SOURCE: “The Tragic Perspective,” in The Identity of Oedipus the King: Five Essays on the “Oedipus Tyrannus,” New York University Press, 1968, pp. 125-54.

[In the following excerpt, Cameron discusses what can be learned from Oedipus Tyrannus concerning guilt, the past, and fate.]

In the middle of the Oedipus we find this juxtaposition: Oedipus and Creon quarrel, and before the scene is finished Oedipus has threatened to kill Creon, or at least to have him killed. Only the most strenuous pleading of both Jocasta and the chorus stops him. Then, in the next scene, Oedipus describes to Jocasta how he met Laius and his party, how he and they disputed the passage of the road, and how he killed them all.

Here, placed together, are Oedipus virtually on the point of killing now and Oedipus who did kill many years ago. An arresting juxtaposition, and surely not an accidental one. It immediately raises questions about the part played by Oedipus in the patricide. It also suggests that in this play crucial events of the past are in some sense being repeated in the present, and that is something about the play that has far-reaching implications for its interpretation.

Later we shall examine the relation of these two incidents to each other in detail, but let us look, for a moment, at another point of similarity between Oedipus' story of the past and the present action itself. In the scene with Teiresias, just before the quarrel with Creon, the following exchange occurs:¹ the old seer makes a mysterious reference to Oedipus' parents at which Oedipus pulls him up short, shouting, “Wait. What man gave me birth?” (437) Teiresias replies, but as Oedipus says bitterly, in nothing but “riddles.” And Oedipus is right, because Teiresias, without meeting the question, goes on in his riddling talk to tell what in the end will become of Oedipus. The parallel to this, in event and situation, is of course the experience of the young Oedipus at Delphi. He had asked the god then who his parents were. Apollo had not answered his question. Instead, as Oedipus in his account of the incident says, again bitterly, the god had sent him away “dishonored” and given him “other things” in reply, saying that he would marry his mother, produce an accursed race, and kill his father. In short, as between these two moments the question is the same, the answer in each case is not directly to the question, but is instead, riddles and prophecies in which Teiresias repeats the role of Apollo. That should not surprise us, since we have already been told plainly about Teiresias that he is “the lord who sees most like the lord Phoebus” (284-85).

Repeating the past in this action then is not limited or peculiar to the two juxtaposed incidents we cited first. In fact, the perspective on time and events which the juxtaposition reflects is something that belongs to the whole action.²

How does the past in general stand in this play? When we put it all together, we find that there is a surprising lot of it, which in itself is an indication of its importance and relevance to the action. In the play, of course it is not all together. Different items are brought out at different times. This is common dramatic practice to be sure, but here the past is wholly dictated by the interests of the action; what is told about it, when and how it is told.

We often speak of events that have taken place in a given story before the play itself begins as being its “antecedents,” almost as if they did not belong to the play. Aristotle categorizes certain things as lying “outside the drama,” “the tragedy,” “the mythos.” Such terms, of themselves, settle nothing about how much or how little prior events belong to an action, and how much or little they mean to it. That remains a matter of the particular play. And about the Oedipus, it can certainly be said that the past is very little introduced for secondary purposes, such as to fill the audience in on the story, or to get things started, or to supply interesting information. Here, past and present are so closely identified that there is no outside and inside. To anyone who knows the play, a simple catalogue of the past events involved is enough to prove the point: the oracle to Laius, the birth, the “exposure,” the passing of the infant from hand to hand, the young prince in Corinth, and all that is contained in that narrative; the coming of Oedipus to Thebes, the Sphinx, the marriage and his elevation to the throne, the children, the plague, and the appeal to Delphi. This is all past and clearly all of it is taken thoroughly into the action. The past, in other words, becomes an integral part of the dramatist's formation of the subject.

We have already had some indication of how thoroughgoing this taking in of the past is. But it is time to see in detail what the repeating consists of, and the best place to do that is the juxtaposition we began with. What does the similarity between Oedipus on the stage quarreling with Creon and Oedipus in the pass fighting Laius consist of?

Let us divide the question into two basic components: first, the character, and second, the situation in which the character exists. Oedipus' character at any given moment in the action is the sum of what he has been shown to be from the beginning to that point. In the briefest kind of summary, thus. First, there is the noble king, “famous to all,” who took up the challenging task that came to him from Delphi, and took it up as his deeply felt duty, with all the eager force of his nature. But then, no sooner had he done so than he was attacked, or so he thought, by Teiresias. This he resented, took as a personal affront, grew angry, arrogant, threatening, and dangerous.³ That, let us say, is the character of Oedipus brought up to the time of the meeting with Creon. Then, in that meeting, suspicion and anger are accelerated to the point where he is ready to kill: “No indeed I do not want your exile,” he cries to Creon, “It is your death I want” (623). The threat is far from idle. It is deadly serious; we must not fail to see that. Oedipus in this moment, before he is stopped by Jocasta and the chorus, is in the act of laying his hands on Creon.⁴

Now let us go on to the young man in the pass, as he is described shortly after this in the story Oedipus tells to Jocasta. As the prince of Corinth, he had enjoyed the highest esteem among his fellow countrymen. But the shocking incident at the banquet in Corinth, when he was taunted with being a bastard, “rankled” so that he went off secretly to Delphi. There he was “dishonored,” as he says, by Apollo's prediction, and fled out into the world, away from Corinth. But, directly, he met Laius and his party in the mountain pass.

This then was the young Oedipus: in Corinth, proud, vulnerable to the personal affront; at Delphi, a figure of sympathy for the terrible predicament in which he found himself. But in both places, he was also a young man who relied on himself, made his own decisions, and acted on them. Then, in the encounter in the pass he showed himself resolute, high-tempered, indeed more than that. Quick to resent the affront that was offered him on the road, he acted with no second thoughts: “I struck in anger … and I killed the whole lot” (774-813).⁵

The point to be grasped is the simple one, that when in the course of the play we reach this story Oedipus tells about himself, the man we hear about, the young Oedipus in the story, is the same man acting in the same way as the Oedipus we have just now been watching in action upon the stage. I do not mean that the whole of Oedipus, in all his parts as he has been presented from the beginning of this action, is repeated. Only this, that enough of the essential Oedipus is there, and vividly there, so that we cannot fail to recognize him as unmistakably the same man, to recognize that the young man who at the moment of challenge to himself took things into his own hands and slew his father is indeed this Oedipus. The correspondence is that direct.

The question of situation is more complex. As between the young Oedipus, who was cut off from home by the god's prediction and driven out alone into the world, and the great king who stands very high in the eyes of the world, the contrast in external situation and circumstance is complete. But also, it is perfectly well understood that there is another situation, not the openly declared public one, but an undeclared real one behind it. And that is Oedipus' situation with Apollo. It was Apollo's words at Delphi that drove Oedipus out into the world; therefore, when immediately he met Laius face to face, we know perfectly well that this was no simple coincidence but something that had its place within the divine scheme of things for Oedipus. In other words, we know that Oedipus met his fate there. I have already suggested where Teiresias stands, and that he and Oedipus face to face are a repeating of Oedipus with Apollo. But we should notice now that it is the whole setting of the play that repeats itself. Thus, when the plague comes, Oedipus turns directly to Delphi; he does not go up himself, but Creon goes as his representative. The question asked is Oedipus' question, and the answer Creon brings back is Apollo's answer to Oedipus. It is also another “riddle,” and one that again sets fateful action on its course. Moreover, this action is hardly well started when Oedipus once again finds the enemy across his path, or so he thinks, first in Teiresias and then Creon. In other words, while immediate circumstances change for Oedipus, the old situation remains, the fateful situation in which he lives and acts.

