Editor’s Introduction (2024)

Sophocles probably saw himself mainly as a poet. He must have been reputed to be a wise man as well, for he was elected or appointed to important positions in Athenian public life. But he was never a professional teacher or sophist, though the self-proclaimed sophist Protagoras once implied that all the great poets were really sophists in disguise (Plato, Protagoras 316d).

Plato drew the boundaries of philosophy after Sophocles’s death, making sure to exclude all such poets. Evidently Plato saw Sophocles and his kind as competitors in the marketplace of ideas who could be mistaken for philosophers. They had an influence on ethical and political thinking that was baneful in Plato’s judgment, and all the more so because it could so easily be accepted as wisdom.1 Plato writes of the ancient war between philosophy and poetry, but in truth the war is largely of his own devising, as Plato was the first to consider philosophy a genre distinct from poetry and rhetoric.

Certainly, the tragic poets differed from Plato on the behavior of gods and heroes. Plato does not identify Sophocles in his criticism of tragic poetry, but Sophocles’s plays show most of the features of tragic poetry to which he objects in the Republic. For example, Plato’s gods are exemplars of virtue, while Sophocles’s gods are not models that humans should follow. Plato leaves little or no room in his scheme of virtues for compassion, while Sophocles leads us to admire Odysseus for his compassion in the Ajax. He does not encourage us to emulate the ruthlessness of Odysseus’s patroness, the goddess Athena. Plato sees grief as a weakness, because he holds it to be based on the ungrounded belief that death is an evil, but Sophocles’s heroes are given to highly emotional displays of grief, as are the choruses.

In recent years, however, some philosophers have been receptive to the wisdom that may be found in ancient tragic poets. Of these Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum stand out.2 This volume illustrates the admiration that Sophocles is earning from philosophers of our time, and the first of its chapters in particular replies to philosophers’ objections to finding wisdom in poetry. Other chapters bring out aspects of this wisdom. The perspectives of this book are those of the philosophers who have contributed to it. Each is unique.

We have chosen to write about the Oedipus plays because, among other reasons, these plays can enrich our concept of self-understanding if we read them closely and with attention to philosophical issues.3In staging Oedipus’s progress toward self-understanding in the two plays, Sophocles has dramatized insights into the process by which we may all come to see our place in larger narratives. The result is more complex and more faithful to human experience than most of what we find in the philosophical tradition.

The Poet

Sophocles was born about 495 b.c.e. at Colonus, just outside the city of Athens, and lived till about 405. He first competed in the festival of tragic plays in 468 and won against Aeschylus. He was the most successful Athenian playwright of the fifth century, composing about 120 plays and winning at least eighteen victories (more than Euripides and Aeschylus put together). Each victory represented a set of four plays, three tragedies and a satyr play. More than half of his plays were victorious. Sad to say, only seven complete tragedies survive today.

The Athenians made him a treasurer (a position of great trust) in 443 b.c.e. and a strategos (general), with Pericles, in 441—probably for a diplomatic rather than a military mission. At the city’s moment of greatest need, after the disaster of 413 in Sicily, the Athenians turned to Sophocles as one of the ten advisers empowered to see them through the crisis, which was both military and constitutional. He was then over eighty years old. After his death in 406/5 they honored him with a cult as a hero in his own right.4

Dating the plays is difficult. We have firm dates for neither of the Oedipus plays. Oedipus Tyrannus (hereafter OT) was probably produced some time after the plague struck Athens. Most scholars accept the period 428–25 b.c.e. for the first production of OT.5

