The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sophocles · a tragedy in eleven parts · 1,530 lines · 9,290 words of Greek · Athens, 5th c. BC · in Sophocles’ Greek, with R. C. Jebb’s prose translation for sense and quotation
Mode
Tragedy as inquiry; a murder investigation whose investigator is its object
Mythos
The scapegoat driven out by his own decree; the foundling returned to his mountain; the riddle’s answer built into the body
Phase
One day of inquiry into a generation’s past; the search turns from Laius’ killer to Oedipus’ birth at the play’s middle word, 766; the discovery at 1182–1185, 78 per cent of the way through
Presentation
Drama for the Athenian festival; a prologue, a parodos, four episodes each followed by a choral ode, and an exodos; 1,530 lines in the standard numbering, spoken and sung by actors and a chorus
Register
From a drunk’s insult at a Corinthian dinner and two herdsmen’s seasons on Cithaeron to the sung lament of the blind king; Oedipus speaks 45.5 per cent of the words
Scale
One city under plague, one house, one day, and the generation it took to arrive
Governing Proposition
A king vows to find the killer of the man who ruled before him, curses the killer in public, and presses the inquiry until he finds that he is the man he is seeking: his predecessor’s killer and son, and his own wife’s son. The wager of the play is that the ablest inquirer can carry a true inquiry to its end and find himself its object, and that no one’s happiness can be judged before the end of his life.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play opens on a city at its king’s door. The Priest of Zeus sits at the altars with the children and the old, and tells what the plague has done: the land is blighted in its crops, its herds and the births of its women. He is careful in his praise. “theoisi men nyn ouk isoumenon s’ egō”
“It is not because we rank you with the gods that I and these children are suppliants at your hearth, but because we deem you the first among men” (31–33). Oedipus has already named himself, “I, Oedipus renowned by all” (8), and he answers that he suffers more than any of them: “hōs egō / ouk estin hymōn hostis ex isou nosei”
“though you are sick I know well that there is not one of you who is as sick as I” (60–61). He means the city’s grief. Everything he says in the play will be true in a second way, and this is the first time.
Around him stands a building of eleven parts: a prologue, a sung entry of the chorus, four episodes each followed by a choral ode, and an exodos, 9,290 words of Greek in all. Oedipus speaks 45.5 per cent of them, more than the next four speakers together. The odes are under a tenth of the play. The episodes shorten as the discovery comes on: 2,239 words for the second, 1,170 for the third, 528 for the fourth, and the third ode is the shortest unit in the play, at 96. The middle word falls at line 766, in Jocasta’s question, “That is easy. But why do you enjoin this?”, and eight lines later Oedipus begins his own story: “My father was Polybus of Corinth” (774). The play turns at its arithmetical centre, from the search for Laius’ killer to the search for Oedipus’ birth.
The economy is stated inside the play. Creon brings the god’s word: Laius’ killer is in the land, and the land is polluted while he stays. Oedipus takes up the case at once: “I will start afresh, and once more make dark things plain” (132). His verb, phanō, is the verb of showing that will close on him a thousand lines later. Tiresias gives the inquiry its term: “hēd’ hēmera physei se kai diaphtherei”
“This day will reveal your birth and bring your ruin” (438). Its verb is the verb of begetting, and that family of words comes back thirty-eight times in the play. One day is all it takes, and one witness. The single survivor of the attack on Laius, who fled and told of robbers (118–122), is the herdsman who once carried a child to the mountain, so that one summons will answer both questions.
Movement II
Oedipus’ first act is a proclamation. No one in the land may receive the killer, speak to him, share prayer or sacrifice with him, or give him the lustral water: “ōthein d’ ap’ oikōn pantas”
“Ban him from your houses, all of you” (241). Then he curses him, and adds a curse on himself, if the man should share his hearth “with my knowledge” (250). He will fight for the dead king “as though it were that of my own father” (264). He holds Laius’ power, he says, “possessing his bed and the wife who bore his children” (260), where the Greek calls her homosporon, ‘common-sown’. Every line of the speech means one thing to the man who speaks it and another to an audience that knows the story. The play has no need to wink. It lets him speak.