But a more specific question has to be reckoned with. Can we speak seriously of a fateful resemblance in situation between the incident in the pass and the quarrel with Creon on the stage, when it was Oedipus' fate on the former occasion to meet and kill not just anybody that blocked his way but his own father—not homicide but patricide? And if to that is added the necessary condition for the patricide, namely Oedipus' ignorance of the man he confronted, then are we left with any possible resemblance between Laius and Creon?

Let us consider Creon. Who is he? A prince of Thebes, of virtually equal standing with Oedipus himself (581 ff.). The homicide in this case, in other words, would have serious political implications. But Creon is also a kindsman, by marriage to be sure, but still a man to whom Oedipus is bound by the closest ties. Oedipus had made a considerable point of the relationship earlier when he said, “For I sent my own brother-in-law to Phoebus' house.” And the truth of the matter is that this is the man of all men alive to whom Oedipus is most closely bound, by public and private obligations alike.⁶ Sophocles cannot repeat the patricide, but I suggest that by creating a situation in which a violation of the most sacred bonds is in prospect, he does the nearest thing to it.

There is also a resemblance in the point of ignorance. Naturally it falls short of the absolute ignorance of not knowing who a man is. Still, the fact is prominently held before us that Oedipus is as ignorant about Creon as a man could well be. He has delusions about him: that Creon is plotting against his life and throne, that Creon is a “murderer” and a “robber” (532 ff.). The ignorance, in short, is tragic ignorance, the familiar condition in which the hero, not knowing what he is up against, acts disastrously. One may, I think very properly, ask whether Oedipus' situation with Laius is anything more than this ignorance in its most extreme form. Certainly Oedipus on the stage acts constantly in blind ignorance.⁷

Where do we stand with our juxtaposition? The facts are these: we do not hear about Oedipus in the pass until we have come to know him well on the stage, and until we have been made thoroughly aware of the fateful situation in which he acts there; we do not hear how Oedipus killed Laius until after we have seen him brought to the point of killing on the stage. These are the plain facts of construction. But the point of this construction lies in the resemblance it contains and the parallel it makes. We have already seen enough to realize that this is a matter which involves the fundamental issues of the play.

Let me repeat. When we reach the point in the action where Oedipus tells his story, we recognize through his words and actions the character in it. The gestures made to us from the past, as it were, have a familiarity about them as being the gestures of a man we have already come to know remarkably well. This recognition is almost forced upon us and it has its obvious implications which, however, need to be stated pretty flatly. It is a commonplace to speak of Oedipus' fate being given. But, if the play makes a point of showing us as between past and present the same man acting in essentially the same situation, the implication is that whenever Oedipus' fate occurs, or can be said to occur, Oedipus is characteristically active in it. We cannot then speak of a given fate without also speaking of a given character. In fact, the implication seems to be that it is nonsense to speak of Oedipus' fate as if it at any time existed without his being active and alive in it.

Then where does this take us in the interpretation of the play? A perspective in which the past is seen through the present, we said, has important implications. And perhaps what comes to mind first is the controversial question of Oedipus' guilt or innocence in the patricide.

This debate always begins with Oedipus' account of what happened. Who pushed whom first? Didn't Laius mean to kill Oedipus and, therefore, didn't Oedipus resist and kill in self-defense?⁸ If so, he cannot be guilty of homicide, let alone patricide. In brief, that is the argument for innocence. From the other side, it is argued that for a young man who has been warned by Apollo that he will one day kill his father (whom he has some reason to believe he does not know), Oedipus acts with criminal disregard of the possible consequences when he kills a man he does not know. Moreover, by his own account, he was hotheaded, proud. This points to guilt. True, in the eyes of the law, he cannot be guilty of patricide, for there is no denying the fact that he did not know that the man was his father; but in the eyes of gods and men he cannot be exonerated, which is to say, in some sense he must be guilty. To those who maintain Oedipus' innocence, this argument is feeble, indeed intolerable. All it has to say is that Oedipus is human, fallible like other men, and to suppose that Sophocles would advance that as proof of guilt, they argue, is absurd. On the other hand, the argument for innocence, in the eyes of those who see Oedipus as guilty, has to ignore those qualities which are simply obvious.

If I had to choose between these two positions I should choose the second.⁹ Everybody would like Oedipus to be innocent if only because it is outrageous that a man placed in the position he was, and such a man, should be found guilty. But then one must remember that tragedy is outrageous; it is only the good man's suffering that is tragic and only the wicked man's that is reasonable. And what sort of innocent could Oedipus be? An “injured innocent”? The argument for innocence seems forced to say so, for it implies that the point we must see about him, very much the point of the play, is that in no sense does he deserve his fate, that he is either a man who simply sustains a terrible fate or who nobly resists it. I think we must see clearly that he is neither of these, the reason being that such a reading of Oedipus simply removes him from the action, takes him out of the play. Apart from the anachronism this view entails, making him a romantic hero rather than a Greek one, the fact is, the decisive one I think, that the play presents us with a character who is almost exactly the opposite of an “injured innocent.” Oedipus is not a man who is assailed by fate or who waits until it comes to him; on the contrary, he seizes his fate and throws the whole force of his personality into it.¹⁰

It is the perspective that is wrong. The proponents of both sides of this argument, in making their case, start from the account of what happened in the pass and then, for confirmation, appeal to the rest of the play or to the parts of it which seem to support one or the other view. It is my point that we have no right to appeal to the present action except within the perspective that the action itself provides.

So let us follow the perspective. In an action where the past is taken into the present, it is the present that counts. What we must judge, in other words, if we judge at all, is Oedipus faced with the command from Delphi, and Oedipus with the different forms that situation takes: with Teiresias, Creon, Jocasta, right through the blinding. The first questions one should ask then are these: is Oedipus innocent with Teiresias, with Creon, with Jocasta, with himself? After that we may ask who pushed whom. True, this does not make a legal case against him for patricide. But then, tragedy does not take place in the law courts.¹¹ Also true, and most startling in the whole sequence, is the evidence of our senses about this man that when aroused as he is by Teiresias he is capable of killing, and, as with Creon, of killing his own kinsman.¹²

Thus, if we are forced to choose between guilty and innocent in the patricide, the weight of evidence comes down for guilty, as guilty in the past as he is now. That, as I see it, is the bearing of the action, and not just of this or that part of it, but of the whole.

