from others, messengers. Here I am myself –
you all know me, the world knows my fame:
I am Oedipus.
Helping a Priest to his feet.
Speak up, old man. Your years,
your dignity – you should speak for the others.(6-10)
Chorus:
Now we pray to you. You cannot equal the gods,
your children know that, bending at your altar.
But we do rate you first of men,
both in the common cries of our lives
and face-to-face encounters with the gods.
…We taught you nothing,
no skill, no extra knowledge, still you triumphed.
(39-43 & 46-7)
Chorus: …Perhaps you’ve heard
the voice of a god or something from other men,
Oedipus . . . what do you know? [Oistha pou]
man of experience - (52-5)
Oedipus: …I sent Creon,
my wife’s own brother, to Delphi –
Apollo the Prophet’s oracle – to learn
what I might do or say to save our city. (81-4)
Creon: Our leader,
My lord, was once a man named Laius,
Before you came and put us straight on course.
Oedipus: I know –
Or so I’ve heard. I never saw the man myself…
…where did Lauis meet his bloody death?
Creon: He went to visit the oracle,…
(116-9 & 129-30)
Chorus: O golden daughter of god, send rescue
radiant as the kindness in your eyes! (216-7)
Oedipus:
You pray to the gods? Let me grant your prayers.
Come, listen to me – do what the plague demands:
I’ll find relief and lift your head from the depths.
I will speak out now as a stranger to the story,
a stranger to the crime. If I’d been present then,
there would have been no mystery… (245-250)
Oedipus: …banish this man –
whoever he may be – never shelter him, never
speak a word to him, never make him partner
to your prayers,… (271-3)
Oedipus:
Now my curse on the murderer. Whoever he is,
a lone man unknown in his crime
or one among many, let that man drag out
his life in agony, step by painful step –
I curse myself as well…if by any chance
he proves to be an intimate of our house,
here at my hearth, with my full knowledge,
may the curse I just called down on him strike!
(280-7)
Oedipus:
I hold the throne that he held then, possess his bed
and a wife who shares our seed…why, our seed
might be the same, children born of the same mother
might have created blood bonds between us…
…So I will fight for him as if he were my father,
stop at nothing, search the world
to lay my hands on the man who shed his blood,
the son of Labdacus descended of Polydorus,…
(295-8 & 301-3)
Oedipus:
Let no crops grow out of the earth for them –
shrivel their women, kill their sons,
burn them to nothing in this plague
that hits us now, or something even worse. (307-10)
Tiresias: …I tell you,
you and your loved ones live together in infamy,
you cannot see how far you’ve gone in guilt. (417-9)
Oedipus: …old man. You’ve lost your power,
stone-blind, stone-deaf – senses, eyes blind as stone!…
…Blind,
lost in the night, endless night that nursed you!
You can’t hurt me or anyone else who sees the light
(422-3 & 425-7)
Tiresias:
You with your precious eyes,
you’re blind to the corruption of your life,
to the house you live in, those you live with –
who are your parents? Do you know? All unknowing
you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood,
the dead below the earth and the living here above,
and the double lash of your mother and your father’s curse
will whip you from this land one day, their footfall
treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding
your eyes that now can see the light! (470-9)
the words of the Oracle at Delphi:
You are fated to couple with your mother, you will bring
a breed of children into the light no man can bear to see –
you will kill your father, the one who gave you life!
(873-5)
Chorus:
But if any man comes striding, high and mighty
in all he says and does,
no fear of justice, no reverence
for the temples of the gods –
let a rough doom tear him down,
repay his pride, breakneck, ruinous pride!
…Nowhere Apollo’s golden glory now –
the gods, the gods go down. (972-7 & 996-7)
Jocasta:
You prophecies of the gods, where are you now?
This is the man that Oedipus feared for years,
he fled him, not to kill him – and now he’s dead,
quite by chance, a normal, natural death,
not murdered by his son….
…now all those prophecies I feared – Polybus
packs them off to sleep with him in hell!
They’re nothing, worthless. (1036-40 & 1062-4)
Oedipus:
What – give up now, with a clue like this?
Fail to solve the mystery of my birth?
Not for all the world!…
…I must know it all,
must see the truth at last. (1160-2 & 1169-70)
Oedipus: O god –
all come true, all burst to light!
O light – now let me look my last on you!
I stand revealed at last –
cursed in my birth, cursed in marriage,
cursed in the lives I cut down with these hands!
(1305-10)
Messenger:
Such things [this palace] hides, it soon will bring to light –
terrible things, and none done blindly now,
all done with a will…
…But you are spared the worst,
you never had to watch…I saw it all,
and with all the memory that’s in me
you will learn what that poor woman suffered.
(1358-60 & 1366-8)
Oedipus’ words, quoted by the Messenger:
…‘You,
you’ll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused!
Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen,
blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind
from this hour on! Blind in the darkness – blind!’
(1405-9)
Messenger: [as Oedipus is exposed] Look,
he’ll show you himself. The great doors are opening–
you are about to see a sight, a horror
even his mortal enemy would pity. (1429-32)
Select Bibliography:
Ahl, Frederick. Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction. (Ithaca, NY & London: Cornell UP, 1991).
Cameron, Alister. The Identity of Oedipus the King: Five Essays on the Oedipus Tyrannus. (NY: New York UP, 1968).
Dodds, E.R. 'On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex.' Greece & Rome 2nd Ser. 13:1 (1966) 37-49.
Edmunds, Lowell. Oedipus: The Ancient Legend and its Later Analogues (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins, 1985).
Edmunds, Lowell. 'The Cults and the Legend of Oedipus.' Harvard Studies in Classical Philology85 (1981) 221-238.
Goldhill, Simon. Reading Greek Tragedy. (Cambridge: CUP 1986, 1988).
Gould, Thomas. 'The Innocence of Oedipus: The Philosophers on Oedipus the King.' Part I:Arion4:3 (1965) 363-386. Part II: Arion 4:4 (1965) 582-611. Part III: Arion 5:1 (1966) 478-525.
Green, Andre. The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy. trans. Alan Sheridan
(Cambridge: CUP, 1979).
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Jones, Ernest. Hamlet and Oedipus. (London: Gollancz, 1949).
Kallich, Martin, Andrew MacLeish, and Gertrude Schoenbohm eds. Oedipus: Myth and Drama. (NY: Odyssey, 1968).
Knox, Bernard M.W. Oedipus at Thebes. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1957, 1966).
Knox, Bernard M.W. Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979).
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Mullahy, Patrick. Oedipus, Myth and Complex (London: Allen & Unwin, 1950).
Pucci, Pietro. Oedipus and the Fabrication of the Father: Oedipus Tyrannus in Modern Criticism and Philosophy. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992).
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Segal, Charles, Oedipus Tyrranus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge (New York: Twayne, 1993).
Vernant, Jean-Pierre. 'Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex.' trans. Page duBois. New Literary History 9:3 (1978) 475-501.
