Sophocles' On Oedipus Tyrannos Part 2
Lecture Notes · Session II
On Oedipus Tyrannos
Paul Cantor · University of Virginia
Not an Everyman: The Tyrant's Fate, Not Man's Fate
Oedipus Tyrannos is not a story about the fate of man in general — it's a story about the fate of the tyrant in particular. Many critics go looking for some universal lesson for all humanity in the play, which really means treating Oedipus as a kind of typical human being, teaching us all a lesson about fate. This is too generalized a view. Oedipus is not an Everyman figure — he is not just like the rest of us. Sophocles shows us something very specific in Oedipus, in fact a genuinely unusual character. Very few people have actually killed their father and married their mother. Plenty of people may have thought about it in some form, but Oedipus has actually done it — and for the Greeks, there's a real, significant difference between the thought and the deed. He's quite a remarkable figure, not least as a leader.
That Oedipus killed his father and married his mother — that much may plausibly have been fate. But that he discovers this about himself is due entirely to his own character, his own tyrannical nature. At the beginning of the play, it's by no means inevitable that he will ever discover the truth about himself — in fact, he has to fight very hard to get there. It takes every one of his virtues to do it — he's remarkably intelligent, fast-acting, powerful. He is, in fact, the prototype of the tyrant — the self-made man — which is exactly what makes him such a compelling figure. The story remains one of universal importance, but not because Oedipus is an Everyman; rather, because the tyrant himself is a perennial issue in human affairs. Oedipus marks the beginning of a whole literary tradition of critiquing tyranny, later picked up by Shakespeare in Richard III and Macbeth — a recurring theme in literature generally (compare, much later, Latin American authors like Carlos Fuentes in The Death of Artemio Cruz, or Gabriel García Márquez in The Autumn of the Patriarch). Plato, in Book IX of the Republic, seems to have Oedipus specifically in mind at one point, where he runs together the categories of god, man, and beast. Greek philosophy often supplies exactly the background needed to understand Greek literature.
Two Faces of Oedipus: God and Beast
This is a real critique of tyranny — but Sophocles is not simply negative about Oedipus. The chorus first thinks of him as a god, and later comes to think of him as a beast; we actually have to see him as both at once. He is raised above ordinary human possibilities, and he also descends below them — something like a combination of Odysseus and Polyphemus at once, the most civilized and the most barbaric man imaginable. This is essentially what Aristotle means by his claim that "man without a city is either a beast or a god." Oedipus believes himself independent of the city, which makes him both better and worse than ordinary human beings at once.
Beyond the "Tragic Flaw"
Tragedy can operate on two levels simultaneously — a cautionary message for ordinary people, and a deeper message for more sophisticated readers, one that reveals the true range of human possibility through the extraordinary character of the hero. Oedipus is a genuinely remarkable man. It's a mistake to read the play in terms of a simple "tragic flaw," since that makes it sound as if there's just some small problem with Oedipus, and the whole tragedy could have been avoided if only he weren't so proud. The real point to grasp is that whatever causes Oedipus's downfall is the very same thing that makes him great. He cannot simply give up his pride and still be Oedipus. We have to avoid a specifically Christian interpretation of the play here, one that treats pride as simply a sin, rather than as an integral part of the hero's own character. The Greeks were considerably less negative about pride than Christians tend to be. The play cannot simply be read moralistically — it actually challenges our very notion of morality, since it isn't clear which morality we're even supposed to apply. This takes us directly to Hegel.
The Hegelian Reading: Deed versus Intention
Oedipus's story is perplexing in exactly the way great tragedy always is. Turning now to the Hegelian interpretation: how can this be read as a conflict between two goods, two competing principles? Specifically, the morality of the deed against the morality of intention. How do we actually react to Oedipus? We're deeply divided. Part of us is genuinely horrified; part of us wants to say he's innocent — he didn't know it was his father or his mother (in fact, if he'd really had an Oedipus complex in Freud's sense, it would have been directed at Merope and Polybus, his adoptive parents back in Corinth). This is the civilized response: we could only really convict him of manslaughter, not premeditated murder — he never set out to kill anyone in particular. Here we're introducing genuine legal distinctions, ones that actually came into being in fifth-century Athens — you can see them at work in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (where Aristotle discusses hamartia directly, and talks about how honest mistakes mitigate the seriousness of a crime). The Athenians began, around this time, to define real degrees of guilt and adjust punishments accordingly — no capital punishment, for instance, for murder in the third degree. Any competent lawyer could get Oedipus off on a charge of parricide; a good lawyer could get him off on murder too; a really good lawyer could probably get him off even on manslaughter.