Yet, are we forced to choose? Have we any right to judge? There is at least the possibility that we import this issue into the play ourselves, since Sophocles makes no explicit statement here about guilt or innocence. That he took up in the Coloneus, a very different sort of play.¹³ I myself believe he is intent in the Tyrannus on something more elementary.¹⁴ That is, the fact that in the fullest sense Oedipus' fate belongs to him. For I do not think we can fail to see what I should call a fitness in him or even an aptitude for what happens. That judgment, I feel sure, the play does make, although perhaps more fact than judgment. But it is a fact which one comes upon in considering any major issue in the play, as we ourselves have found repeatedly. Earlier, we put it that the character appears to belong to this action as if by some profound natural right. The fitness we see now within the perspective of the play is exactly the same thing.

We had better look back now and take further note of the conclusion we reached earlier here; that whenever and wherever Oedipus' fate may be said to occur, Oedipus always appears to be an agent in it. And this carries with it an implication which we have also met before: that Sophocles shows us how Oedipus' fate comes about. The point is an important one to consider again, because it is so widely believed that fate in the Greek tragedy, whether in the past or in the present, does not come about but is simply given, and nowhere so clearly as in the Oedipus.

So let us consider once more the “givenness” of this play and the question of Oedipus' fate. Before the play begins, he had already done what Apollo had said he would do: kill his father and marry his mother. How then, in all conscience, can we speak of Sophocles as showing us Oedipus' fate coming about? Isn't his fate already complete? That is an obvious but not a simple question. And there are other related questions which have to be asked that have the opposite implication. Is it conceivable that Sophocles' interest in this play lies in the fact that Oedipus' fate already exists without his also asking how it came to exist? Can it be doubted that he is enormously interested in the acts into which Oedipus falls during the course of the action and could these be anything, therefore, but fateful acts?¹⁵ In other words, if Sophocles is not showing us Oedipus' fate in the process of coming about, what could he be showing us? Again, if Oedipus' fate is complete before the play beings, then does the play stand somewhere outside his fate? Where? A sequel to his fate, an epilogue, a commentary on it? These are the possibilities, and I cannot see that they are not absurd.

Oedipus' fate is, of course, not complete before the play begins. Apollo commands the search for the guilty man, commands Oedipus, knowing him well, knowing both that he is guilty and will search and therefore find himself. This Oedipus does. That is the literal record of the action. Fate is, to be sure, an ambiguous word, but not so ambiguous that we cannot recognize it here; at least if this is not a fate and its fulfillment, then I do not know what a fate can be. And yet, it remains true that Oedipus' fate by the acts he has committed is, if not complete, already in existence and indeed sealed. How can his fate be in existence and coming into existence at the same time without contradiction? That is the question we have to ask now.

It is not a question to be limited to the Oedipus. It applies as well, for example, to the Ajax or to the Hippolytus, for the heroes of both these plays have also already committed irrevocable, fateful acts before action begins on the stage, and as between them and the Oedipus there is no essential difference in this matter. And actually, it is a matter which affects Greek tragedy as a whole. Always things have happened, or been done in the past from which the individual or individuals involved cannot escape. In other words, what we are talking about is a condition inherent for the Greek in the world of tragedy.¹⁶ There are different ways of recognizing this world, some more explicit than others, and these two plays I have cited are perhaps the most explicit. With their formal opening divine declarations, they represent the world in which tragic action takes place less subtly than does the Oedipus. But the result is the same, for although the fateful situation of Oedipus—that he has killed his father and married his mother—is undeclared, it is no less well understood that it exists.

Then what about the action that does take place? As an example, let us again take the Hippolytus. What about the hero, his purity and his hauteur; about Phaedra's mad passion for him and his response (to say nothing about how bad his rhetoric is); about the revenge she took; about Theseus' blind anger, and the catastrophic death of Hippolytus that followed on it? In short, about the whole action, although Aphrodite had announced that the gates of hell were open for Hippolytus (56-57), can it be doubted that this play shows us a fate coming about? And what does the showing consist of? Clearly, the sealed world of tragic action is there, but also clearly within it the characters, their relations and responses to each other; in other words, a showing or a bringing out of the tragic necessities which together make the fate a reality. Thus, it is not a contradiction to say of the same fate that it is in existence and that it is also coming about now.

Earlier, in following the tragic inevitability of Oedipus' self-discovery, we were dealing with the same problem. And we said then that this process was not among the things which were given in advance to the dramatist. Similarly, here, while it is a principle of the world of tragedy that a man cannot escape his acts, it remains for the dramatist to find the tragic necessities in the particular story which demonstrate the truth of the principle. Perhaps since the Greek tragic world, between the people who lived in it and the powers that governed it, was more clearly formulated, the tragic necessities about Oedipus were closer at hand; more given in that sense for Sophocles than they were for Shakespeare, say, about Macbeth. Even so there was nothing cut and dried about finding them. We said earlier that it seems a fate does not ever exist here without a character, for, as between Oedipus and his fate, we never find one without the other. And that is to say in other words, that the creating or the finding of the character who is necessary to his fate, that creative insight, was as much the business of tragedy then as it has been since.

Bearing in mind, then, the fact that a fate is not simply given, but that it comes about and that a character is necessary for it to become a reality, let us return to the patricide and to the point that we recognize Oedipus in it. What conclusions do we draw? We must try to state them as explicitly as possible. First, the one we have already drawn, that our recognition of Oedipus in the patricide means that we see the same character who is at work now in his fate was also at work in it in the past. It was in that perspective, we maintained, that the question of guilt or innocence in the patricide had to be assessed. But now, I think we must go a step further. Since that event is taken into the present action, and seen through it, we are in effect seeing the patricide coming about as if it were happening now. If that is true, since there can be no doubt that patricide is his fate, there can also be no doubt that we are seeing his fate come about. The perspective of the action, it seems to me, will admit no other conclusion. If it is agreed on the basis of the present action that a fate can never exist without a character, or characters, who execute it, the only alternative I can see would be to say that the play shows us Oedipus' fate as if it were coming about now, whereas, in reality, it had come about in the past. But this is inadmissible because it would take us back to the proposition that we have seen is false: that Oedipus' fate is complete before the play begins. It would also, in my opinion, imply a literary posture which is quite foreign to the spirit of the play, or to any other Greek play, saying, in effect, that Oedipus on the stage was acting symbolically or allegorically, not really acting. The conclusion we are left with then is simply this: that the patricide being taken into the present action, as if it were happening now, takes its place and its meaning in Oedipus' fate as a part of the process that is going on now. This is the process of Oedipus meeting his fate, still going on and completed nowhere but here.

We have said nothing about the marriage, the other act by which in the past Oedipus sealed his fate, and we should like to know how it was committed. Sophocles does not describe how it happened in the way he describes the murder. The theme of incest, however, is always present. Naturally, the action being concerned specifically with the search for Laius' murderer, as between the two issues, patricide and incest, it is the former that for most of the distance up to the recognition occupies the foreground. But the lines play ironically on the incest before Jocasta appears on the scene, and when she does appear, her presence of course keeps it before us. And then, when the action shifts its course from the search for Laius' murderer to the question of Oedipus' birth, with Jocasta on the stage throughout, the incest has displaced the patricide and become the first interest. And certainly, when we reach the discovery, and from there on, the lines make it clear that it is the thought of the marriage that haunts Oedipus and overwhelms him. Thus, in different ways, the marriage looms very large in the action, and if the play tells us how Oedipus' fate comes about it cannot be totally silent on this score.

