Oedipus at Colonus

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 401

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Choral Song 1

Scene 2-Choral Song 4

Scenes 5-6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Themes

The Hero as a Source of Collective Immortality

In ancient Greek religion, the mythic hero was believed to have lived in the distant past and belonged to an earlier race of mortals who were descended from the gods. Part human and part god, these heroes were believed to have been larger and stronger than mortals of the present age. Though their lives were often short and their deaths violent (Oedipus is an important exception to both these norms), their stories made them immortal, and by sharing and honoring these stories, ancient Greeks took on a share of that immortality for themselves.

Because there was initially no written language to record these heroes’ stories, the stories were passed on orally from one generation to the next, a project in which tragedies like Oedipus at Colonus participated. What mattered about telling their stories was not recording facts, whose authenticity could not be fact-checked against existing sources, but preserving stories that were essential to collective and personal identity, to notions of community, and to the moral aspirations of those who told and heard these stories. Because they were descended from the gods, mythic heroes possessed eternal power that did not disappear from the world with the hero’s death. As such, they were seen as vital intermediaries between the mortal and divine worlds. By sharing their stories, people could share in their immorality and assert the immortality of the city. Ritual honors paid to mythic heroes were intended to appease the hero and harness his power for the benefit of the community. In Athens, for example, a legend circulated that Theseus rose up to help the Athenians fight against the Persians at Marathon. This belief in the hero’s eternal protection served as a bulwark against the fear that all things, including cities and peoples, could be erased.

This power of the hero is not explicitly stated in Oedipus at Colonus, but all the action turns on it. Creon and Theseus fight what is essentially a battle for possession of Oedipus’s body and the protection it confers. When Oedipus arrives in Athens offering his body as a gift for the city, it is understood that he is offering to become a cult hero for Athens because heroes’ mortal remains are the physical link between their eternal spirits and the material world.

Because he exists within the narrative, the Theseus of Oedipus at Colonus does not immediately recognize what the Athenian spectators do. It takes time for him to understand, providing Sophocles the opportunity to telegraph across the play what makes Oedipus important as a hero. Though he is blind and in need when he arrives in Athens, he nevertheless has the power to defeat his enemies by withholding his body from them and benefit his protectors by granting it to them. Theseus does not know this from the outset, but because he acts piously, offering Oedipus sanctuary, preventing Creon from absconding with him, and recovering his daughters, he receives Oedipus’s “battered body” (Line 576) as his reward.

By telling the story of this hero, Oedipus, and his journey to immortalization, Sophocles’s play reinforces what needs to be remembered about heroes. In life, they are in many ways more human and vulnerable than ordinary people. They commit shocking, excessive acts, and they suffer for their crimes. But they are also purified through that suffering, and when their mortal lives end, their eternal lives begin. By telling his story, Sophocles participates in the project of eternal memory, honoring Oedipus’s power in the process.

The Interwoven Nature of Fate and Individual Will

The play opens with Oedipus arguing his cause before the Chorus. Having killed his father and married his mother, Oedipus has transgressed the gods’ laws so severely that his very presence threatens to pollute the city of Athens. Nonetheless, he argues that he cannot be blamed for these events: They were fated and thus would have happened no matter what he did. The play then becomes an extended meditation on the relationship between fate and individual will, as Sophocles prompts his audience to question the degree to which choice is involved in events that are predestined.

Across the play, Oedipus attributes his banishment from Thebes to different characters, but the root cause is the same. He murdered his father and married his mother, and this caused pollution that brought on the plague. Having violated sacred law, Oedipus becomes dangerous to Thebes. His presence there harms the people, and they must cast him out to save themselves. If the play is interpreted purely at the narrative level, then, Oedipus is responsible for the plague because of his actions, but the ancient Greeks would have understood causality as more multifaceted.

Obliquely referenced in the play is that the gods had cursed Laius to die at his son’s hands because he committed an act of sexual violence against the son of Pelops. From the moment Oedipus is born, then, he is a threat to his father. Laius cannot kill his son without incurring the same pollution that Oedipus later does, so instead, he abandons him with the expectation that he will die. Only he does not die but is saved by a shepherd, who brings him to the Corinthian king and queen. When Oedipus later learns of the prophecy that he will kill his father, he flees from Corinth to avoid it, which places him on the road, where he unknowingly meets and murders his father.

