me try to provide some historical context.

The only other mention I'm aware of regarding Oedipus' death is in Euripides' Phoenician Women, produced sometime around 410, in which Oedipus speaks of going to Colonus to die. Colonus was Sophocles' birthplace. The story of the secret grave and its power over the future is not known elsewhere and may be entirely Sophocles' invention, though there is some speculation, based on the Stranger's remark in Scene 1, that there might have been a local tradition regarding these things:

That is this country, stranger: honored less
In histories than in the hearts of the people.

Sophocles died sometime in the year 405 -- 6. OC was probably the last thing he wrote. 406 was the year of Athens' last victory in the Peloponnesian War at Arginousae. This was followed by the disastrous defeat at Aegospotami in 405 and the blockade of Athens led by the Spartan general Lysander which resulted in Athens' surrender in 404. At that time Sparta's allies Thebes and Corinth wanted to destroy Athens entirely, raze the city to the ground and enslave its citizens, but Sparta intervened and in the end the peace terms were less harsh: Athens' fortifications were destroyed and it was placed under the rule of the Thirty Tyrants. In 401 Sparta's powerful ally Cyrus, the emperor of Persia died and was followed by Artaxerxes II who was less friendly towards Sparta, and Sparta was drawn into a war with Persia which gave the Athenians an opportunity to overthrow the Thirty Tyrants and restore their democracy. The production of plays during the festival of Dionysus was resumed and OC was finally produced in 401. In the interest of economising on space I've somewhat over-simplified, but that was the main crux of events.

When Sophocles wrote the play, he must have feared the end he could see coming, and I think the play was an attempt to inspire Athens by forecasting a victory over Thebes when they attacked. The idea of an ancestral figure being buried on one's soil granting victory in battle is one that must seem strange to moderns, but was a well-established tradition at the time. I could cite many examples.

I think Sophocles must have had the idea of some play such as this in mind, ever since writing Oedpus the King twenty-three years earlier. In the Exodos of that play, Oedipus says:

And yet I know
Death will not ever come to me through sickness
Or in any natural way: I have been preserved
For some unthinkable fate.

Perhaps it is only me, but this play looks much more straightforward than Oedipus the King: the bad guy (Kreon), the good guy (Theseus). And in this play, Oedipus does not look as the real tragic hero—his children play this role.

In Oedipus the King, Oedipus falls from king to tragic exile, and in Colonus he rises from exile to demi-god. A totally different trajectory, and not nearly as satisfying dramatically, but it does complete the cycle of his mortal life.

The last lines of OK are

"Therefore one should never say a moral man
is prosperous while he still waits to look upon his final day,
until he passes life's last limit having suffered no distress"

...which sounds an awful lot like Solon in Herodotus' Histories; "Count no man happy until he is dead." There is an element of time and aging at play here. Maybe it's just a formal thing, but I keep thinking that the riddle of the Sphinx is on the same theme -- aging and the course of human life.

The first word of OK is "O tekna" -- "Oh Children," and the first word of OC is "teknon". And of course both plays end with thoughts on death and the end. There is a holistic aspect to this that I find very satisfying.

Thomas wrote: "How does a man so thoroughly debased become a hero with divine powers? Does the way in which he dies reveal anything about who he was as a man? ."

I did wonder about this, and look forward to starting this one soon – hopefully it will have an answer.

But it's an interesting question, every time Heracles kills someone, accidentally or in rage, he removes himself and goes on a kind of pilgrimage to get cleansed.

Or the hounding of Orestes by the furies.

So, yeah, just on the story and without reading the play this doesn’t make sense to me.

Donnally wrote: "LWhen Sophocles wrote the play, he must have feared the end he could see coming, and I think the play was an attempt to inspire Athens by forecasting a victory over Thebes when they attacked. The idea of an ancestral figure being buried on one's soil granting victory in battle is one that must seem strange to moderns, but was a well-established tradition at the time. I could cite many examples.."

