Oedipus the King

• “In Sophocles’ time, most Greeks believed the fate of an individual was bound up with a daimon, a divinity that presided over every person’s life. The Greek word for happiness, eudaimonia, meaning “well-daimoned,” implies that a person so blessed might be permanently protected.“

  “I do pity you, children. Don’t think I’m unaware.
  I know what need brings you: this sickness ravages all of you. Yet, sick as you are, not one of you suffers a sickness like mine.
  Yours is a private grief, you feel only what touches you. But my heart grieves for you, for myself, and for our city.
  You’ve come to wake me to all this.
  There was no need.“ (Oedipus)

• Palpable dramatic irony.

[Oedipus]
But here was your kingship murdered!
What kind of trouble could have blocked your search?
[Kreon]
The Sphinx’s song. So wily, so baffling!
She forced us to forget the dark past, to confront what lay at our feet.

–

“I’ll banish this plague for my own sake.
Laios’ killer might one day come for me, exacting vengeance with that same hand.
Defending the dead man serves my interest.”

• Palpable irony again. Seeking to defend who he killed. Notice also the egocentric motive.

–

“But as my luck would have it,
I have his power, his bed—a wife
who shares our seed. And had she borne
the children of us both, she might
have linked us closer still. But Laios
had no luck fathering children, and Fate
itself came down on his head.
These concerns make me fight for Laios
as I would for my own father.”

• Yet he is his son :(

Tiresias enters, a blind seer. Upon arriving, he seems to sense Oedipus’ tragedy and refuses to cooperate. Oedipus is furious and calls Tiresias a traitor, to which Tiresias replies, “You blame your rage on me? When you don’t see how she embraces you, this fury you live with? No, so you blame me.”

• Tiresias, though blind, sees the fury embracing Oedipus better than wide-eyed Oedipus can.

“That’s your truth? Now hear mine:
honor the curse your own mouth spoke.
From this day on, don’t speak to me
or to your people here. You are the plague.
You poison your own land.
…
I nurture truth, so truth guards me.” (Tiresias)

“If he still claims there were several,
then I cannot be the killer. One man
cannot be many. But if he says: one man,
braving the road alone, did it,
there’s no more doubt.”

• The sole soul where three roads join. (What do the three mean? Soul-fate-free will? Cursed birth-patricide-incest?)

“No human mind could conceive them [the sky-walking laws]. Those laws neither sleep nor forget— a mighty god lives on in them who does not age.”

“Which one of you ever, reaching
for blessedness that lasts,
finds more than what seems blest?
You live in that seeming
a while, then it vanishes.”

“It was Apollo who did this.
He made evil, consummate evil,
out of my life.
But the hand
that struck these eyes
was my hand.
I in my wretchedness
struck me, no one else did.”

• Interesting. Claiming to providence for all the horrors except the blinding of oneself (symbolic for the banishing of one’s ego as all one can truly do with one’s will? Only through one’s will can one be free of it?)

“He was a most powerful man.
Which of us seeing his glory, his prestige, did not wish his luck could be ours?
Now look at what wreckage the seas of savage trouble have made of his life.
To know the truth of a man, wait till you see his life end.
On that day, look at him.”