As for Oedipus at Colonus (hereafter OC), we know when it was produced but not when it was written. It was first performed after Sophocles’s death, in 402/1 b.c.e., soon after the defeat of Athens by Sparta, the bloody reign of the Thirty Tyrants, and the restoration of democracy,. Sophocles may have written OC soon after OT, but most scholars are inclined to accept the ancient tradition that it is a late work, composed after 411 and the foundation of government by the Four Hundred, who were associated with Colonus as members of the class of Knights, and had once convened there. Ancient sources tell us that Sophocles wrote the play at the very end of his life, but these are very late sources and have not persuaded all modern scholars. It is too natural a hypothesis that a play about a very old hero was written by a very old writer. Some scholars think that the play was written in stages, and only the final draft in Sophocles’s last years. Some scholars think Sophocles introduced the episodes concerning Oedipus’s sons later, in his own extreme old age, but most readers in recent years prefer to interpret the play as an organic whole.6

The Plays

Sophocles’s two plays about Oedipus were probably separated by twenty-five years, during which Athens lurched from suffering several years of deadly plague to its gradual, terrifying defeat by the arms of Sparta.7 The central character, however, is living out the same story in both works—playing out a family curse. We learn in the first play that Laius,8 fearing death from his own son, tried to have baby Oedipus killed. In the second play we will see the old man Oedipus calling down a curse on his two boys, and this curse will work, as we should remember from the opening scene of the Antigone, the first of the Theban plays to have been written. On the day before the sun rises on the action of that play, Oedipus’s sons have killed each other at one of the seven gates of the city.

In Greek, as in Latin, the concept of the sacred is close cousin to that of the cursed, both in language and in thought. The first play ends with Oedipus dragged to his lowest point by the curse; the second play will end with his bringing a blessing to Athens—sacred himself, leading the king of Athens into sacred space, the blind leading the sighted, the lame leading the healthy young king. In this, the second play ends in a miracle. There is nothing in literature to compare with this pair of plays that let us see the same basic myth through different lenses. The first play was the product of a poet in vibrant middle age, the second of a man who was probably in his eighties, with the grand vision of a very old poet still at the height of his powers.

We have good reason for reading the plays together. We want to ask how much, or how little, Oedipus has changed as he has aged—whether his habits of rage have moderated, and whether he sees himself in the same way in the later play as he did in the earlier. (Three of the chapters of this volume address those questions, the chapters by Ledbetter, Kitcher, and Woodruff.) In any case, the later play presents Oedipus’s story in a different light. Now it is a tale of suffering that has brought a great man down to the level of a homeless beggar, who has been driven out of one town after another until his suffering meets compassion in the outskirts of Athens. There, Theseus offers safety to Oedipus, while Oedipus brings a blessing that is to save Athens in its hour of greatest need—an hour fast coming on Athens at the time the play was written.

Has Sophocles himself remained unchanged in the interval between writing the plays? In the first play, his chorus sings of the tragic pattern of overreaching followed by catastrophe (though they don’t make clear how this applies to the case of Oedipus). There, in OT, they imply that some sort of happiness is in store for those who live in reverence and do not reach too far. But in the second play, they mourn the pain they say is universal in human life.9 Perhaps the poet grew more pessimistic in old age.

The plays are closely related—and not merely because they share a character or because one is sequel to the other. The plots form a reverse parallel:10

This is not the only connection. The plays share language and themes in the choral odes, and the chorus itself is similar in representing local elders.

The title of the first play calls for special comment. In Greek, at least since the Hellenistic period, it has been called Oedipous Tyrannos, abbreviated by scholars as OT (though to Aristotle it was simply Sophocles’s Oedipus). This title is usually transliterated on the Roman model as Oedipus Tyrannus. Some authors have called the play Oedipus Rex (the title of the Latin play by Seneca), but this is less common today. The Latin word rex translates Greek basileus “king,” which in archaic usage can also mean “judge,” a meaning retained in the title of the magistrate overseeing the judiciary in Athens, the king archon. The term “king” carried a connotation of honor not found in tyrannos.11 In archaic Greek, tyrannos meant “ruler” and carried no unpleasant connotation. But with the overthrow of the Athenian tyrants and the establishment of democracy, tyrannos acquired a more specialized meaning: a ruler who has brought himself to power and so lacks the legitimacy of an elected official or a basileus such as Theseus. Fear of tyrants was a major force in Athenian politics during Sophocles’s lifetime. The story of Alcibiades is a striking example: he was a brilliant general and ought to have led the expedition to Sicily that the Assembly had voted for at his urging. But his enemies played the fear of tyranny against him and had him arrested on charges of impiety. The loss of his leadership cost the Athenians dearly (Thucydides 6.53–61).