We are, as I said, told nothing in detail about the event itself. There is, however, an understanding: that the people of Thebes, in gratitude and as the prize of victory for his conquest of the Sphinx, had offered Oedipus the throne and with it the queen, and he had accepted both.¹⁷ Thus the victory and the marriage are, in effect, one event and, as a result, it is in connection with the Sphinx that we learn what we do learn about how the marriage happened. From the priest in the prologue we hear about the great reputation Oedipus has won in the eyes of the world for his conquest: he is the “noblest of men,” the “savior” of his country, “first among men” in dealings with the gods, he overcame the monster “with the adherence of a god,” etc. (31-51). But it is from Oedipus himself that we learn how it happened and, after the laudatory and pious remarks of the priest, it comes as a shock when we hear Oedipus saying angrily and arrogantly to Teiresias that he defeated the Sphinx himself, by his own wits:

But I came, I Oedipus the ignorant one, and I stopped her, hitting the mark with my wit, not by learning from birds.

(396-98)

Oedipus' point here in his duel with Teiresias is that whereas he, Teiresias, with all his mantic art could do nothing when the Sphinx was ravaging the country, he, the famous Oedipus, came along and “without birds” saved Thebes single-handed.

The clue to the marriage, I suggest, is found in this picture Oedipus gives of himself as the man who came along and where others had failed, risked all (presumably he risked his life) and won all. In other words, he is a man who trusts his luck and his wits and wins, or so he thinks. Don't we know that supreme self-confidence and the readiness to risk all very well?¹⁸ And the image of the gambler with fortune is not farfetched. Teiresias at one point refers directly to the marriage, thus:

What harbor shall not be filled with your cries, what Cithaeron will not echo soon, when you shall realize what bad anchorage it was you entered in the marriage to this house, for all the luck of your fair voyage?

(420-23)

A few lines later the reference is indirect but no less pointed, when again we here Teiresias say:

And yet it was just that fortune (tyche) that destroyed you.

(442)

Oedipus had won the game with the Sphinx, or so it seemed, and had picked up as his winnings the throne and the queen. Jocasta, in other words, he had won as a part of his political “fortune.” What Teiresias puts to him here is that his fortune with the Sphinx had been his misfortune, and he is referring, of course, to the disastrous marriage.

Admittedly being told nothing directly about the marriage itself, we have to read between the lines to find Oedipus in this fateful event, But when we do, it is the same Oedipus we find, the one acting before our eyes, and the marriage takes its place in Oedipus' fate accordingly. We need only look at him in the moment before the scene of recognition to see how much the gambler with fortune is a part of the present action: “Let break what will … I deeming myself Fortune's child, generous Fortune, shall not be deprived of my inheritance” (1076-81). This is surely the gambler for high stakes, ready to risk all and reckless of the consequences.

Difficult as it was in the case of the patricide to say that Oedipus was guilty, it seems preposterous in the incest. Yet, the fact presented by the action cannot be denied, that Oedipus took Jocasta in the same way; blindly Teiresias would say,¹⁹ arrogantly as Oedipus' own words betray him. He put his hand to his fate in this event as he had in others, and continues to do now.²⁰ This leaves us with the thought, however preposterous, that in the marriage he cannot be called innocent. And perhaps the most revealing thing in the whole matter and the most damaging, is what Oedipus does to Jocasta in that last scene. He treats her roughly, very roughly, so that when she leaves the stage there is a sense of her being driven off to her death by him. True, she has her own reasons for going, of which he is still unaware but, after all, what happens to her here at the hands of this “child of Fortune” is not totally different from what happened to Laius. She too looks like a casualty of his acting.

Earlier, we said that while it made no sense of the play to call Oedipus innocent to find him guilty was outrageous. Then, is it less outrageous to say about acts which in the eyes of gods and men are the most unnatural of all acts—and this the play makes very clear—that the noble Oedipus was somehow fit to perform them?²¹ For whatever his faults, Oedipus is noble. And, after all, the acts he performs he is condemned to perform in ignorance. Therefore, whenever he acts, necessarily he acts blindly. Blindness is given him in his situation. The Greek word for it is ate.

All this is very true. However, what we have also seen many times is that Oedipus acts not only in blindness but with blindness. That is, there is not only the built-in ignorance of the situation, there is also a condition of the soul, a blindness which leads him, for example with Creon, to act with a passionate ignorance.²² The Greek word for this is again ate, which is to say that the phenomenon we recognize here of a fitness in the soul for the tragic situation is common enough. The odds against Oedipus are certainly enormous, notoriously so. But tragedy always works with such odds, and it is nonetheless Oedipus who threatens Teiresias, who would kill Creon, and not Oedipus by name only, but the noble Oedipus with the whole force of his personality. In short, it is put down at the center of this story that this noble nature is somehow itself productive of a fantastically ugly tragedy. The chorus after the discovery see Oedipus' fate as the paradeigma (1193) of the great fall from blessedness. The appalling part of the lesson is how Oedipus brought it about. Oedipus, even Oedipus, is fit for his fate. That is the remarkable and tragic thing the play has to say.

Guilt and innocence are moral judgments which in their different ways resolve the problem of suffering. Tragedy has its limitations, one being that it does not provide solutions to the problems it poses. If it tried, or when it tries, it runs the risk of denying the fact by which it exists, that suffering is real and cannot be explained away. That does not mean that it leaves the problem alone. Sophocles does not leave the story of Oedipus where he found it, in Homer or in Aeschylus, or in fantasy, folklore, or nightmare, where it originated in the first place. He explores it, he has vision about it, and he illuminates it. The center of this vision which he leads us to recognize is Oedipus fully human and alive in the terrible story. This, as I say, solves no problems, but it does one thing which apparently never loses its fascination. It grasps the joint of the world at which tragedy arises, and that is nothing more nor less than what we have been seeing, here and elsewhere in these pages; that however monstrous the things given, the man has a capacity for them. This is, of course, for such a man as Oedipus an outrageous vision; it does not satisfy common sense; it is not comfortable. But Sophocles, neither in this nor any other play, thought he was making a world in which such a terrible fitness exists either acceptable or comfortable. What he was doing was presenting the world as he saw it. And this we must believe the “serene” Sophocles believed passionately he must show, and we must see. To some, this vision has been undeniably true. Others deny it, like Plato, and insist that the tragic necessities it poses are false. No one, I should think, Plato included, has been able to forget it.