Though Oedipus could not have known that the party on the road included his father, he did make the mistake of thinking that he could outrun the prophecy, an act of hubris. Further, Oedipus apparently never stopped to question whether he understood the prophecy, and he did not confer with his Corinthian parents but chose instead to act alone. Both could also be considered acts of hubris since for the ancient Greeks no mortal has absolute knowledge, and every mortal is part of and responsible to a human community that functions best when it acts together.

In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus repeatedly denies responsibility for his crimes because they were fated, but it is clear that the choices he made contributed to the outcomes he experienced. The hero Perseus, for example, was similarly under a prophecy that he would kill his grandfather Acrisius. This prophecy is fulfilled but entirely by accident. Acrisius happens to be among the spectators of games in which Perseus is competing, and his discus throw veers off course, striking and killing Acrisius. Thus, even though the prophecy is fulfilled, it is done in a way that leaves Perseus blameless.

For the ancient Greeks, then, fate and individual will are interwoven in ways that can be difficult to untangle. One never knows how a prophecy will be fulfilled, thus one’s choices matter. Oedipus did not make the best choices, but the degree to which this makes him responsible—given the inexorability of fate—does not have a straightforward answer. It would be debated even in ancient times not to condemn him but to understand causality and responsibility.

The Significance of Place and Sanctuary

Ancient Athenians of the classical period prided themselves on being autochthonous, which for them may have even meant that they sprang from the very earth and had always and only inhabited Athens. For ancient Greeks generally, one’s native land was sacred, but the connection was especially powerful when tied to a god or hero. Heroes’ mortal remains were believed to be connected to their source of power, so where they were interred was of crucial importance because they could be understood as intermediary figures between gods and mortals. In this sense, the land was the place where gods, heroes, and mortals intersected.

These interconnections are woven into the play from the beginning. By setting the Prologue in a sacred space dedicated to the goddesses who punish kin murderers and named for a hero, Sophocles communicates the gravity and import of Oedipus’s arrival in Athens. It was not his native land, but he will become the hero for the native Athenians, for reflective of their beneficent power, the Eumenides will not punish Oedipus but oversee his transition from his wandering to his sanctuary, and from his sanctuary to his eternity.

The prophecy is the narrative justification for Creon coming to Athens in force: He needs Oedipus because whoever has his support will win the war. In addition, from the perspective of Greek religion, Creon cannot allow Oedipus to slip from his grasp because at stake is not only the immediate question of who will rule Thebes but also the question of the city’s eternal protection.

On the narrative level, Creon is unable to achieve his intention because of the piety and propriety of Theseus, who pledges to honor his obligation, to both Oedipus and Zeus, to provide sanctuary in his sacred city. But there is again a religious meaning. The play suggests that Theseus, a native of Athens, is fated to secure Oedipus’s power, which the city still enjoys in the historical present.

When reporting Oedipus’s death, the Attendant refers to it as “wonderful,” for “[n]o weeping marked his passing. No disease tortured him” (Lines 1663-1664). Singing with the Chorus later, Antigone reiterates the point, saying her father had “the kind of death | that anyone might crave—not slain by Ares, god of war, | nor drowned by ocean wave” (Lines 1682-1684). Compared to many heroes in Greek myths, Oedipus’s passing was, as the Attendant and Antigone remark, notably gentle, unlike the violent deaths of war heroes and surviving warriors who died at sea returning home from Troy. But it was not only heroes who died these tortured deaths. Athenians themselves endured war and relied on their ships for the survival of their city. The precarity of life amid so much war—and the likelihood of dying far from home—meant that notions of home and sanctuary took on even greater significance. Oedipus’s relationship with place is unusual in this context. After his death, Antigone remarks that he fulfilled his lifelong wish: to die in a foreign land with people there to mourn him. Rather than returning to the place of his birth, Oedipus puts down roots in a new place, becoming part of that place’s history and its present. The presence of his body confers protection on Athens, and thus, he offers sanctuary to the place that became a sanctuary to him.