The moral and political status of a tyrannos in OT is an interesting and complex issue. On this the second stasimon sheds light (863 ff.), as does the speech in which Creon indicates that tyrants cannot sleep at night for fear of being overthrown (584–86). Indeed, fear of being overthrown is a major motivator of Oedipus’s actions in the first half of the play; hence his suspicions of Creon and Tiresias. A basileus presumably would sleep more soundly, secure in his legitimacy—as Laius no doubt did, once he thought he had eliminated the son who was destined to kill him. So the title of OT has significance that should not be eclipsed in translation.12

Oedipus started in Thebes as a tyrant in that he earned, rather than inherited, his power. He is not a tyrant in Plato’s sense, who would be driven by insatiable desires, nor is he the sort of tyrant Solon warned about, who would depend on a troop of spearmen for his power.13 Oedipus has the best interests of his city at heart, and he does not have a military escort.

He is a king in truth, but he does not know it. The word basileus does occur in OT, but quite late, when the chorus addresses the disgraced Oedipus as the man they have called king since his destruction of the sphinx (1202). The lovely irony is that his legitimacy as basileus (vs. tyrannos) is declared just when his status as pariah is known. The same breath of truth makes it known that he is son and heir of the king and that he is the land’s pollution.

In this volume Ahrensdorf’s chapter shows how clear it is that Sophocles meant to designate Oedipus as a tyrannos, but also that he is a most untyrannical tyrant: even his anger at Tiresias and Creon can be explained without attributing tyrant qualities to him. Ahrensdorf compares the enlightened, rational rule of Oedipus to that of Pericles in Athens and builds on that analogy. Reeve, by contrast, brings out Oedipus’s failures of rationality, and Woodruff finds some tyrannical features in Oedipus’s character.14

We know only a little of the plays Aeschylus and Euripides wrote about the fall of Oedipus.15 Scholars do not think that either play showed Oedipus as a tyrant, or that either play dwelt, as OT does, on the process of discovery. Sophocles’s play draws out the discovery over nearly twelve hundred lines. The main action staged in OT is that of Oedipus discovering the truth that horrifies him—his ambitious promises to solve the crime, his inquiries of oracles, prophets, and servants, his initial suspicions of a coup, and then the discovery itself. Sophocles may have designed the cognitive failures that Reeve points out in order to make this slow process credible to an audience. The actions that fulfilled the oracle—killing his father and marrying his mother—these have already happened and are merely reported on stage. So the play is more about discovery than it is about the fulfillment of oracles.

Also, keep in mind that the play was composed not for reading but for performance. Try to imagine how each scene might be staged, and how it would affect a live audience. The chorus, on stage the whole time, gives cues to the audience as to how best to respond emotionally to what audience and chorus are seeing together.

The second play’s title shows that it is set at Colonus, and this too has special significance. Colonus was Sophocles’s birthplace; it also had special associations for the upper middle class known as knights— citizens who could afford to keep horses and join the cavalry. In 411 (around the probable date of composition for this play) Athens was taken by a conservative coup that set up an oligarchical government—rule by the “Four Hundred.” In order to appeal to the knights against the lower classes, the oligarchs used Colonus as the site for the assembly that set aside the Athenian constitution in their favor. Whether this had anything to do with Sophocles’s choice of themes for the play we do not know.16 But there is nothing in the play to imply that Sophocles sided against the democracy in 411.17 The chorus is made up of old men of no particular class, and if there is a political bias in the play it is against civil war.

