Oedipus at Colonus: Dead Man Walking

Finale: Oedipus the Miracle

Dear Readers,

Hello, thank you for being here, and a special welcome to new readers! This is the final post in a series I’ve called Dead Man Walking: Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. You can head back to to my home page to catch up at any point of this seven part series. And for those of you who are here as followers rather than subscribers, please think about hitting that subscribe button below. You’ll get one post a month with nary a charge, ever. I think there are about 700 of you at last count, and it would thrill me no end if you signed on. And now, back to our regular programming….

Here’s where we left off:

Oedipus, the one who cannot see, or walk without assistance, has stood up and led the way to where he will leave this earth. Only he knows where he’s going; his knowledge comes from an unnamed divine source, ‘the god.’ Theseus, his attendants, and Oedipus’ daughters follow him. So now, finally, we will see Oedipus into his grave – but only in a manner of speaking, for there will be no lowering of his corpse into the ground.

One of the many strange things about this play is that the crowning moment takes place offstage. Once Oedipus leads the others away, we never see him again. While it’s true that deaths almost never occur onstage, there’s more to this than the observance of a theatrical convention.

A man without a name – we know him only as ‘Messenger’ – recounts the dramatic final moments of Oedipus’ life to the chorus. We, the spectators, only hear what happened; we can ‘see’ what happened only in our mind’s eye. (Interestingly, the Greek words for ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ originate from the same root: oida-, which sounds the same as the first two syllables of Oedipus’ name in Greek: Oidipus.)

Messenger speeches are not at all uncommon in tragedy; they create a turning point in the action. Something new has happened, a significant plot point, usually bad news, delivered in in plain and brief language. This messenger’s speech, however, is highly unusual. For one thing, it is long, as long or longer than the speeches of the major characters, even though the messenger is an unimportant person without even a name. What’s more, it is good news. The messenger has witnessed the extraordinary, and the ordinary way of doing things will not do. He is now the storyteller, and a good one. He creates suspense from the first moment.

Citizen men! If I were to speak succinctly,

I would say: Oedipus is dead.

But so much was done and said

That I cannot tell this story short.

The chorus asks, “Is the poor man dead?” and the messenger replies, “Be assured: he has left this mortal life forever.” Of course, they (and we) want to know how it happened, and the messenger obliges. It was astonishing, he says.

He found his way forward, slow step by step,

You were here, you know already –

With none of his friends leading him.

No, he himself was the leader of us all.

Now we hear that Oedipus came to the threshold of what was called The Bronze Way, a path to the Underworld that heretofore only Theseus and his friend Perithous had traveled and come back alive. (Long story, but one that the Athenians would know.) There the old man sat down and undid his filthy rags. He called upon his daughters to fetch water from a running stream,

and on their return

They gave him the customary bath and raiment.

By bathing and dressing the body of their father, Antigone and Ismene are carrying out the ritual of preparing a corpse for burial. The ‘raiment’ would have been a shroud. Oedipus is in a liminal state between life and death.

Then Zeus of the Earth thundered, and the maidens

Trembled when they heard it, and fell

On their father’s knees, and wept,

Beating their breasts and crying out.

But when he heard their sharp keening,

He said, ‘My children, on this day your father is no more.

Everything has come to an end for me; no longer

Shall the wearisome task of caring for me be yours.

It was hard, children, I know. But a single word

Will put an end to the burden of toil and hardship.

For no man could love you more than this man,

Without whom you will now spend the rest of your lives.’

At this they all clung together and wept.

When they were done with their cries of grief

Silence descended. Suddenly, someone’s voice

Called him. Everyone’s hair stood straight up

In terror. For the god called to him,

Over and over, from all around.

‘You, Oedipus! You! Why do we wait to go?

You’ve been waiting far too long already.’

At this, Oedipus called Theseus to him and asked him to clasp hands with Antigone and Ismene, as a pledge of friendship and protection. The old man then turned to his daughters, telling them to leave: ‘for it is not permitted that you look upon what may not be seen, or hear what is said. Only Theseus was allowed to remain. The messenger and another attendant took the weeping girls away.

But in a little while, they turned back to look. Oedipus had disappeared. Theseus stood holding his hand over his face, “as though something unearthly and terrifying had appeared that he could not bear to look upon.” Then they saw Theseus salute earth and sky, acknowledging the gods of both realms.

The messenger concludes:

There was no thunderbolt, no whirlwind;

Either a divine guide came for him, or the earth

Opened up the regions below in welcome.

Oedipus, the messenger concludes, was thaumastos: a source of wonder, “if ever any mortal was.” His manner of death was miraculous: he knew where he was going to die and walked there without being able to see. Not only that, a god summoned him by name. His body seems to have simply disappeared and then entered a secret tomb without benefit of burial, at least by human hands.