Tiresias comes unwilling and will not speak, and Oedipus provokes him until he does: “you are the accursed defiler of this land” (353); “I say that you are the killer of the man whose slayer you seek” (362). Oedipus answers with the plot he suspects, Creon behind the seer, and with his own title to the throne. The Sphinx, he says, was stopped not by birds or gods but by “ho mēden eidōs Oidipous”
“I, Oedipus the ignorant” (397), where the Greek sets eidōs, ‘knowing’, against the name it sounds in. He mocks the seer’s blindness, and the seer turns it on him: “though you have sight, you do not see what a state of misery you are in, or where you dwell, or with whom” (413).
Tiresias goes with a prophecy that the play will fulfil line by line. The man they seek is here, a stranger in name and a Theban by birth: “A blind man, though now he sees, a beggar, though now rich, he will make his way to a foreign land, feeling the ground before him with his staff” (454–456). The word for blind falls four times on Tiresias in this episode and three times on Oedipus at the end. The curse that will drive him out is deinopous, ‘dread-footed’ (418), and in the ode that follows the hunted killer roams the caves meleos meleōi podi, ‘wretched on wretched foot’ (478). The chorus will not believe it of the man who answered the riddle: “Never, therefore, will he be adjudged guilty of evil” (510–511).
Movement III
The quarrel with Creon is the play’s widest stretch at ground level, and it does its work. Oedipus calls him “the palpable thief of its crown” (535), giving him the word the survivor had used of Laius’ killers. Creon answers with a cool case for power without the throne (583–602), and one sentence that the end will keep: “time alone reveals a just man” (614). As the anger rises the verse breaks, and each line is split between the two men: “Still I must rule.” “Not if you rule badly.” “Hear him, city of Thebes!” (628a–629a). Jocasta comes out to part them.
To calm her husband she offers proof that seers know nothing. An oracle told Laius he would die by his son; yet Laius “was murdered one day by foreign robbers at a place where the three highways meet”, and the child, not three days old, was cast out after Laius “pinned his ankles together” (715–719). The proof holds the clue. Oedipus hears one phrase, “that Laius was slain where the three roads meet” (729–730), and asks where, and when, and what the dead king looked like: “his form was not greatly unlike your own” (742–743). Then he tells his own story: the drunk at the banquet, the oracle at Delphi, the flight from Corinth, and the old man at the crossroads, killed “with one swift blow from the staff in this hand” (811). The word is skēptron, the staff with which Tiresias said the beggar would feel his way.
He sees what he has done before he knows who he is. “ōthein d’ ap’ oikōn. kai tad’ outis allos ēn / ē ’gō ’p’ emautōi tasd’ aras ho prostitheis.”
“and all must push him from their homes. And this—this curse— was laid on me by no other mouth than my own” (819–820). The Greek is the proclamation word for word; Jebb renders it differently each time. One hope remains, the number: “If, then, he still speaks of several as before, I was not the slayer” (842–844). It is never put to the witness. The chorus, left alone, sings that “Insolence breeds the tyrant” (873), and then asks what its own office is worth if the oracles fail: “ti dei me choreuein?”
“why should we join in the sacred dance?” (896). The ode ends “errei de ta theia”
“the worship of the gods is perishing” (910).
Movement IV
Jocasta prays to Lycean Apollo for some escape, and the answer that comes is a man from Corinth with good news. His first three lines close on hopou, Oidipou, hopou (924–926), the king’s name rhymed with ‘where’. Polybus is dead, of age. The oracles, says Oedipus, are “worth nothing” (972), and Jocasta gives the creed she lives by: “eikē kratiston zēn, hopōs dynaito tis”
“It is best to live at random, as one may” (979). Many men before now, she says, have slept with their mothers in dreams. Oedipus still fears the mother who lives, and the stranger, wishing to free him of that fear, frees him of his parents.
