Sophocles' On Oedipus Tyrannos
Lecture Notes
On Oedipus Tyrannos
Paul Cantor · University of Virginia
Two Recreations of the Heroic Ideal
These plays are commonly called "the Theban plays," but they don't form a real trilogy the way the Oresteia does — Antigone was actually written earlier (see Bernard Knox's essay "Greece and the Theatre" in the Fagles edition). We'll follow the order of the underlying story rather than the order of composition.
This week is devoted to the tyrant; next week, to the philosopher. These are two separate recreations of the Greek heroic ideal after the emergence of the polis, each defined by its own peculiar relationship to the city. They represent two different responses to the hero being brought within the orbit of the city, two different attempts to triumph over it: the tyrant conquers the city and makes it his own private possession; the philosopher goes beyond the city in thought, sees past its limits altogether.
Two Theories of Tragedy
We can approach Oedipus first through Aristotle's lens, treating Oedipus as the tragic hero, and then through Hegel's lens, treating the play instead as a tragic situation — a conflict between two genuine goods (Hegel himself actually preferred Antigone for this purpose). These are, in effect, the two prototypical tragedies behind the two great theories of tragedy: Oedipus is Aristotle's model, Antigone is Hegel's model. But both theories can actually explain both plays, and I'll try to synthesize the two — something like a unified field theory of tragedy.
From Aeschylus to Sophocles: The Polis Becomes the Problem
In Aeschylus, the polis emerges as the solution to the underlying tragic conflict — it resolves the problem of particular, competing wills. In Sophocles, the polis itself becomes part of the problem. For Aeschylus, the polis represents something genuinely universal, capable of resolving conflicts between merely particular wills. For Sophocles, the polis turns out to be itself merely particular rather than truly universal — a false universal, one that becomes identified with one particular will in the end: the tyrant's own.
In Aeschylus, the polis is presented as genuinely all-embracing, a comprehensive human community — in the Oresteia you can feel a real initial enthusiasm for the city as an institution, one that even seems capable of incorporating the gods themselves, a fantastic claim: the gods brought directly within the city limits. This isn't what we're used to with transpolitical religions — you can't drag Jehovah into court and sue him. Here, the gods become identified with one particular city instead. The family, in Aeschylus, is the actual source of conflict, incapable of creating harmony on its own ("come into my house, and I'll kill you" is the family's real motto). In Aeschylus, the family creates all the problems; the city is what can solve them. Contrast the way Agamemnon is welcomed home in Argos with the way the Furies are welcomed in Athens — Argos is a Mycenaean kingdom straight out of the heroic age, while Athens is a "modern" polis, complete with modern institutions like a court of law. The institutions of the city are designed to mediate and moderate — even the conflicts among the gods themselves. This institutional resolution is underscored by the tie vote at the very end of the trilogy: the outcome could genuinely have gone either way, and there's a real sense of arbitrariness to it, but the important thing is that everyone agrees to abide by the verdict regardless. No one is completely satisfied, but everyone gets something — even the Furies don't get to tear Orestes apart, but they do get to be honored in Athens instead. The city, in this sense, simply means compromise. There's a great hope invested in the city here: it forms the comprehensive human horizon, with politics and religion thoroughly bound up together — a genuinely political religion (we're much more used to transpolitical religions ourselves). The city itself becomes the hero. The Homeric hero claims to be self-sufficient, godlike — already a problematic claim for any single human being to make. But what about an entire city? Can a city itself be heroic? Can it be self-sufficient? Athens certainly seemed heroic in standing up to, and defeating, the Persian Empire.
Aristotle on the Polis
I've been drawing throughout on Aristotle's own understanding of the polis. We can't see a real, living polis today, but Aristotle actually observed one directly — he lived inside one, and he was an extremely intelligent observer, which makes him a genuinely useful guide for us now. He wrote an entire book about it, called the Politics — ta politika, "the political things," the things having to do with the polis, which is exactly where our word "politics" comes from. Think about it this way: imagine trying to study athletics without ever having actually seen an athlete. That's essentially our situation today, studying politics without ever having seen a real polis — which is exactly why Aristotle remains so useful to us.