Colonus had a grove sacred to the Eumenides, who, before being tamed at Athens, had been the Furies who pursued Orestes for killing his mother. Colonus also had an altar to Poseidon, who is honored in the play for his two great gifts to Athens: horses and ships (lines 710 ff.). Horses, of course, belong to the knights, but ships are the mainstay of Athens’s military and commercial success, and ships give power to the common people, who were needed to man them. Greek warships were rowed mainly by citizens whose expertise with oars gave the city a naval advantage. The more Athens depended on shipping, therefore, the more its leaders had to cultivate the lower classes. So Sophocles may have tried in the play to remind the warring factions in the city of their common heritage from Poseidon.18

To understand OC we need to appreciate the importance of graveside cults for dead heroes. Sophocles’s audience believed that the graves of heroes could have protective powers. In some cases, heroic graves were the sites for religious observances. One of the few historical figures who received the honor of a cult at his grave was Sophocles himself, probably for his role in bringing the worship of the healing god Asclepius to Athens.19

Sophocles’s Ajax turned on the value of heroic graves, as Athenians felt they benefited from his cult, and they had named a tribe after him. King Agamemnon had planned to sentence Ajax to a punishment worse than death for trying to assassinate him: leaving him unburied, without a grave. Had Agamemnon prevailed, Ajax’s shade could not have had the honor of a hero cult, and Athens would have been deprived of his beneficent presence. A similar story is true of Oedipus: he must die in the neighborhood of Athens to bring the city his benefits. The death he will have is a mysterious gift of the gods—a gift of honor for him and for Athens protection from enemies at war. The OC shows Oedipus’s progress toward this end.

As Sophocles was writing this play, he probably had in mind the perils faced by Athens in the final years of the war with Sparta and Thebes and their allies. True, Theban forces had been defeated in a skirmish not far from Colonus, but the war was going badly for Athens in Sophocles’s later years. Soon after he died, the city would be defeated by its enemies. Athens would be saved from total destruction not by the Thebans (who hated Athens) but by the Spartan desire to balance the ascendant power of Thebes with a chastened Athens. The restoration of democracy in Athens a few years later must have seemed a miraculous rebirth, and Sophocles’s audience, in seeing this play at the time of that rebirth, must have felt a thrill at the prescience of their poet, who foresaw that the city would be saved from Thebes. If any city seemed to have divine protectors at that time it was Athens.

The Chapters of This Volume

In “Oedipus Tyrannus and the Cognitive Value of Literature,” Noël Carroll enters the war Plato began. He reviews thoroughly the arguments philosophers have given against allowing cognitive value in fiction. His response begins with showing that what counts as cognitive is wider than critics have thought. In this he draws on a useful interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics. Literature draws on knowledge of what it is that people of a certain sort are likely to do or say, and it communicates that knowledge to its readers. He illustrates this from Oedipus Tyrannus, where Sophocles shows Oedipus acting in ways that are appropriate for the sort of person he is shown to be.

In “The Killing Feet: Evidence and Evidence Sensitivity in Oedipus Tyrannus,” C. D. C. Reeve raises an important question that most readers have missed: How well does Oedipus evaluate the evidence on which he bases his decisions? The answer is that in his impetuosity Oedipus rushes to careless judgments, time after time. He wavers over the value of religious as opposed to secular evidence, lurching from one to another, and he is unaware of his own inconsistencies. He does this sort of thing all through the play. Apparently he is that sort of person. Oedipus is proud of having solved the riddle of the Sphinx by using his mind, but Reeve shows that even here he does not deserve credit for good reasoning; he is walking with the aid of a stick, after all, when he faces the Sphinx, and so he has a clue to the answer in his hand. Reeve’s point supports Carroll’s: Sophocles knows what a man of a certain sort will do; in the case of Oedipus’s quest for knowledge, the portrait is consistent. His failure in self-knowledge is no accident. Reeve’s conclusion applies to all of us: “Oedipus Tyrannus is reverent in the true sense by showing us the disasters we mortals bring upon ourselves when we are insufficiently sensitive to such evidence as we have, and by making us complicit in its neglect. In that way, if not in the one that Sigmund Freud made famous, we are—all of us—poor children of Oedipus, following blindly in his maimed footsteps.”