The scene runs forty single-line speeches without a break (1007–1046). Polybus was no more his father than the man who speaks: “And how can my father be equal to him who is as though nothing to me?” (1019). The Corinthian took the child from another shepherd on Cithaeron, “your savior, my son, in that hour” (1030), and loosed his pinned ankles: “hōst’ ōnomasthēs ek tychēs tautēs hos ei”
“So much so that from that fortune you were called by that name which you still bear” (1036). Jocasta knows before he does, and begs him to stop: “ō dyspotm’, eithe mēpote gnoiēs hos ei”
“Oh ill-fated man, may you never know who you are!” (1068). She goes in. He takes her silence for shame at his low birth and names himself “paida tēs Tychēs”, “son of Fortune” (1080). The chorus, in the play’s shortest song, guesses at a god for his father, Pan or Loxias (1098–1102).
The herdsman is brought in, and answers questions with questions (1129, 1144). He was “not a bought slave, but reared in his house” (1123), and spent his seasons on the mountain, “from spring to Arcturus” (1137). Oedipus’ questions come faster than anywhere in the play, and when the old man will not answer he orders his hands tied. Then the two lines: “oimoi, pros autōi g’ eimi tōi deinōi legein.” “kagōg’ akouein; all’ homōs akousteon.”
“Alas! I am on the brink of speaking the dreaded words.” “And I of hearing: I must hear nevertheless.” (1169–1170). The last answers come in half-lines (1173–1176). “ō phōs, teleutaion se prosblepsaimi nyn”
“Light, may I now look on you for the last time” (1183). The verb of showing he used at the start closes on him here: he has been shown, pephasmai, born of those he should not have been (1184).
Movement V
The chorus counts what is left. “iō geneai brotōn, / hōs hymas isa kai to mēden zōsas enarithmō”
“Alas, generations of mortals, how mere a shadow I count your life!” (1186–1187). The Greek says ‘equal to nothing’, and the word for equal has run through the play: the Priest would not make the king equal to the gods (31), Oedipus said none was sick equal to him (61), and the Corinthian made his father equal to nothing (1019). Jebb’s shadow does not keep the chain. The ode ends on time: “ephēure s’ akonth’ ho panth’ horōn chronos”
“Time the all-seeing has found you out, against your will” (1212).
A messenger tells the rest in 49 lines (1237–1284). Jocasta ran to the marriage-bed, called on Laius, and lamented the bed where she had borne “husband by husband, children by her child” (1250). Oedipus burst in asking for a sword, and for “the wife who was no wife” (1256), gynaika t’ ou gynaika. They found her hanged. He took the golden brooches from her dress and struck his eyes, again and again, until “a dark shower of blood came down like hail” (1278–1279). Brought out blind, he sings, and the chorus asks what god drove him: “Apollōn tad’ ēn, Apollōn, philoi … epaise d’ autocheir nin outis, all’ egō tlamōn.”
“It was Apollo, friends, Apollo who brought these troubles to pass, these terrible, terrible troubles. But the hand that struck my eyes was none other than my own, wretched that I am!” (1329–1331).
He carries out his own sentence. He has robbed himself of the city “by commanding that all should reject the impious one” (1381–1382), the proclamation a third time. He calls on Cithaeron, and on the three roads, “you who drank my father’s blood from my own hands” (1400). His daughters are brought to him, and he bids them come “to the hands of the one whose mother was your own” (1481). Creon, now master, refuses him even them: “Do not wish to be master in all things” (1522a–1523). The chorus closes on the lesson the play has proved on the ablest man in Thebes: “we must call no mortal happy until he has crossed life’s border free from pain” (1528–1530).
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the play, and on the Greek for the verbal part. The subtractive test fails almost everywhere, and the play states its own economy. It has one day: “hēd’ hēmera physei se kai diaphtherei”
“This day will reveal your birth and bring your ruin” (438). And it has one witness who serves twice: the survivor of the crossroads (118–119, 756) is the herdsman who carried the child (1123–1176), so one summons settles both questions. Even chance is spent on necessity. The Corinthian comes with good news (934) and brings the last proof. Held below the top by the length of the quarrel with Creon (513–677), and by a closing chorus (1524–1530) whose place in the play is disputed.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Two propositions can be stated, and both hold without Delphi. The ablest inquirer can carry a true inquiry to its end and find that he is its object: “though you have sight, you do not see what a state of misery you are in” (413). And happiness is a seeming that only the end of a life can judge: “tis gar, tis anēr pleon / tas eudaimonias pherei / ē tosouton hoson dokein”
“Where, where is the mortal who attains a happiness which is more than apparent” (1188–1191). It also parts guilt from pollution: the deeds were unknowing, and the polluted man goes by his own decree (819–820, 1381–1383). Held below the top because the city appears as suppliant and as plague, not as a structure of power examined.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The height reaches the ceiling at Tiresias’ entrance (300), and the play seldom falls from it. Terror comes first, in the seer’s list: “at once brother and father of the children with whom he consorts” (457–460). Dread is held in two lines: “oimoi, pros autōi g’ eimi tōi deinōi legein.” “kagōg’ akouein; all’ homōs akousteon.”