We have had much to say about knowing the self and about Sophocles' Oedipus as the unforgettable exemplar of this drive to the real world. But one thing remains to be added: that it is surely Sophocles who knows himself. Sophocles, it was said in antiquity, was the happy one, and the one “loved of the gods.” He was also, as his plays show, the one beyond others who knew how to look unhappiness and suffering in the face. To be “loved of the gods” and to be “happy,” as Aristotle said, is not easy. It means in Sophocles' writing finding one's true self in the real world. In Sophocles himself this happiness is an awesome achievement.²³

Still, whether we are convinced or not by this vision, it is a matter of more than historical interest to consider further what sort of world it presents and what position it gives to man. Two things we said in connection with the blinding were excluded: first, the idea of a tragic Oedipus who is nothing but a victim struggling in the grip of his fate; and second, the other extreme conclusion, that he is a free agent. The only fitness of “the worm on the hook” for his fate would be, so far as I can see, his impotence. As for free agent, it means—if it means anything at all—freedom of choice, and although we have been able to say of Oedipus that he chose to act and that this was profoundly expressive of his nature,²⁴ it would be obvious nonsense to say that Oedipus would choose to kill his father of his own free will. And then further, perhaps it is necessary to say, just because we have been making much of Oedipus' fitness or capacity for tragedy, that this does not signify a world in which the fatality is lodged in the character, at least not in the sense of tragedy which would have no existence except as it is created out of the psyche. In other words, this is not private tragedy, but tragedy which takes place in a world which has fatality built into it, therefore objective, public tragedy.

Then how does this built-in fatality function? That is the question we should like to be able to answer. Naturally, nobody could pretend to be able to dispose of so vast a question, but, as Aristotle might put it, we can still try to say something about it. If we look back once more to the command from Delphi with which the play begins we can say this: that Apollo confronts Oedipus with a fate which he, being the man he is, cannot but take up.²⁵ Doesn't that mean then that the god knows the particular fate that belongs to the particular man and knows his capacity to take it up?²⁶ Perhaps we can say that this is tragedy's way of expressing the terrible fitness or symmetry it sees between what is given to a man and what he does. And it is abundantly clear in the play that Apollo knows Oedipus through and through. Therefore, what sort of a world? One in which the gods know men but know at least some men to their misfortune. In other words, it seems that this is a world where the man, or the woman, who is known to the gods, or of whom they take notice, is a man who is in for trouble, headed for disaster. A merciless sort of world for some people then. Is that the point?

It is part of the point, but not the whole of it. Certain things are left in this world for certain men or women beyond, or along with trouble. And two characteristic positive findings or interests of tragedy I think we can put a name to: honor for one, and for the second, the capacity of a man to act and declare himself in his own actions. Honor, to which the Greeks were acutely sensitive, is the public recognition of a man's achievements. Accordingly, the heroes of tragedy win honor from the gods. Even Aphrodite, perhaps the cruelest divinity, while she brings about Phaedra's death (in the Hippolytus) also gives her “glory.” And, it might be added, Artemis in the same play goes beyond honor. She decrees perpetual honor for her devoted Hippolytus, but in explaining that she, being a goddess, may not weep for him, there is more than a suggestion that she gives him love and compassion as well as honor (1394). But it seems that honor is implicit in the tragic relation itself. For who are the men to whom the gods offer a fate and a destiny? They are the heroes. And what is a hero in tragedy? The man who has the capacity for tragedy. That is, the man who can and will take up his fate.²⁷ These are the men the gods know. Knowing them they see that they “walk proudly” (883-85), whereas only the gods have the right to be prond. Such men, it seems, the gods in their government of the world with its “high-footed laws” must bring down or, as in Artemis' case, keep hands off while they are brought down.²⁸ It is, to be sure, a merciless world but just as surely not one in which the gods act at random. Certain men the gods confront with a fate, and that in itself we are given to understand is a title of nobility.²⁹

Human pity for Oedipus there is in the Tyrannus, but not divine, and no divine honors are decreed for him. Honor certainly, and perhaps compassion, are implicit in the divine summons and the “marvelous” departure from life in the Coloneus (1665). By comparison, the earlier play remains silent, painfully silent. Nevertheless, at the end, as I have said more than once, this play contains the classic example of the man who acts and declares himself in his own actions. All men may have the capacity for action, but Greek tragedy is not much concerned with that. Its concern is with the men and women who have this capacity in a heightened degree, and in the fact that for such men, the world is inevitably tragic.³⁰ For the heightened capacity for action does not enable the hero to escape tragedy, only to go further and further into it. The Greek tragic world allows no room for taking your life into your own hands and making it something different from what it is. Nonetheless, it is you in the last analysis who make it. In other words, we come to the crucial fact of which the play by its present action gives eloquent evidence: that the fate comes about, and that the actor is essential to the process, whether now or in the past. A fate, it follows, without an actor would exist only in a secondary sense, as something written in the books of the gods, not lived. The tragic poet was certainly not interested in such an abstraction. What fascinates him is the man, the kind of man who, with his actions, brings the universe alive. In showing this, he makes the point, I suggest, that there is room in this universe, or opportunity for such great action.

A play where situation and character remain constant, where the past is taken into what happens on the stage, raises questions about time. And they are general questions affecting Greek tragedy as a whole; for the perspective on action in the Oedipus was not contrived for a single play. Ajax equally with Oedipus was active in his fate in the past. In fact, the perspective is an optique on the world that belongs to all. And a world in which Oedipus old or young remains the same and acts in the same situation must be a timeless world in some sense, at least one with no past in the historic sense; rather, since what it contains is a repeated enactment of the same factors, a world of a continuous present. This is thoroughly Greek, and to give it its Greek name, it is a world in being.³¹ And then we must go further; if a world in being, then not only with no historic past but with no future either. And this too is profoundly true of Greek tragedy. As we watch the progress of events, we hope passionately that things will become different. But it is the central truth of these tragedies that hope precisely prevents men from seeing things as they are and must continue to be; that, in the tragic world, hope is a delusion.³² The tragic function of the gods, for example, is very much that they force men to recognize and face the fact that there is no escape into the future from things as they are and must be.

Then, finally, we might raise the question: is it not true of all tragedy that it offers no escape into the future? I have referred earlier to the view that only later tragedy is capable of expressing a genuine interplay of character and circumstance, and I have tried to show that on the contrary nothing is more striking about this fixed world, this world in being as we are now calling it, than that by its repeated enactment or reenactment it is a being, fully alive, repeatedly enlivened by the actor. Not a Parmenidean world, therefore, which excludes motion and variety, for surely no one can deny the variety in Oedipus, or the fact that it registers itself on events. On the other hand, if it is claimed for other tragedy that it is capable of producing a new situation, is creative of wholly new events in a future, then that is another matter, for of this achievement the Greek was certainly not capable.

A Hellenist wonders, naturally, if the distinction is valid. What is the newness, the creative novelty, in Shakespeare? Is there a difference in kind from the Oedipus? Are Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello really changed, transformed in the course of the play, and do they by their choices and acts transform their world, the situation in which they act? Or, is tragedy there too the exploration of the fateful situation and the character or characters that fit it? And do we, the spectators, not hope that things will be different for this character or that, and yet know they will not? In whatever age, is it not just this point that tragedy makes to us—the ancient point that we cannot escape what is?