In Book I of the Politics, the polis is described as the basic unit of genuine self-sufficiency. The family cannot resolve its own conflicts on its own, cannot provide for all its own needs — the family represents only a primitive stage of human organization, just as it does in Aeschylus (Aristotle actually cites Homer's account of the Cyclopes here as a hint at exactly why the family can't stand entirely on its own — the specter of cannibalism looms). People come together first in villages, and then finally in a city, following the classically Greek understanding of the division of labor (developed first in Plato's Republic): some people raise food, some build houses, some make clothing, some make furniture. This is simply more efficient than each individual family trying to take care of all its own needs at once; a community can produce far more through this kind of division of labor. The city can finally provide for all its own needs, including its own defense. As Carnes Lord puts it in his edition of the Politics, the city comes into existence for the sake of mere life, but exists for the sake of the good life — the city is what allows for the fulfillment of real human potential, allows human beings to develop to their fullest. In effect, the city provides a critical mass of human beings, without becoming too massive in the process — it remains the largest community in which people can still all know each other more or less directly, with only one real degree of separation (if you don't personally know someone, you know someone who does). Athens itself wasn't an enormous community by modern standards — perhaps 300,000 people in total.
The city solves the basic problem of economic necessity, providing the essentials of life, and this in turn allows for genuine luxuries, like the theater. This is a good example of the underlying principle: you don't form a city in order to have a theater — there are far more pressing needs involved at first. But once you actually have a functioning city, you can start thinking about supporting actors and playwrights. People don't say, "We don't have enough to eat, we don't have houses to live in, we're constantly killing each other — what we really need is a theater." But once people start to feel safe and comfortable, they can direct some of the surplus generated by the division of labor toward supporting theater people, who don't themselves produce anything to eat or wear — "mere entertainment," in a sense. That's exactly what it means to say the city comes into existence for the sake of mere life but exists for the sake of the good life. In our own terms, the city is what allows "culture" to develop at all, allows for the luxury of culture. We can simply accomplish more together, in cities, than we ever could in isolated families or tribes.
Man Is a Political Animal
Human beings can only develop their own distinctively human potential by living in a city — this is what Aristotle really means by his famous claim that "man is a political animal." He isn't saying we're all secretly a bunch of politicians; he's saying that man is that distinctive kind of being whose special nature it is to live specifically in a polis. No other animal lives in quite this kind of community (not ants, not bees), and the gods don't either — they remain far more free-ranging. The city is a genuinely distinct kind of community, with a particular natural size — not too small, and not too big either (not an obvious claim to us today, which suggests we ourselves may be living rather artificially, inside artificially blown-up and overextended nation-states, living in unnaturally large communities by this older standard. Cities, in fact, remain meaningful units of human organization even now — we still feel genuinely attached to our own cities, particularly as cultural units; different American cities really do have different cultures, and we still tend to have municipal theaters rather than one single national theater — our closest thing to a "national" theater is really just the municipal theater of Washington, D.C. People still identify strongly with their cities, saying things like "I'm a New Yorker" — though these aren't quite cities in the full sense of the ancient polis, since they're not truly independent; even New York doesn't conduct its own foreign policy, not even under Giuliani. Compare, too, how fiercely cities attach themselves to their sports teams — the Yankees against the Red Sox is not unlike the ancient polis and its patron gods.)
