Sophocles: ‘Oedipus the King’

 Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, observes that the Oedipus legend is a common type of story in Greek literature. Someone makes an unpleasant prediction. People try to avoid it. But in some naturalbut surprising way, the prediction is fulfilled.

‘Oedipus the King’ is “vividly naturalistic,” Kitto says.

Sophocles and the other ancient playwrights held that the universe is rational. It operates under physical and mathematical laws. It also has moral laws, which are just as certain, just as effective.

We can complain that the universe is cruel but not that it’s chaotic.

It’s why the gods, who know the laws, can predict what will happen.

Oedipus, who is insolent and impetuous and prone to wrath, suffers what the universe has in store for people with certain kinds of character flaws who insert themselves into explosive situations.

As Kitto puts it, “Oedipus … is blasted as a man may be who inadvertently interferes with electricity.”

These lines, sung by the chorus, catch the theme:

 

Insolence breeds the tyrant, insolence

if it is glutted with a surfeit, unseasonable, unprofitable,

climbs to the roof-top and plunges

sheer down to the ruin that must be … 

 

This is the play we know from college, and different lines strike different people in different ways. I have the vaguest boyhood memory that says my father, who taught the play when he was young, quoted these lines:

 

Soon you will see a sight to waken pity

even in the horror of it.

 

In my mind, he took the lines as a maxim, a law of nature. If you bring the best of yourself to a bad situation, you will feel pity for others when you are tempted to simply look away in horror. If you bring your lesser self to that same situation, you’ll just look the other way.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Oedipus Tyrannus is on pp. 142-49. The quotation is on p. 148.

Oedipus the King, translated by David Grene, is in Sophocles I in The Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore; Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 9-76. The quotations are on pp. 48 and 67.