We are talking here about tragedy and tragedy alone. I do not believe that a fixed world of being was the only world the Greeks conceived of, and I am certainly not questioning the fact that since the Greeks, in history, religion, and science, a sense of change and novelty has been achieved which is not found in Greek tragedy. But I am asking if that sense of change is compatible with tragedy. In a world of genuine novelty, I myself find it difficult to imagine the kind of happening which the Greeks called by the name “tragedy.” And if there is a later drama that we still call tragedy, which represents such a world, I should be inclined to give it some other name in recognition of the fact that it has broken out of the tragic world into some other world.³³ In short, I wonder whether men who no longer believe in a world in being can go on writing tragedy.³⁴ Perhaps that is what O'Neill felt when he said it was so difficult for a dramatist to capture a “classic fate” in a modern play.

Notes

1. See above, Chapter 2, pp. 48 ff., for the implications of this exchange in relation to the self-discovery.

2. This question of time so far as I know has not been discussed in the literature. Letters (p. 104) speaks of the “telescoping of the present with the past or the imminent which is the essence of classic irony.” This is a suggestive remark but Letters does not follow it up. Knox (Oedipus, p. 41) says more: “The character of Oedipus in action in the present time of the play makes plausible and explains his actions in the past; it does this with especial force since one of the purposes of Oedipus' present action is precisely to reconstruct and understand his past.” I agree. However, I cannot see Knox's further point that the situation in the present is different from the one that existed in the past, because if it were it simply could not explain the past. See also Kirkwood, pp. 69 ff.

3. “I think you and he who plots it (Creon) will have reason to lament your purging of the land. If you didn't look old to me you would have realized to your cost … what your plots deserve” (401-03). Knox (p. 28) is able to say on the basis of these lines that Oedipus “disclaims any intention of punishing Teiresias.” The bald threat of physical violence here should not be minimized.

4. I cannot see Oedipus here as anything but a man acting in terrible excitement. But I can't agree with Reinhardt (p. 122) who thinks Oedipus' threat to kill Creon more a “passionate outburst” than a serious threat. Knox (pp. 17 ff.) thinks him deliberate and reflective. What Knox (p. 30) and Adams (pp. 95 ff.) are impressed with is not the fact that Oedipus wants Creon put to death but that Creon is not killed. To Knox this shows a “democratic temper” and, to Adams, Oedipus' “own essential goodness.” I must say that these interpretations strike me as extraordinarily lighthearted. The fact is that Oedipus barely escapes a terrible deed and, as he says, by no will of his own (688). He is, in fact, what Creon says he is: “sullen” …, “over-bearing” …, “ignorant” … (673-77).

5. See Kirkwood's interesting note (p. 69 n) stressing the point that Laius, by Oedipus' own account, “paid no equal penalty.”

6. Creon emphasizes the relationship: “For to cast off a noble friend I say is like casting off one's own life which is the thing he loves most” (611-12). This reminds one of Aristotle's statement, “a friend is another self” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1166a31). The lines, of course, bear ironically on the point that Oedipus is constantly injuring himself. See also Sheppard, p. lv, where he observes that a tyrant typically is unable to distinguish friend from foe. And Plato, Republic 575e, the tyrant “has no friends.”

7. Sophocles, through Creon, stresses Oedipus' ignorance in different ways here, most subtly thus: “I do not know and where I do not understand it is my habit to be silent” (569). A contrast runs through the whole scene of course, between the man governed by prudence … and the man who acts blindly, thus emphasizing Oedipus' ignorance. The contrast between the two is maintained to the end: Creon, “What I do not mean, it is not my habit to say idly” (1520).

   Perhaps Sophocles, Fr. 238N 924P should be read in this context: “The hardest evil to wrestle with is ignorance.” The sense seems to be that it is ignorance which makes a man most dangerous.

   One must remember that many things with Oedipus in the Oedipus are pushed to an extreme, and ignorance is one of them. But does his ignorance differ essentially from Ajax'? Ajax acted in madness sent upon him by Athena when he slaughtered the flocks. Deianeira certainly did not know any more than Oedipus what she was doing. What about Antigone? Could anyone make the plea of ignorance for her? It would hardly seem so. She knew the great risk when she chose to act. And yet when Creon makes it quite clear that she will in fact die, she like many another pleads that she too has been led by the gods. She speakes of herself as “ill-fated,” as being carried off by Death, as being a victim of the blind follies of her race (857-928).

8. Letters (p. 218) justifies Oedipus as “having his head almost split open.” This is fun, but for what happened see Jebb's comment on 804-12. The herald, and Laius, told Oedipus to get off the road. Evidently he wouldn't budge, so the driver pushed him, Oedipus hit him, and then Laius brought his stick down on Oedipus' head, etc. I would add from my own experience that it is very annoying and rather dangerous to meet someone who insists on having the road to himself, especially when you are driving a “narrow” … “hidden” … (1399) pass in the mountains in Europe.

9. Kirkwood, p. 276: “Scarcely anybody doubts that Oedipus is morally innocent.” This I find a rather ambiguous statement especially in view of the fact that Kirkwood himself is also able to speak about Oedipus' responsibility. But perhaps all that is meant is that Oedipus is a good man, which I should think nobody at all would question.

   Letters defends the innocence of Oedipus vigorously, and apparently thinks anybody who doesn't is a numbskull or worse. His case (p. 220) is based largely on the distinction between guilt and ritual uncleanness and on Oedipus' arguments in the Coloneus.

   Waldock, p. 167: “Oedipus is indisputably a victim; that fact is at the very heart of the drama.” He believes Oedipus' “deficiencies fade into nothingness.” Oedipus, as he thinks, is “normal,” and it is absurd that he should pay the price for being so (p. 146). Waldock does not want us to have anything to do with “the veritable matters behind human conflicts.” They “abolish the drama,” he believes. Sophocles, he says, “eschews thinking,” and Waldock is down on anybody who tries “smuggling significance into Oedipus Tyrannus” (p. 159); “There is no meaning in the Oedipus Tyrannus” (p. 168); “the theme of Lear is universal, Oedipus is not.”

10. See Whitman, pp. 122-46 for the opposite view, e.g., “Oedipus remains a type of human ability condemned to destruction by an external insufficiency in life itself.” See Kirkwood, p. 171 on the interpretations of recent “hero-worshippers.”

11. It has been argued that an Athenian jury would have acquitted Oedipus: see Sheppard, p. xxviii, and see Wilamowitz, Hermes, 34 (1899), pp. 55 ff. It seems to me that the only court Oedipus is judged by in the play is on Olympus (867). No doubt Creon too in the Antigone, for different reasons, would have been acquitted in law, but I think there can be no doubt that the gods find him guilty: the chorus does, he finds himself guilty (1257 ff.) and we, not as judges but as men, agree with him. To argue to a conclusion in the play from Athenian legal practice is open to the criticism of judging the play by criteria other than its own.