Aristotle's basic point is that you simply cannot develop your full human potential unless you live together with other human beings — as he puts it, "man without a city is either a beast or a god," lacking either the potential to be fully human or else standing entirely above ordinary human limitations. This could almost serve as an epigraph for Oedipus, and arguably for Greek tragedy generally. It grows directly out of a real sense of the problematic self-sufficiency of human beings: as human beings, we are, in one sense, genuine wholes in ourselves, and yet we still need the polis in order to complete ourselves — we are wholes in one sense, but parts in another, wholes that belong to a still larger whole, the polis itself. This produces a real, peculiar tension between the polis and the individual: we cannot be complete without the polis, and yet we must surrender some portion of our own freedom in order to become part of it. The polis allows human beings to develop, while simultaneously setting real limits on that development, and actively trying to shape it in the process — theater, for instance, only comes into being within the city, and yet the city immediately wants to regulate it. Think of Shakespeare, who clearly had the potential to become the greatest playwright who ever lived — but if he had simply stayed in the village of Stratford, he never could have realized that potential; Stratford was much too small a community to support a theater at all. He had to go off to London, to the big city, in order to realize his potential — but there, the theater was heavily regulated, subject to all sorts of censorship, and Shakespeare's own company was at one point called before the court. You can't have a theater at all without the city, but you also can't necessarily have exactly the kind of theater you'd want, once the city gets involved. This is a real, genuine source of tragedy: the underlying tension between the interest of the individual and the interest of the city. There's an old Greek formula lurking behind all of this: the polis — can't live with it, can't live without it. Much like the hero himself: can't live with him, can't live without him.
The Play's Title: Tyrannos
Oedipus Tyrannos was not the play's original title, which was likely added later, sometime after Aristotle (who simply calls it "the Oedipus"). It's certainly not "Oedipus Rex" — a good example of how the transmission of Greek terms through Latin can create real confusion. The play should really be called "Oedipus the Tyrant" rather than "Oedipus the King," as our own translation has it — though, as we'll see, he actually turns out to be both.
Tyrannos is the source of our own word "tyrant," and it's worth going back to the original Greek here, since the meaning has genuinely shifted over time. The word originally carried a much more neutral meaning: a man not born to rule, but who wins that position through his own talents — a self-made man, in contrast to a basileus, a legitimate, hereditary king. In earlier Greek usage, you could say, quite comfortably, "I'm a tyrant, and I'm proud of it — I'm a genuinely good tyrant, in fact the best damn tyrant among all the Greeks — I won this position entirely through my own merit." Tyrants first came onto the scene in the sixth century BC; the word tyrannos doesn't appear anywhere in Homeric Greek. At the time, it genuinely seemed like a good idea — a new solution to a real political problem, essentially a merit system. You're no longer stuck with whatever son your king happens to have, who might turn out to be a fool; instead, you get the kind of ruler who has made his own way in the world. Athens itself was ruled by tyrants throughout the sixth century, and they were, in fact, quite impressive — they did real, great things for the city. Pisistratus, for instance, reportedly had Homer's poems written down and helped found Athenian theater, all part of a larger effort to make Athens the greatest of all the Greek cities. The glory of Athens, in this sense, becomes the glory of the tyrant himself. The tyrant identifies the good of the city directly with his own personal good — the city has, in effect, become his private possession, and he does things to improve it accordingly.
The Rise and Fall of the Word "Tyrant"
All of this reflects the older Greek heroic ideal: the tyrant recaptures something like the self-sufficiency of the Homeric hero, except now the city itself becomes the relevant unit of self-sufficiency — the tyrannos effectively takes over the entire city, becoming something like a god in the process. There is, undeniably, something admirable about the tyrant, something genuinely enviable — he seems, in a real sense, to embody a dream of complete human fulfillment; the tyrannos can have essentially anything he desires, especially where sex is concerned, of every kind. There was a real, ongoing debate among the ancient Greeks: is the tyrant actually the happiest of men? The common-sense view was yes — he gets to fulfill every one of his desires, rather like a modern movie star; the Greeks were quite open about matters like this. But there was also a real critique of tyranny developing alongside this (see Plato's Republic especially) — a genuinely Greek insight that the tyrannos inevitably becomes tyrannical: if you come to power this particular way, you simply won't end up ruling well. This is how the word gradually took on its familiar negative connotations, centered on the underlying opposition between