“Alas! I am on the brink of speaking the dreaded words.” “And I of hearing: I must hear nevertheless.” (1169–1170). Then, in sequence, the farewell to light (1183), the generations counted as nothing (1187), the rain of blood (1278–1279), the three roads (1398–1401), and pity at the close (1480–1485). Held off the top by Creon’s cool defence of second place (583–615) and the bargaining of 1515–1523.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The play never states the Sphinx’s riddle; it builds the answer into the plot, through the foot. The infant’s ankles were pinned (718, 1032–1034), and the name is the wound: “hōst’ ōnomasthēs ek tychēs tautēs hos ei”
“So much so that from that fortune you were called by that name which you still bear” (1036). The hunted man of the first ode goes meleos meleōi podi, ‘wretched on wretched foot’ (478), and the curse that will drive Oedipus out is deinopous, ‘dread-footed’ (418). The scapegoat is built too: the king proclaims the expulsion (236–243), and his own proclamation expels him. And he stays particular: a drunk insults him at a dinner in Corinth (779–780).
Score: 9.8 / 10
The inheritance is known in part. In the Odyssey Epicaste hangs herself and Oedipus goes on ruling in Thebes (11.271–280). The turns this play makes are visible in it. The whole past is compressed into one day of inquiry; the hero is the investigator of his own crime; the queen knows before he does (1056–1072); and he puts out his eyes with her brooches (1268–1270) and insists that the hand was his (1331). The chorus even puts its own dance at risk: “ti dei me choreuein?”
“why should we join in the sacred dance?” (896). What cannot be measured is the stake. The form was proven and the myth known to every spectator, and that holds it lowest of the five gates.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Change the form and the play stops knowing what it knows. Every line means one thing to the speaker and another to an audience that knows the myth, and only a staged recognition plot makes that doubleness the experience. The irony works at the level of the word: Oedipus will fight for Laius “as though it were that of my own father” (264), and he curses the man who shares his hearth “with my knowledge” (250). The interrogation is in the form. His questions run at 20 to the thousand words in the first episode, 55 in the third and 71 in the fourth, and fall to 21 when nothing is left to ask. Held a step from the top only by the slack in the quarrel.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: some twenty-four centuries of re-examination, from Aristotle’s Poetics, which takes the play as its model of reversal and recognition, through Hölderlin’s translation and notes (1804), Freud (1900) and Lévi-Strauss (1955), to Knox, Dodds and Vernant, and to Ahl (1991), who asks whether Oedipus is proved guilty at all. That question is in the text. The survivor spoke of robbers, lēistas, in the plural (122); Oedipus answers in the singular, ho lēistēs (124), later stakes everything on the number (842–847), and the herdsman is never asked. The verbal yield is as deep: the name sounds in oida, ‘I know’, in ho mēden eidōs Oidipous, Jebb’s “I, Oedipus the ignorant” (397).
Score: 9.8 / 10
A published work, so both components are scored together. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what drama can do. The play makes the uncovering of the past the whole action; reversal and recognition coincide in one moment (1182–1185); and the audience’s knowledge becomes a second plot, running beside the hero’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Aristotle took the play as the model for the Poetics, and through the Poetics it governed European dramatic theory from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth; Seneca, Corneille, Dryden and Lee, and Voltaire rewrote it; Freud named a complex from it; Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1927) and Pasolini’s Edipo re (1967) remade it; and the detective story inherits its form.