But part of us reacts with real horror regardless — this man killed his father, and he slept with his mother; these are primal crimes, and part of us wants to say: no excuses. Much like in Aeschylus, this takes us back to a far more primitive sense of justice, pre-civic, essentially tribal — a sense of pollution, miasma, a stain. This is morality understood not through intention but through the deed itself — you don't look at the inner consciousness of the person who did it, you look at the deed itself; the deed stains you regardless of what you meant by it. Christian morality, by contrast, places enormous emphasis on intention, on what's actually in your heart — Jesus himself says that merely thinking about adultery is as bad as actually committing it. Our whole modern concept of guilt and punishment sits closer to this more archaic notion of pollution and purification, which was extremely strong in ancient Greece, with formal rites of purification available (Orestes undergoes exactly this). This is a genuinely physical sense of guilt — closer to being contaminated by some external force than to harboring evil thoughts in your mind. Your hands kill your father, and your hands are literally stained, and have to be washed clean — the stain of blood needs to be washed away (compare Macbeth). This is a deeply pagan idea (Shakespeare himself sits about halfway between the pagan and Christian views on exactly this point). Oedipus's deed helps us recover this older, ancient sense of pollution — deeds are simply horrible in themselves. The play turns on a real conflict between this primitive and this more civilized sense of justice (there's a clear connection here to the Oresteia). We genuinely don't know quite how to react to Oedipus's crime — is he innocent, or guilty? It isn't easy to say. Even if you ultimately conclude that Oedipus is innocent, you can't get there simply — you still have to overcome your own horror at his deeds first. That's the real substance of our divided response: a lingering sense that he has broken fundamental taboos, whatever the state of his intentions.
Why the City Must Expel Oedipus
The polis has emerged, with its own considerably more sophisticated notions of legal justice — degrees of murder, and so on — but when faced with these primal family crimes, it simply can't cope with them; it has no choice but to expel Oedipus. The city doesn't want to think about the questions he raises. Parricide and incest are the two primal family crimes, and they show exactly why the city is necessary in the first place: parricide weakens the family, while incest makes it too strong. Parricide is a primal rebellion against the authority of the family, and the city is needed to defend the family and resolve its internal conflicts — a father normally punishes a child's wrongdoing, but he obviously can't do that if the crime in question is his own murder; the worst possible family crime is exactly the one the child can get away with unpunished by the family itself. The polis has to step in and punish parricide — this may, in fact, be part of the very reason the polis comes into existence at all. But the polis must also prohibit incest, since it's needed to break the excessive unity of the family, which otherwise threatens to become all-inclusive on its own terms. With parricide, there is no more authority within the family; with incest, there is no more need for authority outside the family, in the city. Parricide must be prohibited by the city in order to establish the authority of the family; incest must be prohibited in order to establish the authority of the city. These are the two crimes most directly bound up with the very founding of the city as such.
Oedipus commits precisely the two crimes that most thoroughly undermine authority, challenging the city's whole way of thinking — he has gone entirely beyond the pale, doing what other men only dream of doing (this can sound remarkably modern, almost Freudian; compare, again, the Republic). In effect, he is no longer restrained by any conventional limits — he breaks every taboo, violates every fundamental category. He becomes a walking riddle: is he his wife's husband, or her son? Is he his own children's father, or their brother? Is he a tyrannos or a basileus? A foreigner or a citizen? A detective or the criminal himself? The source of the city's problem, or its solution? These are not trivial categories — they're basic, foundational categories that actually define the city as such. Oedipus breaks down the very binary oppositions the city rests on. He violates something close to logical or mathematical axioms (Knox has noted how strikingly mathematical the play's language actually is) — but look specifically at the kinship relations involved. The Sphinx's riddle should really have pointed Oedipus toward the right answer all along: three can be one. In the riddle itself, we seem, at first glance, to be dealing with three entirely different categories of creature — four-legged, two-legged, three-legged — but only if you insist on thinking in purely conventional terms. Oedipus saw straight through that riddle, and yet he can't see through his own. There's a real sense of monstrousness building throughout the play, culminating in genuinely nightmarish images of confusion.