law and will. The willfulness of the tyrannos means he rules arbitrarily. The tyrannos has to violate the basic principle of lawfulness in order to seize power in the first place, which gives his rule a peculiar, built-in insecurity — he typically comes to the throne through usurpation, by killing his predecessor, the lawful king (compare Aegisthus in the Oresteia). This is exactly why people remain suspicious of him. And it is precisely what Oedipus himself has done — parricide is, in this sense, the quintessentially tyrannical act. Having usurped power this way, the tyrant then has to live in constant fear of some future usurper of his own, ruling tyrannically as a result, surrounded by bodyguards, endlessly suspicious of everyone around him (compare Shakespeare's own portrait of the type in Macbeth). The tyrant must always jealously guard everything he's won — he appears, at first glance, to be the most powerful of men, but turns out, on closer inspection, to be the most insecure man alive, and in the end the unhappiest (this is essentially Plato's own verdict). By the fifth century, "tyrant" had already become a genuinely negative term. And yet there were still plenty of young men running around Athens saying, in effect, "Mom and Dad, when I grow up, I want to be a tyrant" — with proud parents doing exactly the right thing for their ambitious son and sending him off to law school. (This is precisely the problem Socrates has to deal with throughout many of Plato's dialogues — ambitious young men showing up wanting to learn how to rule specifically in order to become tyrants; we'll see this dynamic clearly with Alcibiades, and Plato himself may well have been one of these young men once, which helps explain the persistent critique of tyranny running throughout his dialogues.) "Tyrant" clearly remained an attractive ideal in practice, even as it acquired its negative reputation in theory. Tyrannos originally designated only how you came to the throne — through your own efforts — and only gradually came to indicate how you actually ruled once you got there: arbitrarily, without regard for law, cruelly.
Oedipus, at first, seems to be a tyrannos only in the earlier, neutral sense. We come to realize, over the course of the play, that he is a tyrannos in the full, later sense as well. Here lies the play's central irony: Oedipus is, technically, actually the legitimate basileus of Thebes — the rightful ruler. And yet he turns out to have the nature of a tyrant regardless — which is exactly what Sophocles is exploring throughout the play. The play amounts to a full study of the tyrannical nature itself — the tragedy of the tyrant, whatever his technical claim to the throne.
Oedipus as the New Heroic Ideal
Oedipus represents a genuinely new embodiment of the Greek heroic ideal, closely resembling Odysseus. He shares Odysseus's cleverness; like Odysseus, Oedipus is a traveler, someone whose mind has been liberated by travel, not bound by the customs of any single land. He's gotten to where he is entirely through his own wits — he simply walks into town and becomes ruler. He's not a local boy, doesn't win office through some hometown vote, which underscores his real universality — he's not tied down to any one particular city, standing, in a sense, above the city altogether. Later in the play, Corinth wants him back too; like Achilles, everyone wants Oedipus on their own side. This is what happens once you've genuinely got brains — he solves the Sphinx's riddle. There's essentially no reliance on the gods here — a real hint of impiety, much like Odysseus, human self-reliance quietly making up for the gods' own lack of providence.
As a direct result of his own brilliance, Oedipus becomes something like a god within his own city. He's very much a take-charge kind of guy, always one step ahead, already having thought of whatever needs thinking of; he identifies completely with his city, ruling as a genuinely benevolent despot — the tyrant, after all, really can do great things for his city. He's a thoroughly public man, with nothing whatsoever to hide from the city — everything must be done right out in the open, which turns out to be the actual source of most of his problems: he gets angry in public, treats every disagreement as a competition, and his thumos gets aroused as a result (he would genuinely have been better off simply speaking to Creon in private). Oedipus is, by any reasonable measure, a good tyrant — he lacks the usual telltale signs of a bad one: no bodyguard, no one executed on the spot. Everything that's genuinely best in the Greeks converges in Oedipus — noble, self-reliant, clever, resourceful, enterprising, public-spirited, deeply concerned with his people's welfare (Knox argues, in fact, that this represents everything best specifically in the Athenians, since Athens itself was increasingly being called the "tyrant" among the Greek cities). But there's a negative side too — arrogance, rashness, impiety, much as with Odysseus: self-reliance necessarily means not relying on the gods, and Oedipus's impiety runs deep, reflecting a real Greek strain of skepticism, real scorn for oracles. This is the classic Aristotelian tragic hero: his very best qualities are inseparably bound up with his very worst — exactly what makes him great is exactly what leads him to disaster. Being raised above ordinary people allows him to do great things for his city, but it also makes him genuinely dangerous, both to the city and to himself.
Not a Tragedy of Fate
The whole story arises out of Oedipus's own attempt to avoid the fate the gods had ordained for him. The traditional reading treats this as a tragedy of fate — you simply cannot escape your own destiny. This reading seems true enough if you look only at the bare facts of the plot. But it's not actually where Sophocles places his emphasis. Freud offers a more generalized reading of the underlying myth: the story is compelling, on his account, because we all secretly share Oedipus's own desires — to kill the father, to marry the mother, the famous Oedipus complex. But this doesn't really explain why women respond powerfully to the play too; for Freud, "we" quietly means "we men." More importantly, it doesn't explain why Sophocles's particular version of the story alone continues to fascinate us — on Freud's own account, any version of the underlying story ought to have exactly the same psychological impact. But there are plenty of other versions of the story, both ancient and modern, and only Sophocles's version really holds our sustained interest. Aeschylus wrote his own trilogy on the subject, of which only Seven Against Thebes survives, and he emphasized instead the family curse — the curse on the House of Labdacus, much like the curse on the House of Atreus (Aeschylus liked showing us cursed families of exactly this kind, which is part of why the city becomes necessary in his work). In Aeschylus, the relevant facts about Oedipus are simply revealed to us directly. Compare the mythographer Apollodorus's own bare summary: "Afterwards, when what was unknown was revealed, Jocasta hanged herself in a noose, and Oedipus put out his eyes and was driven from Thebes." We tend to assume there was one single, definitive Oedipus myth that Sophocles simply dramatized as given — but this isn't really true; he actually invented a great many of the details himself. There are real variants of the story elsewhere: the Iliad implies, in passing, that Oedipus actually died in battle. The Odyssey names his mother Epicaste rather than Jocasta, and has the gods simply reveal the whole truth directly to all humanity at once, after which Oedipus simply goes on ruling regardless. Many different versions of this story were circulating in antiquity, with no single definitive version among them — Sophocles shapes his own version out of this material.
The Dramatic Action: Discovery, Not the Crime Itself
Sophocles builds his entire drama around the discovery of these facts, with Oedipus himself as the one doing the discovering. So what is the actual action of the play? It isn't killing his father and marrying his mother — that already happened, long before the play even begins. What is this play actually about? It's about the discovery of facts from the past. People commonly mistake the play's dramatic premise for its actual dramatic action. This is not a drama about a man who kills his father and marries his mother; Oedipus never once wonders, within the play, "Should I kill my father and marry my mother?" It is instead a drama about a man who discovers that he has already killed his father and married his mother — that's the question he genuinely does deliberate over: "Should I keep pursuing the truth about who murdered Laius?" That's the real decision actually confronting him over the course of the play.
This is a genuinely brilliant piece of dramatic construction: at the play's opening, everything relevant has already happened, and yet nothing is actually known yet — real suspense becomes possible. There's no suspense at all over whether Oedipus will kill his father and marry his mother, since that's already happened; all the suspense instead concerns whether he will ever find out about it. Oedipus brings about his own downfall, and it grows directly out of his own best qualities — his relentless will to know the truth. He refuses to let mere social prejudice stand in his way, isn't remotely ashamed of his uncertain origins, and relies entirely on what he actually does to establish his own nobility — all of this is closely bound up with his being a tyrant in the older sense: his will to power and his will to truth are two expressions of the very same underlying drive toward the universal, a drive to get beyond merely local, merely conventional opinion — exactly the same capacity that let him see through conventional opinion in order to solve the Sphinx's riddle in the first place. He genuinely thinks outside the box. He doesn't think the way an Athenian, a Corinthian, or a Theban thinks; he stands, in a real sense, beyond the city altogether — which is exactly why he's able to solve riddles no one else can.
