ABOUT THE PLAY​ - SPOILER ALERT!!​

This performance combines Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (OT) and Oedipus at Colonus (OC). OT, which opens during a plague in Thebes, was probably performed shortly after two devastating plagues in Athens, whereas Sophocles composed OC in his late eighties. The audience’s reception of Oedipus’ style of leadership in OT was probably colored by the recent death in that plague of Pericles, an outstanding and famous democratic leader. The long and difficult relation between Athens and Thebes and the accumulated stresses of the Peloponnesian Wars in the 5th century BCE leave their mark on this play, as do memories of Sophocles’ much earlier Theban play Antigone (440s BCE).

 

At the opening of OT the plague-ridden city of Thebes turns for help to a godlike Oedipus, who won his kingship by solving the riddle of the deadly Sphinx. He spends the rest of the play trying to find the killer of his predecessor Laius and to cure the plague caused by Laius’ murder, without realizing that he himself, fleeing an oracle of Apollo that predicted he would kill his father and marry his mother, was in fact the child of Laius and Jocasta exposed on the mountainside with bound feet. Oedipus’ name means “swell foot” or “know foot.” As the truth emerges his wife/mother Jocasta departs to hang herself. Oedipus blinds himself and closes the play insisting that he should be expelled from the city, while his brother-in-law Creon decides, despite the plague, to shut him in the palace and consult the oracle of Apollo once again. In the final scene, Oedipus, now blind like the wise blind seer Tiresias whose predictions he earlier rejected, appears to know and understand more than anyone else.

 

OC opens with the blind Oedipus and his daughter Antigone arriving after many wanderings as beggars at Colonus, a beautiful place outside the city of Athens where Sophocles was born. The chorus of Athenian elders warn him not to tread on a grove sacred to the mysterious and dangerous goddesses, the Eumenides. Oedipus justifies his past actions to the chorus because he acted in ignorance, then promises Athens’ king Theseus that if he is allowed to remain his burial place will protect Athens against its enemies. Creon arrives to bring Oedipus back to Thebes. Once rejected, Creon tries to abduct Antigone and her sister Ismene, who has arrived to help them. Theseus rescues the daughters and accepts Oedipus into Athens. Oedipus then rejects his son Polyneices, who is on his way to battle his brother Eteocles over the rule of Thebes, because the brothers mistreated him. The play closes with Oedipus’ mysterious disappearance to another world in the sacred grove witnessed only by Theseus, followed by the lamentation of the daughters, who unfortunately wish to return to their own problematic futures in Thebes.

 

Perhaps reflecting Sophocles’ own meditations on his previous encounters with this myth, today’s performance opens at Colonus as Oedipus tells his story, performs OT, and then returns to OC.  

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ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT

The Athenian playwright Sophocles’ long life (496-406BCE) almost spans the entire famed 5th century BCE. He won his first victory in the dramatic contests in honor of the god Dionysus in 468BCE, defeating Aeschylus, and he followed this success with more first and second place victories than any other poet. The ancient biographical tradition paints him as well born, handsome, successful, patriotic, and fond of beautiful young boys. A priest himself, he helped establish a cult of the god of healing Asclepius in Athens and served in several important governmental roles, including a generalship and participation in various embassies.

 

The dates of his seven extant (out of about 128) plays are generally uncertain. Of the three plays in his famous Theban trilogy-- Antigone (performed in the early 440s?), Oedipus Tyrannus (the mid 420s), and Oedipus at Colonus--only the date of the performance of Oedipus at Colonus is certain. It was first presented in 401 by Sophocles’ grandson Sophocles after he died. Of his two sons, one, Iophon, also become a playwright. A probably apocryphal story claims that his sons grew tired of awaiting their inheritance and took him to court for incompetence. He got off by reciting a chorus from Oedipus at Colonus, which he was in the process of composing. He may also have been close to a much- loved loyal daughter. These details, if true, appear to resonate with the representation of Oedipus’ children in Oedipus at Colonus.

 

According to Aristotle in the Poetics Sophocles introduced a third actor to the Athenian stage, reduced the dramatic chorus from 15 to 12, and played an innovative role in scene painting. Oedipus Tyrannus served as Aristotle’s model for the perfectly structured tragedy in which the tragic recognition (anagnorisis) coincided with a tragic reversal (peripeteia).  Oedipus’ hamartia (meaning tragic error, not tragic flaw) in this play was also believable due to ignorance. Sophocles’ treatment of the chorus as a character also met with Aristotle’s approval. Sophocles, the “tragic Homer,” was also famous in Antiquity for his “honeyed style” and his treatment of character. He represented “men as they ought to be, not, like Euripides, as they are.” (Poetics) His assertive and often stubborn characters repeatedly face to some degree unmerited suffering with heroic endurance.

 

Sophocles directed his own plays, wrote the music, and supervised the choral dance. Unlike Aeschylus, however, he stopped performing as an actor due to a “weak” voice. Honored publicly and reperformed throughout the Mediterranean world after his death, Sophocles was admired in his lifetime to the point where comic poets avoided making fun of him. 

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- HELENE FOLEY | Claire Tow Professor of Classics, Emerita at Barnard College