12. I am not sure whether Adams (p. 90) is justifying Oedipus' conduct toward Teiresias when he says that his suspicion of the seer is not unfounded. To say “they are the natural suspicions of any tyrannos” does not of course justify, although it does explain, and that may be all that Adams means. What his pages here (pp. 90-95) really bring out very well is the fact that given his situation (ruler) and his character (at this point tyrannical), Oedipus' conduct with Teiresias and Creon is thoroughly convincing. Letters on the other hand (p. 223) apparently thinks there is nothing tyrannical about Oedipus. I think Oedipus in certain circumstances behaves tyrannically. I do not mean by that he is a tyrant, and I think the play shows the word … as no more applicable to Oedipus than it would be to some other king when he behaves badly. See Knox, passim, for quite a different view. And for Knox' point (pp. 74 ff.) that an Athenian audience would have accepted Oedipus' suspicions of Creon with relish because they were familiar with such plots, to that I must say that he (and Whitman whom he cites) are a good deal more complacent about the Athenian suspicion of plots and counterplots than, say, Thucydides, who regarded it as a sign of moral deterioration.

13. The difference between the two plays in this matter is, of course, very striking. We cannot read one play in terms of the other without getting into difficulties. Thus, for example, Sophocles, when he wrote the Antigone, had no thought of the Coloneus in his mind, for in the earlier play (50), Oedipus, according to Ismene, had died “odious and infamous” (also it seems to be the implication of 897 ff. that he had died in Thebes). On the other hand, no one can doubt that when he wrote the Coloneus he did have the Oedipus in mind.

    Does Sophocles say in the Coloneus that Oedipus was innocent in the patricide and the marriage? Perhaps he does, though the question is open to some doubt on the grounds that it is Oedipus who is doing the talking and not Sophocles. Perhaps the whole question is a biographical one. Did Sophocles have second thoughts on the question of Oedipus' guilt, and did that question interest him in the later play in a way that it had not in the earlier one? It is also possible that he felt the Oedipus had been misunderstood, that people had drawn conclusions on this score (like mine, for example) which he had not intended and did not like. But equally possible is that he felt that he himself had done less than justice to Oedipus and therefore wrote the Coloneus as his palinode, the amend of the gods and his amend too. Did the old gentleman also see a dilemma on this question of guilt left by the Oedipus which confronted us and him with an obscure, unresolved, and terrifying problem? And did he now with other ideas about guilt and innocence, seeing perhaps more clearly—and less tragically—set about resolving the dilemma? These are different ways in which one can make sense of the difference between the two plays. Each of them, it is worth noting, implies that Sophocles, whether he meant it or not, had himself implied that Oedipus was guilty (and, of course, Oedipus in the Coloneus blames himself for thinking just that at the time: 437 ff., 768). The one thing we can be sure of is that the criterion for judging guilt or innocence in the Oedipus is not to be found in the Coloneus or in Sophocles' state of mind but in the play itself. See Nilsson, Geschichte, p. 758 on the “innocence” in the Coloneus as reflecting a change in Sophocles' attitude towards the gods. Letters (p. 295) finds that Sophocles “virtually remade his hero.”

14. I do not think Sophocles wrote the Oedipus to show that Oedipus was guilty. What he is doing, as I see it, is putting before us the sort of man Oedipus was or must have been, and the sort of world it must have been that he lived in for such things to happen. Therefore he did not write the Creon scene with the idea of proving that after all Oedipus was guilty; nevertheless, from the scene and the number of other things which show Oedipus' temper in the play it follows that he is guilty. And not guilty in a ritualistic sense … but guilty in a sense that his character and will, as demonstrated by the action, are implicated. Sheppard, pp. xxiv ff., puts all the emphasis on the blood-pollution. Oedipus certainly becomes pure … and the theme of purification is very strong in the play: cf. pp. 466 ff. See Jebb's excellent remarks OC, p. xxii) on the conclusion of the play. They imply, I believe, that not only is there justice in the “amend” but also in the suffering that the gods had led Oedipus through.

15. See Sheppard, p. xxii, for an example of the opposite view: “Sophocles has been at pains to make the hero innocent: and since the tragic truth was true before the play began, had Oedipus been as reasonable as Creon, and as modest as the chorus, the tragic result would, in Apollo's own time, have come to light.” This amounts to saying that Oedipus' character has nothing to do with his fate and also that he is “the injured innocent”; to saying that the play says, in effect, “How good a man and how terrible and undeserved a fate,” and I should think one would have to say if Sophocles had been at pains to make Oedipus innocent he could very easily have done a better job of it.

16. I do not believe there are really any exceptions to the rule. It might be argued that there is a difference in this respect between the Oedipus and, for example, the Antigone. However, I think it more apparent than real. Creon has already issued his edict before the play begins (and Antigone has already revolted against it). This does not mean that Creon's actions are not decisive in bringing about his fate; it means rather that his present conduct towards Antigone shows how he became fated in the first place. Further, at the end of the play the process of a man bringing about his fate is “repeated.” When Creon through Teiresias comes to some realization of his position, then he is like Oedipus in his flight from Apollo's prediction, seeking to avoid his fate but precisely doing everything (the burial of Polyneices first, for example) to bring it to its final completion.

17. This is the account given in the Phoenissae: Jocasta speaking, “My brother Creon proclaimed my nuptials, to join my bed in marriage with him who could read the riddle of the subtle maiden” (47-49). Apollodorus, III, v. 8: “Creon proclaimed that he would give both kingdom and the wife of Laius to the one who solved the riddle.” In the Coloneus (525 f.) Oedipus argues that Thebes “bound” him to the fatal marriage and when the chorus say “you did it,” he replies that it was a “gift” which he wishes he had never “taken up” … (539-41). We must bear in mind that Oedipus in the Coloneus speaks proudly and passionately in his own defense, and we should be careful therefore about taking him exactly at his own estimate.

18. Compare 145-46: “For either with the god's help we shall turn out lucky … or lost. …”

19. So Teiresias, 413: “You have sight and you do not see where you are in evil.”

20. It is what Oedipus did—the work of his “hands,” “what things I wrought” (in the pass), and “what I did” (the marriage)—that haunts him later (1398-1403).

21. There are perhaps two points to be kept in mind about Oedipus from the Coloneus. The first from his defense of the patricide and the marriage, that his parents were the guilty ones, not he: “And yet how could I be really evil … ? I who acted in reply to what I had suffered, so that had I done those things knowingly I would not even then have been evil … ?” This is going pretty far. The second point has to do with the Polyneices' scene, in which it becomes so distressingly clear that Oedipus in his wrath is quite willing to send his son to certain and horrible death. And this is distressing not only to us of a later age, as Antigone's intercession for her brother at this point makes quite clear. One is loath to recognize the capacity in Oedipus to kill his father knowing that he was his father, but it is not out of the question.

    There can be no doubt that Sophocles accepts the common view that these are the most unnatural and frightful acts and makes the most of it (for a mockery of this attitude see André Gide's Oedipe). The point, or one point of the plague is that what Oedipus has done causes a revulsion in nature herself. Other crimes. Ajax' for example, or Creon's in Antigone, are great offenses against the political, moral, and religious order but they are comprehensible, somehow contained within a context of law, the state etc. as Oedipus' cannot be. Ajax is finally tried in a sort of court of his peers. Oedipus is beyond that. He in his singular fate is a creature apart, beyond human judgment. This point is made much of. Thus Creon at the end says only a god can deal with Oedipus (1518). The public measure of his apartness is given in these horrendous words, also by Creon: “But if you no longer feel shame before the race of mortal men at least respect the flame of the lord Helios which pastures all creatures, so as not to show thus a naked pollution, one which neither the earth, nor the sacred rain, nor the light will receive” (1424-28).