Tragedy of Character
This is ultimately a tragedy of character rather than of fate — Oedipus's thumos is absolutely central to the play. He grows angry with Tiresias; the two are, in a sense, mirror images of each other. He grows angry with Creon as well; we can see Oedipus's underlying suspiciousness clearly, constantly suspecting plots against himself, which is characteristic of the tyrannical type — he has to stay mentally alert at all times, always ready for a preemptive strike (much like Macbeth confronting Macduff). Creon functions as an interesting foil throughout, representing a kind of deliberate mediocrity — much like Menelaus in the Iliad, or the chorus in the Agamemnon, the Greeks consistently define their heroes by direct contrast with ordinary mediocrity. Creon isn't a tragic figure precisely because he isn't heroic — less dangerous than Oedipus, certainly, but also considerably less interesting. Ruling is, quite simply, too much trouble for Creon. Oedipus is not remotely an ordinary man. Freud's claim of false universality — "we're all just like Oedipus" — simply isn't true. Oedipus manages to out-Odysseus Odysseus himself. He is, in effect, both Achilles and Odysseus at once, combining Odysseus's metis with Achilles's thumos. Thebes, as a city, is absolutely chock-full of thumos throughout the play — Tiresias has it, Creon has it, and above all, Oedipus himself has it. This is, in the fullest sense, a tragedy of thumos.
Oedipus's anger is fundamental to his whole character — he reacts rashly to provocation, and the whole chain of events was actually set off at a banquet, long before the play begins. The underlying problem is that literally every word counts as "fighting words" for Oedipus. "I had to make my move" is entirely typical of him — he always feels he has to anticipate other people's next moves and strike first. This is exactly how the killing of Laius happened in the first place. With an oracle hanging over his head the way it was, you might expect him to have acted with real caution — if you're told you're fated to kill your own father, and you have any doubts at all about who your real father actually is, you might reasonably be careful around any man old enough to be him. If you absolutely had to kill someone under those circumstances, you'd think twice and go after a woman or a small child instead. But no — Oedipus is characteristically impetuous throughout. This is an extreme case of what we'd now call road rage; not everyone would have reacted the way Oedipus does in that exact situation. His thumos leads directly to the killing of Laius, and that same thumos later leads him directly to the discovery of the truth. The tragedy flows entirely from his own character. What Sophocles concentrates on, precisely, is the way Oedipus's own attempts to avoid his fate are exactly what bring that fate about. As in Homer, fate here equals character plus circumstance. A different man, placed in exactly the same circumstances, might well have turned out very differently — not everyone kills a random stranger they happen to meet on the road. Creon, for instance, would never have initiated this particular search in the first place, and would have abandoned it early on if he had. Remember: for Sophocles, the real issue is never simply what Oedipus has done, but whether he will discover that he has done it — in a real sense, there is no tragedy at all if he never learns the truth (no suicide for Jocasta, no self-blinding for Oedipus). That discovery is itself the direct result of his own actions and his own character, even as virtually everyone around him actively tries to stop him from making it.
Sophocles Secularizes the Myth
Sophocles's whole emphasis takes the classic story of fate and effectively turns it into a story of human action instead. There's a genuinely good summary, late in the play, of the actual relationship between gods and men here, centered on Oedipus's own insistence on taking full responsibility for his own actions. As in Homer, Sophocles is finding real room for a human role within destiny, even inside what looks, on the surface, like the classic story of fate. We're naturally struck by how much the gods are involved in the action of Greek drama generally — but compare this play directly to the Oresteia: this time, the gods don't appear on stage at all. Their role is genuinely restricted here — there isn't even a deus ex machina to resolve things, which is part of why Aristotle liked this particular play so much; it comes much closer to what we'd recognize as secular drama. Moving from the Iliad to the Odyssey to the Oresteia to Oedipus, you can trace an increasing secularization of these stories over time — the gods progressively withdraw, or are progressively withdrawn by the poets themselves. Across all of this Greek literature, we're naturally struck by how much the gods are involved in the action — but we really ought to be equally struck by how little. It's worth remembering that Greek theater was never a secular institution in our sense — attending was much closer to attending a Catholic Mass than to seeing a Broadway musical, carrying a real sense of divine presence at a genuine religious ritual. But Sophocles, within that context, is actively working to secularize his material, building a real sense of human responsibility rather than simply placing the blame on the gods. Human beings, in his hands, have to take real responsibility for their own actions. These become genuine cautionary tales.
Hybris
The chorus treats the whole story explicitly as a cautionary tale. The word our translations render as "pride" is hybris in the original Greek — and hybris is something considerably more external than the Christian notion of pride. It doesn't primarily describe your inner feelings or your private beliefs about yourself; it describes how you actually behave — outrageously, insolently, toward others. Its basic meaning comes from the verb form, hybrizein, meaning to assault or outrage someone — to humiliate someone, to add insult to injury, much as Achilles does to Hector's corpse. It carries a specific legal meaning too, close to "to rape" — to carry someone off, to violate them sexually. Its root meaning, interestingly, relates to horses — something like "chomping at the bit," which is essentially Oedipus's whole problem: he's always chomping at the bit. Hybris does involve something close to what we call pride, but not in the Christian sense — it was never thought of as a deadly sin in itself. In fact, in a thoroughly Greek move, even the condemnation of hybris still carries real respect for healthy competitive striving, quite unlike the Christian attitude — the Greek word for "wrestling" genuinely does appear nearby in the text, invoking athletic competition once again. No Christian minister delivers a sermon against pride and then adds, "of course, I don't mean that healthy pride that makes our church strong" — but that's essentially the Greek attitude toward hybris.
The Chorus and the Limits of Its Perspective
The chorus learns, by the end, not to admire tyrants. It doesn't describe Oedipus as an ordinary man at all, and is quite open about its own envy of him. This is part of the real nature of tragedy — it can function as a lesson in moderation, showing us a character who goes beyond ordinary human limits and suffers catastrophe as a direct result. The chorus is entirely typical of ordinary men in this respect: they admire the tyrant while he's still prosperous, and only turn against tyranny once he falls, needing a simple, digestible lesson from the experience. They praise Oedipus at first, and then turn sharply against him. Sophocles is clearly portraying a real problem with the tyrant as a type here. The tyrant's life was genuinely attractive to the ancient Greeks, which is exactly why they needed a simple cautionary lesson against it.
But even so, Sophocles himself should not simply be identified with the chorus — the chorus represents only one perspective among several, and, as we've already seen elsewhere, a genuinely limited one, fundamentally non-heroic in outlook. There's a real temptation to mistake the chorus's own generalizations for the actual message of the play as a whole. No single character, or set of characters, speaks directly for Sophocles himself. Sophocles takes a considerably broader perspective than any of them — one that ultimately goes beyond the city altogether. A simple moralistic reading of the play remains fundamentally inadequate to it.
The Aristotelian Tragic Hero, and the Myth of the "Tragic Flaw"
We've been taking, throughout, a broadly Aristotelian view of Oedipus — focusing on the tragic hero, on the character of the tragic hero as such. Precisely what makes him great is exactly what brings on his tragedy. Oedipus's thumos and his intellect together are what make him heroic in the first place — they've won him Thebes — and they're also exactly what leads to his eventual destruction. A lesser man, placed in Oedipus's own circumstances, would never have uncovered the truth about himself at all; he would simply have given up along the way. We can't simply say that Oedipus was "too clever for his own good," full stop.
This is precisely what's wrong with the popular notion of the "tragic flaw" — a concept that isn't actually in the original Greek. The relevant term is hamartia, which literally means "missing the mark," a term borrowed from archery. Aristotle, when he uses this word, is really talking about heroes who make a specific kind of mistake — a factual error, like not knowing who your own mother really is. He uses the same term, hamartia, in the Nicomachean Ethics, referring there to things like manslaughter, specifically involuntary manslaughter. "Flaw" is, in this light, a real mistranslation — it suggests there's just some small, isolated problem with the hero, and that if he'd only correct that one thing, he'd otherwise be perfectly fine. But Oedipus simply wouldn't be Oedipus if he didn't relentlessly pursue the truth. That relentless pursuit is itself the genuine substance of his heroism.