The city rests on distinctions, on binary oppositions — it defines kinship patterns in particular — but Oedipus the tyrant breaks all of them down. He keeps ending up exactly where he doesn't belong — in his own mother's bed, the wrong place entirely for any human being to be (incest isn't a problem for beasts or for gods; we don't worry about incest among animals, and the Greek gods are shown committing incest constantly). The incest prohibition, in other words, is precisely what defines the specifically human condition. This is a perfect example of what Aristotle means by "man without a city is either a beast or a god" — only a beast or a god could commit parricide or incest with impunity. Oedipus threatens to annihilate these important distinctions altogether. As Jean-Pierre Vernant has argued, Oedipus effectively obliterates the distinctions between generations — much like the Sphinx's riddle itself, he embodies three generations at once: he is himself; he is his own father, since he's married to his own mother; and he is his own son, since he's the brother of his own children (he's even, in effect, his own grandfather). It genuinely makes you dizzy to think it through. Consider how important binary oppositions were throughout Homer — a sustained attempt to define the human specifically through binary opposition, mortals against immortals above all. Here, Oedipus collapses god, man, and beast into a single figure (much like the tyrant in Plato). Man himself appears to be the answer to the Sphinx's riddle — but in Sophocles's tragedy, man himself becomes the riddle. Oedipus genuinely puzzles the polis, forcing Thebes to think about exactly what it doesn't want to think about, which is precisely why it ultimately banishes him (compare the broader Greek practice of ostracizing tyrants, and the related figure of the pharmakos, the scapegoat).
Blessed and Cursed: The Greek Sense of the Sacred
There's a real heroism in Oedipus here too — he looks directly into the abyss, where the city itself shies away. Oedipus seems to feel that he has been singled out for a kind of greatness — what the Greeks called agos, both blessed and cursed, divine and demonic at once. This is genuinely hard for us to understand, since it sounds like a contradiction on its face. The Greeks simply do not identify the sacred with the morally good the way we tend to. The Greek word for "demon" is actually fairly neutral in itself — Socrates goes around openly saying he has his own personal daimon. It essentially means an intermediary figure between gods and human beings, not necessarily demonic in our own modern, sinister sense at all (early Christians looked at these pagan daimones and simply relabeled them "demonic" in our sense). For us, being singled out for divine favor is unequivocally good — think of the blessing of Jacob; we assume God would never be unfair or unjust toward us. It's very different for the Greeks: if the gods single you out for special attention, you genuinely don't know whether it's a blessing or a curse. One day it looks like a blessing, the next day it looks like a curse. You end up surrounded by a real aura, at once admirable and frightening. Oedipus is clearly not an ordinary man — he's a hero, and there's a real sense of awe surrounding him, one that eventually leads him to Athens in Oedipus at Colonus, where rival cities actually compete over him, wanting his bones in order to establish a cult, to establish his worship after death.
Where Aristotle and Hegel Meet
Tragedy, in this sense, works on two levels at once. It offers ordinary people a cautionary tale — the anthropos looking at the aner and concluding that he's dangerous. But it also gives us a real sense of the hero's genuine extraordinariness. This double view of the hero is exactly where Aristotle and Hegel come together: the tragic hero is an exceptional human being who shows us how our different conceptions of the good can come into genuine conflict with one another. The tragic hero pushes the human condition to its absolute limits, exposing its underlying contradictions in the process. This is exactly why tragedy remains genuinely perplexing — it directly challenges our normal perceptions and assumptions, rather than simply confirming them.