I'm reading Fagles translation, in the intro essay for this play it mentions Oedipus's grave and how it will protect the city it's burried in.

The intro essay also says the play mentions a place that the Athenian audiences would have been familiar with.

I was left with the impression that maybe they were watching this play as if Oedipus's spirit / energy would protect them.

As I reread OC this time around, a new thought occurs to me. Admittedly, I don't have much to support this idea, but compared to Sophocles' other plays, this one seems unusually lax, static and full of philosophical discussion. Also, the valedictory tone seems a liitle out of place in his overall oeuvre. Of course, given the fact that only a very few of his plays have survived, there is really no evidence to support that. But I wonder if Sophocles himself ever put the finishing touches on this play. It has the feel of being a collection of fragmentary scenes that haven't quite coalesced.

We know the play was produced five years after his death by his grandson. Perhaps this was his grandson's effort to give his fellow Athenians something to rally around as they fought their way back from subjection to Sparta.

OC seems to me primarily a religious drama. It isn't a tragedy exactly, and it certainly doesn't have the dramatic impetus and power of Oedipus the King. It takes place in a grove sacred to the Eumenides, with an altar of Poseidon, and where Dionysus is said to visit, and it climaxes with Oedipus undergoing purification and divine transformation. He is "saved" as a suppliant and then becomes a savior himself to the Athenians. The mysterious way in which he dies caps it all off -- it very anachronistically makes me think of the ascension of Jesus, though what happens to Oedipus is even more mysterious than what the Gospel writers tells us about Jesus.

Athenian plays were performed during a festival in honor of Dionysus, so a highly religious play might make some sense. And maybe it makes sense that Sophocles would be thinking along these lines at the end of his life.

Here is an interesting tidbit concerning OC from Cicero's De Senectute chapter 7:

"Sophocles composed tragedies to extreme old age; and being believed to neglect the care of his property owing to his devotion to his art, his sons brought him into court to get a judicial decision depriving him of the management of his property on the ground of weak intellect -- just as in our law it is customary to deprive a paterfamilias of the management of his property if he is squandering it. Thereupon the old poet is said to have read to the judges the play he had on hand and had just composed -- the Oedipus Coloneus -- and to have asked them whether they thought that the work of a man of weak intellect. After the reading he was acquitted by the jury."

Perhaps this explains why OC was produced by his grandson, rather than his son. (His son Iophon was also a playwright. None of his plays have survived.)

Seneca also wrote an Oedipus Rex -- it sounds largely the same, with some minor variations (Laius' ghost, for example.) I haven't read it myself, just the synopsis. Has anyone read it? Donnally? Any thoughts?

I might have read it. Many years ago I read a book of Seneca's plays. They've left no impression on me.

Another literary curiosity is Oedipus Tyrannus, or Swellfoot the Tyrant by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which I found and read in preparation for this read: https://allpoetry.com/Oedipus-Tyrannu...
However, it cast no light on the Oedipus legend. It is primarily a satire of contemporary English politics.

I hadn’t reread Oedipus at Colonus in many years and was surprised by how moving and beautiful I found the play and the language. The play opens with Oedipus’ arrival after years of wandering in poverty and social anathema to this beautiful and holy place, and for the rest of the play, the question that is constantly raised is will he get to stay (and die) there?

I found it fascinating that the “Kindly Ones” aka the Furies were among the many deities that were represented in this final sanctuary. Of all the gods who would object to the presence of a man who killed his father and slept with his mother, I would have put them at the top of the list, and yet, they seem appeased by the simple rites prescribed by the chorus early in the play. Oedipus seems more harassed by men than gods in this play.

Thomas asked if there is a continuity to Oedipus’ character between Oedipus Rex and Oedipus in Colonus. Given that Oedipus has suffered years of poverty and blindness, I accepted him as the same older and maybe wiser Oedipus, especially given the familiar flashes of anger in his dealings with Creon and his son.