The messenger departs, leaving the chorus onstage, now with Ismene and Antigone, who have returned utterly distraught. They cry out. What are we to do? Where are we to go, how will we even stay alive? They know that their brothers cannot save them; Eteocles and Polynices, forgetting their sisters once again, are preparing to fight each other to the death. Theseus re-enters.

The girls turn to him, begging to see their father’s tomb. Theseus refuses. He tells them that he has promised Oedipus to show no one, or Athens will come to harm. Antigone replies:

Send us to ancient, storied Thebes, so that we may prevent

The death that is coming for our brothers.

He agrees to do whatever “is of service to you and the one below the earth” – referring now to Oedipus not as ‘your father,’ but as a powerful being who cannot be named. In the final lines of the play, the chorus tells Ismene and Antigone to trust that what Theseus has said.

Come, cease your cry of grief,

and rouse it no more.

For these things are

Assured in every way.

All well and good for the chorus, who live in Athens under Theseus’ protection, but not much comfort to Ismene and Antigone, who must return to Thebes with the slim hope that they can avert their father’s curse and keep their brothers from killing each other.

What seem to be trite closing lines, however, speak to Athenian pride. Theseus, the king who united ancient clans into one city is a pious and noble man, ever true to his word. He made a promise to Oedipus and his daughters, and it will be kept. Thebes? Thebes is a mess. Its rulers are motivated by self-interest. They think that they can defeat destiny, and the gods punish them over and over.

Here we have to keep in mind Sophocles’ original audience. For them, Thebes is not a story land. Thebes is the enemy. As a Spartan ally in the 27 years of the Peloponnesian War, Thebes had defeated Athens not long before and had planned to burn the city to the ground. The Spartans refused permission: a dead Athens was of no use to them. Despite defeat and suffering – much of it self-inflicted – Athens rose again, although never to previous heights.

Oedipus at Colonus has a divine miracle at its heart. There is no making sense of what happened; making sense of things is not the function of miracles. Nor is it the function of Greek tragedy, unless ‘the ways of the gods are mysterious’ is the only sense to make. That may be a trite sentiment, but it is not trivial. Humans don’t understand why the gods do what they do. Acceptance must take the place of understanding. Acceptance was never Oedipus’ strong suit, to say the least, but the gods rewarded him all the same – yet another mystery.

Even so, we are left with legitimate questions about this strange play. For starters, why did the gods decide to give Oedipus a glorious, one-of-a-kind death? What about that dreadful curse Oedipus put on his sons, that they should die by each other’s hands? How could the gods reward this unpitying, vengeful man with an honored life after death? We know from the plays left to us that Sophocles did not shy away from depicting the gods’ capricious cruelty as well as their cruel indifference to suffering. So I think that we are invited here to wonder why the gods gave the dreadful Oedipus a miraculous send-off in which Zeus himself played a part.

Yes, the ways of the gods are strange. But that’s not really a satisfactory answer for us, and it’s fair to say that it wouldn’t have been enough for the Athenians of the day. The city was buzzing with radical thinkers, Socrates only one among them, who questioned conventional piety and morality.

The Athenians, however, would have recognized that Oedipus was was a hero, in the ancient Greek sense of the word. The Greek word ‘hero’ never meant ‘good person’ or ‘savior,’ as it does to us. In Greek,‘hero’ describes a man (always a man) who is larger than life, a descendant of kings (who are descendants of gods), often a king himself, who does astonishing deeds, responds violently to disrespect, takes what he wants, often draws down the wrath of one god or another, and, above all, is famous, for to be famous was to live eternally. The hero’s deeds are the stuff of song and legend; they belong to a mythical pre-history. In this way Oedipus belongs to the ranks of Homer’s Achilles and Odysseus.

Heroes have a special code of ethics. It goes like this: the enemy of my enemy is my friend; the enemy of my friend is my enemy. The world is made up of enemies, friends, family members and nonentities. The word for friends, philoi (FEE-loy) is the same as the word for family members. So when Oedipus asks Theseus for protection in return for a favor as yet to be revealed, the two create a heroic, i.e., transactional, friendship: we’re on the same side as long as it benefits us both and we stick to the terms of the agreement.

Oedipus’ horrific cruelty to his sons is justified in his mind because they neglected him and their sisters. They broke the bonds of familial obligation. Now, no ordinary mortal would curse his sons to die at each other’s hands for that, but Oedipus is a hero, and as such is god-like in his wrath. (In case I haven’t made it clear, the gods weren’t good. They are manifestations of absolute power, not goodness, and they take pleasure in avenging the slightest of slights, intentional or not.)

Perhaps the gods admired Oedipus’ self-righteousness and his zeal for revenge. He’s god-like in that way. Anyone else would have given up. Heroes killed themselves in despair; we’ll read about one such, the hero Ajax. Not Oedipus. Oedipus held onto the belief that the gods who brought him low would raise him up again. They weren’t lying, although they do often lie or hide the truth in riddles. In death, Oedipus becomes even more god-like, able to confer blessings on Athens for eternity.

The site of Oedipus’ death is tied to his elevation. We haven’t yet had time to examine its location in the grove sacred to The Kindly Ones, goddesses who lived beneath the earth. Remember the beginning of the play, when Oedipus and Antigone were wandering beggars, just trying to stay alive? They had stopped to rest, not knowing where they were. When the citizens of Colonus shouted at them to get off the ground sacred to goddesses, Oedipus rejoiced. He refused to move. This was where he was meant to be.

The implied connection between Oedipus and The Kindly Ones is significant. The Kindly Ones, like Oedipus, did not belong to any city, and they are all associated with murder. Before coming to Athens, they were called the Erinyes; their Latin name is ‘the Furies.’ The underground-dwelling goddesses pursue those who killed blood relatives. (Erinyes is thought to be a combination of the word for being angered and the word for hunting or searching.)

These terrifying beings came to Athens to chase down and kill the hero Orestes who had killed his mother, Queen Clytemnestra of Mycenae (and Helen of Troy’s sister!). Orestes had fled to Athens, where Apollo hoped to save him. The complete story is far too long to go into now; we know it from Aeschylus trilogy, the Oresteia. What’s important for us to know is this: Athena persuaded the Erinyes, personified goddesses of vengeance, to put their powers of destruction into the protection of Athens. In return, she promised, they would be worshipped, revered, and thanked instead of feared. She gave them a new name: not Erinyes, Furies, but Eumenides in Greek: the kindly-minded ones. (I’ve shortened it to the Kindly Ones here.) They even got new scarlet robes to wear instead of their blood-soaked black rags. Athens gained strength because of their presence.

The gods directed Oedipus to the shrine of the Kindly Ones in Colonus. We see the parallel. Just as Athens’ protector goddess took in the dreadful creatures from whom all shrank in fear, so Athens’ king Theseus took in the dreadful Oedipus, a living curse, bent on vengeance, whose bloodstained face and empty eye sockets first panicked the chorus of citizens.

And so in the last play of his life, Sophocles reminds Athens of its ancient heritage. What happened at Colonus could only happen in the city of Athena, with Theseus as king. Above all, Athens is a civilizing force. Creon’s attempts to force Oedipus back to Thebes didn’t work here. Athens scorns tricks and lies. The city is strong enough to take in Oedipus and the Erinyes, turning their vengeful natures into protective shields. Athens is confident and unafraid.

I am reminded of the the funeral oration of Pericles, the most famous speech of many in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Pericles was the general and statesman who presided over much of what we call the golden age of Greece. As Thucydides has it, he gave the speech in 430 BC, after the first year of the war that would last, unimaginably, for three decades. At that point, the war was going well for Athens, but there were losses. At the public funeral for the Athenian soldiers who died that year, Pericles said:

“We leave our city accessible to all, and do not, [unlike the Spartans] drive out foreigners to prevent anyone from listening or observing [us], even though some enemy might benefit by seeing what we do not hide; because we do not put more trust in contrivance and deception than in the courageous readiness for action which comes from within.” [Adapted from Steven Lattimore’s translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. All other translations are my own.]

Within a few months after his speech, a plague hit Athens, killing many thousands, and eventually Pericles himself. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King was produced that year; it opens with the elders of Thebes begging Oedipus to find the cause of the plague in and put a stop to it. He promises that he will, and learns that the gods have sent the plague to punish Thebes for harboring a murderer. Oedipus searches until he finds him. He is the unwitting murderer of his father, years before, a father unknown to him.

And so we find our way back to the punishing gods. Who are they? We learn at some point in our schooling or reading that each one is the god or goddess of one thing or another. Their identities are much more complex than that. In my next few posts, I’ll step aside from the tragedies for a while to talk about them. We can’t ignore the gods for much longer, anyway. They are much bigger than any elephant in the room, and infinitely more dangerous.

Before my next post, however, we’ll have a guest essay from the marvelous essayist, memoirist, novelist and writing teacher Mary Tabor, who has written about redemption and forgiveness in Oedipus and Colonus and Shakespeare’s King Lear. Two angry kings are determined to have their way, with disastrous results. Watch for it soon, and in the meantime, enjoy Mary’s four Substacks: Only Connect; Write It!; Who By Fire; and Inner Life Collaborative. Find them at https://substack.com/@maryltabor.