‘Oedipus Rex’: The Tragedy of Knowledge

A review of ‘Oedipus Rex’, by Sophocles; 5th century BC.

I went with my brother the other day to the Royal Academy of Arts to see ‘Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael’. Frankly, it was a bit of a let-down, for reasons I have given elsewhere; but it did get me thinking about how it could be that three men, over three successive generations, in one city, over a 50-year period, could create paintings (to say nothing of their sculptures and architectural designs) that are arguably better than anyone had produced before or since. Is there anything to compare to this?

Well, yes, actually. There were Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. But there were also Aeschlyus, Sophocles and Euripides, three men who made theatre what is today. Aeschylus added the second actor, after the chorus, to the stage, creating the possibility of dialogue and relationship. Sophocles introduced the third, enabling the writing of knottier, more intricate plots and interactions without the chorus. Euripides pushed the boundaries of characterisation and emotion, depicting complex, overlapping roles within the three-actor constraints of the format.

We could argue (many have) that the high point of the period of the flourishing of Greek drama over which these men presided was the writing and staging of Oedipus Rex, praised by Aristotle in his Poetics as the ideal tragedy. For him, it typifies the rules of unity of action, catharsis, and tight plotting. It draws its power from the sense of inevitability it elicits in the audience, the way it characterises Fate.

The high point of the period of the flourishing of Greek drama over which these men presided was the writing and staging of Oedipus Rex.

We all know the story, more or less. The play opens at a time of crisis: a plague grips Thebes. The only way to end it is to find the killer of Laius, the former king. Oedipus, sure in his reason and authority, vows to find the culprit. Of course, he does not know or even suspect that the murderer is himself, nor that he has satisfied a prophecy cast long ago: that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Each step towards the truth is a step towards his ruin, and so the play hurtles toward its grim revelation. The moment the truth comes out: that Oedipus killed Laius, his father, and married Jocasta, his mother, Jocasta kills herself and Oedipus tears his eyes out with her brooch.

The characterisation of Oedipus is striking. He would have been recognised by audiences not as a mythical hero but contemporary. In fact he stands for the Athenian ideal. His traits reflect those lauded by Pericles in his Funeral Oration (and condemned by the Corinthians in their attack on Athenian power). ‘Athens will be the envy of the man who has a will to action,’ said Pericles; and Oedipus is nothing if not a man of action. He imposes himself on the world. He forces those who would rather not take part in his undoing—the seer Tiresius, Jocasta and the shepherd—to be complicit. Oedipus is brave, defiant, optimistic. He is so decisive that he anticipates advice. He sends for help from Delphi before he is told to; he summons Tiresius before it is suggested.

Thus Oedipus Rex warns fifth-century Athens, with its creative vigour and intellectual daring, against hubris. This was the time of the birth of the historical sense, and the sense that the past was worse and the future will be better. An early version of the myth of progress—the Enlightenment idea that things do not just change but improve—grew out of golden-age Athens. And yet the message of the play is that we can discover Fate but we cannot in any real sense defy it. This theme, the conflict between free will and determinism, has often been dismissed on the grounds that such questions were not raised till after Sophocles’ time. But — and this assumes that none of the philosophers whose work has been lost discussed it formally—the idea that we have not asked such questions for as long as we have been around seems unlikely. Indeed, one of the reasons why Oedipus Rex can hold its own in 2024 is because it deals with timeless questions, that is, questions that predated its writing and will always interest us.

An early version of the myth of progress — the Enlightenment idea that things do not just change but improve — grew out of golden-age Athens.

The basic problems we have is that, as Galen Strawson puts it in his essay, ‘The Impossibility of Ultimate Moral Responsibility’, is that nothing can be the cause of itself, yet for us to be morally responsible, we would have to be the cause of ourselves. Given that we are not the cause of ourselves, but born to parents, shaped by our environment and so on, we cannot be morally responsible. We cannot, in other words, be free. Such an idea outrages the Western spirit, as does its opposite: that we are absolutely free and there is no pattern or order to the universe. As Robert Fagles puts it, ‘we want to eat our cake and have it, too.’ There is a ‘compatibilist’ position that I will not go into here; but such paradoxes open the door to mystery and so to religion—and art. In Oedipus Rex, Oedipus is free and responsible for catastrophe, because he freely chooses to carry out those actions he was fated to. If he were not free, there would be no tension, and thus no story.

Both Oedipus and Athens, despite their thriving, are not all-powerful. The knowledge that Oedipus prizes so highly proves to be curse as well as blessing. Oedipus blinds himself to show, poetically, that sight and insight are not the same thing:

‘Apollo, friends, Apollo—

he ordained my agonist—these, my pains on pains!

But the hand that struck my eyes was mine,

mine alone—no one else—

I did it all myself!’

He, who was proud of his far-sightedness and taunted the blind Tiresius, sees that he was the one who was blind. That he does not kill himself suggests he was not culpable. His choice was between seeking the truth and not doing so, and in choosing the former he showed the bravery, wits and perseverance that raise him to the rank of hero. Fagles writes that, for Sophocles, the freedom to search for the truth about ourselves—to discover what and who we are—is ‘perhaps the only freedom’ that we have.