Garry L. Hagberg takes up self-knowledge in his chapter, “In the Ruins of Self-Knowledge: Oedipus Unmade.” He uses a set of ideas developed by Richard Wollheim to show how Oedipus proceeds by stages toward the point at which he can see himself as the person at the center of a picture he first thought must have been of someone else. The process has nothing to do with introspection and everything to do with the different ways one can relate to a picture or a narration. The chapter is subtle and difficult to summarize but will transform your way of understanding the OT.

In “Tyranny,” Enlightenment, and Religion: Sophocles’s Sympathetic Critique of Periclean Athens in Oedipus the Tyrant,” Peter J. Ahrensdorf reads OT as a mirror for the story of Athens at the time the play was composed—just after Athens had suffered catastrophic losses in its own plague—including the death of its leader Pericles. As we know from history, especially the report of Thucydides, the years leading up to the plague were the golden ones of Pericles’s enlightened leadership. We hear of the glories of Athens’s enlightenment from Pericles’s Funeral Oration, and then, a few pages later, we learn how Athenians abandoned their values during the plague years.

Oedipus has been an enlightened ruler, and his heroism is that of the mind, as it is through mind, and not muscle, that he defeated the Sphinx. In this he is like the enlightened Pericles. Oedipus’s enlightenment too will fade when confronted with a plague, which drives him into consulting oracles and the very prophet who failed the intellectual challenge of the Sphinx. The failure of his former rational approach now illustrates the danger of what Ahrensdorf calls “immoderate political rationalism,” and so the play is meant as a warning to the Athenians not to depend too heavily on Periclean reason.

In “Gods, Fate, and Character in the Oedipus Plays,” I review the ways in which the gods influence the fates of the people in Sophocles’s plays, especially in these two. Sophocles holds that divine agency is in the background of every action shown or reported on stage, but he also shows that every such action flows plausibly from the characters of the agents. These conclusions support the argument with which Noël Carroll begins the volume.

In old age, Oedipus has not given over his proclivity for impetuous, self-absorbed rage, as we see in OC. And yet he does manage to achieve a positive attitude at the end, not without effort. Against a literary background ranging from the Bible to T. S. Eliot, Philip Kitcher shows how Oedipus progresses to a sense of fulfillment. His “Aging Oedipus” goes beyond illuminating this astonishing play to deliver a deep and moving reflection on human aging itself.

“Truth and Self at Colonus,” by Grace Ledbetter, explores the process by which Oedipus comes to terms with himself in OC. Using a theory of multiple truths developed by the psychoanalyst Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot, she shows how Oedipus comes to a kind of self-knowledge that goes beyond a unitary theory of truth. Oedipus is many things, both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others.

In “The Goodness of Death in Oedipus at Colonus,” Franco V. Trivigno ends the volume with his chapter on the famous message of the disturbing third stasimon of OC: “The best is never to have been born, or, once alive, to die young” (1225–27). This was not a new thought when Sophocles took it up for his chorus, but he gave it new vigor in OC. Trivigno studies it closely through the lens of philosophy and then shows how the play vividly illustrates the theme: the overall pain and suffering of a human life. On a calculation of pleasures and pains—a hedonic calculus—it really is better to not be born or else to die young. A tragic play should convey wisdom, he writes, and this is the wisdom of this play. There is an alternative to the hedonic calculus, a theory that measures happiness in terms of virtue. On such a theory, the deadly verdict might fail, but this the play does not explore.

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