22. Oedipus is what he charges Teiresias with (371), “blind in his [noüs].” This is a state of his being in contrast with what he appears to be, or thinks he is. See Reinhardt, pp. 116 ff. Reinhardt (p. 110) points out that Creon's suspicions in the Antigone are a matter of the external situation whereas with Oedipus they have to do with his soul.

    See Dodds, p. 5 on ate: “Always, or practically always, ate is a state of mind”; but also (p. 38): “Ate always, I think, retains the implication that the ruin is supernaturally determined.”

23. See Schadewaldt's brilliant treatment of this question (pp. 28 ff.).

24. Snell (p. 123) says of the tragedy that with it “for the first time in history man begins to look at himself as the maker of his own decisions.” But “decision,” “choice,” etc. are terms I think which when applied to the Greek tragedy bring a good deal of ambiguity with them. There is little reflective decision pictured to us in the Greek. It is certainly more implicit than explicit. But see Snell, pp. 124 ff., on Medea. I prefer to limit myself to speaking of the decisive act which is expressive of the character. It is well known that what we commonly mean by “choice,” “will,” “decision” etc., is not easy to find even in Plato and Aristotle.

25. See Sophocles, Fr. 879N, 964P: “This is the gift of the god, and whatever gifts the gods give one must never flee, my child.” Also Philoctetes: “The fortunes that are given men by the gods one must bear” (1316-17). Cf. Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 147: “The gifts of the gods we men endure of necessity however much we suffer.” And Solon 12, 64 (Hiller): “and the gifts of the immortal gods are inescapable.”

    Plato's myth of Er (Republic, 614-21) offers an interesting comparison. The man who had the first lot, and therefore the first choice of the patterns of life which lay on the ground, sprang forward and blindly picked up the greatest tyranny. He discovered he had chosen a fate which among other evils led to the eating of his own children. He complained bitterly that the fault lay not with him but with the gods. Plato makes a point of saying that the man was not bad, but that he acted quickly and in ignorance. Plato does not deny a certain leading by the gods. Necessity and her daughters in Er preside over the disposition of the lots and the lives. These are the symbols of law and order. Over against them are the souls. The two sides meet, as it were, when the individual takes his place within the scheme and chooses. The choosing in other words takes place within a divine control and at the same time is dictated by the individual's character.

    So much tragedy and Plato have in common. Oedipus is not “bad” … either; the quick, headlong acting in ignorance of the consequences by the first chooser in Er is like him, and it is clear that Plato here had the grisliest stories of tragedy in mind—from Cronos to Thyestes. Plato claims the chooser is responsible … and so in its own way, although to a lesser degree, does tragedy. The differences are, of course, deep. Plato gives a choice, not an unlimited one (the lots are to some extent fixed, if only by the series of numbers) but a choice which contains the real possibility in the immortal history of the soul, through knowledge, of escape from evil and suffering. Such a possibility is nothing but an illusion in tragedy. Also there is the difference between the two formulations that in tragedy the divine order is not abstract and unmoved like necessity. Apollo comes up close, in effect, personally, to the hero. The “offering” of a fate there is direct and active, and it is, so to speak, the “right” fate from which, therefore, there is no escape. Paradoxically in this rightness, the fact that it belongs to him, the character comes most fully alive.

26. “But Zeus and Apollo are sharp and they know the destiny of mortals” (Oedipus 497-99).

27. Antigone is a case in point. She goes beyond … (see Adams' observations on this point; p. 44) and yet compels the admiration of gods and men. None the less, in the justice of things which is honored and protected by the gods, she must pay the price of this greatness. This, it seems to me, is the point of the second stasimon at 613-14, although the lines are admittedly obscure and the text is not certain.

28. On the gods bringing heroes to their doom, cf. Herodotus, VI, 135 on Miltiades. Aeschylus expresses this relation between gods and men pretty clearly through Darius' ghost in the Persians: “Alas, swift indeed has the completion of the oracles come, and upon my son Zeus has brought them through. I for long have been confident the gods would work them out; but whenever a man hurries on himself the god too joins in.” Athena to Ajax illustrates this in grim fashion when she says “Since it is your pleasure [to beat the imagined Odysseus] go ahead with your intent” (114-15). See Knox, HCS, LXV (1961) for a somewhat different view of Athena's relation to the hero.

    Also the gods, it seems, must not only bring down but they must publish abroad the whole truth of the matter. So, in the second stasimon here, things must be clear so that all men “can point to them” (902); and in the fourth, “all-seeing time has found Oedipus out and judges the marriage that was no marriage, etc.” Athena shows Ajax' crime to Odysseus for him to proclaim it to all the Argives (Ajax 66). And perhaps it is this function of the gods in the life of Oedipus we would recognize in the brief account of the Odyssey: “Suddenly the gods made these things known among men” (XI, 280).

29. See Sophocles, Fr., 703N, 770P: “And what a daimon you will come before … who knows neither what is fair-seeming, nor favor, but cleaves to Justice absolute alone.”

    And see Blumenthal (RE., col. 1086) succinctly that it is an Hellenic law that “a great fate grips only the great.”

30. The ancient sentiment is well-known, particularly in Aeschylus Cho., 312. Cf. also Sophocles, Fr. 209N, 229P: “For the one who does something is bound to suffer.”

    And of course the capacity for action means also the capacity for suffering. Cf. Schadewaldt, p. 24: “Oedipus ist gross durch seine Fähigkeit zum Leiden, zu einem Leid von grosser Art.”

    On Creon without the capacity either for acting or for suffering, see Reinhardt, p. 142 f.

31. The chorus of the Trachiniae express a similar thought: “The having of evils and the waiting on them are equal” (952).

32. In Sophocles, hope feeds men: “For it is hope that feeds the majority of men.” (Fr., 862N, 948P), but again doom it is powerless: “Fow how shall I being a man fight with divine fortune where hope avails nothing in the face of terror?” (197N, 196P). In Aeschylus, Suppl., p. 96f., Zeus hurls men from “their high-towered hopes” to ruin. For hope, the solace and the delusion, see Thucydides, 5.103.

33. On common ground between Christian tragedy and Greek, see Aylen, pp. 158-65. Enlightenment, Christianity, Naturalism, are often said to be hostile to tragedy. Cf. Saint Evremond (De la tragédie ancienne et moderne): “The spirit of our religion is directly opposite to that of tragedy.” He disliked its “black ideas” and thought he had banished them.

34. Aylen (p. 186), far from believing that the possibility of tragedy has been eliminated, maintains that philosophy is dead, science limited in what it can say, and that for the future the best possibility of illuminating life lies with tragedy.

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