Score: 9.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries: the text was copied through antiquity and Byzantium, printed in the Aldine Sophocles of 1502, and played again from the production that opened the Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza in 1585. Part of the surface is fixed to its world: Delphi, the “central shrine of the earth” (480), Abae and Olympia (899–900), the lustral rite of the proclamation (240), and the law of pollution on which the plot turns. The play explains each as it goes, and none is needed to follow it. What has perished is part of the work itself. The music and dance of the odes are lost, the lyrics survive as words only, and the text has a gap at 214. That loss holds it a step from the top.
Score: 9.7 / 10
Judged on Sophocles’ Greek, where the command shows in placement. The proclamation turns on its maker: ōthein d’ ap’ oikōn, ‘to drive from the houses’ (241), returns word for word when Oedipus applies it to himself (819), and again, in other words, in his sentence on himself (1381–1382). One word carries two senses: homosporon, Jocasta as the ‘common-sown’ wife (260), returns in Tiresias’ homosporos of the father (460). The verse breaks under the action, in fifteen lines split between speakers at the quarrel, the herdsman’s last answers and the close. The messenger holds the death and the blinding in 49 lines (1237–1284). Held a step from the top by the flatter rhetoric of Creon’s defence (583–615).
Score: 9.7 / 10
One law governs the whole: what is said means more than the speaker knows, and the meaning comes true. The two most distant elements obey it. The Priest’s opening ranks Oedipus first of men but not equal to the gods (31–34); the outcast at the end is “eti de kai theois / echthrotaton brotōn”
“the mortal most hateful to the gods” (1342–1345). The plot is less strict. Oedipus has never learned how Laius died in all his reign, and the play admits as much (558–568); the survivor who begged to be sent away (758–762) kept silent for years; the robbers’ number is never put to him. The range is narrow: no comedy, one place, one day.
Score: 9.3 / 10
For its size the play holds many orders, and one cause binds them. The plague is natural, sexual, civic and sacred at once: the land is blighted in crops, herds and births (25–27, 171–173), the god’s word names a pollution (97–98), and the king’s marriage is its source. The state is there in tyranny and succession, the suspicion of conspiracy (380–389, 532–542) and Creon’s case for power without the throne (583–602). Labour is there in two herdsmen’s seasons on Cithaeron, ex ēros eis arktouron, “from spring to Arcturus” (1137). What holds it lowest of the twelve is the form: 9,290 words, one day, one house. History beyond the Labdacid line (267–268) is thin, and war is absent.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.5 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier V — Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 9.8, with The Living Form, The Imperishable and The Made at 9.7. A myth built into the plot through the foot, the staff and the proclamation that expels its maker; an inquiry that has carried some twenty-four centuries of argument and still leaves the robbers’ number open; a reorganisation of what drama can do; and a form in which every line means two things at once.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.8, held by the form: 9,290 words, one day, one house, history thin beyond the Labdacid line and war absent. Among the gated axes, The Swerve at 9.1, because the stake of the turn cannot be measured when the form was proven and the myth known to every spectator.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.7, The Inner Law at 9.3, The Made at 9.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.8, Pressure on Tradition at 9.8, The Imperishable at 9.7, The Unconcealment at 9.5 and The Swerve at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met — the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Swerve at 9.1, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a full reading of Oedipus Tyrannus in Sophocles’ Greek, the text of the Perseus Digital Library, which does not name its editor — a prologue, a parodos, four episodes each followed by a choral ode, and an exodos, read whole and in order, 1,530 lines in the standard numbering and 9,290 words. Every score is judged on the Greek. Read alongside R. C. Jebb’s prose translation, as given by Perseus, the only English text in hand, chosen because it is close and its paragraphs are keyed to the Greek line numbers, so that each passage can be read against the original. It is used for sense and for every English quotation on this page, and its English is not charged to the play. Where a point turns on the Greek, the Greek is given in transliteration with Jebb beneath; in places his English does not keep an identity the Greek makes, as at 241 and 819, where the same words are rendered two ways, and at 1187. The text has a gap at 214. References are to the Greek line numbers. The metre, music and dance are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged.