Sophocles: 'Oedipus at Colonus'

 Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the Greek tragedies, says that Oedipus at Colonus is the end of Greek tragedy. In his mind, the play is unsurpassed.

The drama is about change in one person. As the play begins, Oedipus, led by his daughter Antigone, wanders into the sacred grove of the Eumenides in Colonus, just north of Athens. He arrives old, blind and helpless.

But slowly he gets stronger. Halfway into the play, he is powerful, speaking with authority, certain that his vision of the world is how things are and must be. In the end, we see him hopping from rock to rock, as if led by some god or spirit to the place where he will be buried.

Oedipus, in his wanderings, found that he’d been too harsh in his judgment of himself. He had not wished to sin, to defy the norms of human behavior. As a young man, he’d defended himself against an armed assailant. He did not know that his attacker was his father. He did not know the queen he would claim for his public service was his mother.

Kitto says that as Oedipus’s personality emerges in the play, we see the playwright’s philosophy embodied. Goodness in a person doesn’t guarantee happiness. Disaster isn’t reserved for people who are bad. Some things happen to human beings just because they are human, rather than gods. The test of a person’s humanity is how he or she endures calamity.

Oedipus didn’t crumble.

He defied his enemies and was determined to help his friends. He was that way on his last day.

On that day, Oedipus was taking stock in himself, and others were re-evaluating him. Family members visited him, driven by new oracles that said the victor in the dispute over the throne of Thebes would be the one blessed by Oedipus. The old king’s curse would mean certain doom. Kinsmen who had betrayed him came to ask for favor.

The omens changed the Thebans’ perception of Oedipus. But the perception of the Athenians also changed. They had no stake in the Theban quarrel but had heard of the famous man and his tragedy. They had imagined Oedipus to be cursed by the gods. Instead, they learn to see that a person can be unhappy in fortune but noble in spirit.

The play includes some famous passages. One is a description of the sacred grove, a rare nature ode in Greek tragedy. The ode to Time begins with these lines, spoken to Theseus, king of Athens:  

 

Most gentle son of Aegeus! The immortal

Gods alone have neither age nor death!

All other things almighty Time disquiets.

Earth wastes away; the body wastes away;

Faith dies; distrust is born.

And imperceptibly the spirit changes

Between a man and his friend, or between two cities.

 

But I like the lines that Oedipus speaks when he first meets Theseus:

 

I come to give you something, and the gift

Is my own beaten self: no feast for the eyes;

Yet in me is more lasting grace than beauty.

 

Professor Kitto says this play is the best. I must reserve judgment. I started the year with Aeschylus and I’m just finishing with Sophocles. All of Euripides lies ahead. But Oedipus at Colonus is an astonishing play.

• Sources: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The section on Oedipus at Colonus is on pp. 405-23. 

Oedipus at Colonus, translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 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. 77-155. The quotations are on pp. 107 and 105.