Running Away From Yourself: Oedipus the King

I feel a deep emotional connection with Sophocles’ tragic hero Oedipus. Yes, that Oedipus, who was fated to kill his father and have sex (and children) with his mother.

What could Oedipus possibly have to do with me?

I feel empathy for him, as if he were a friend or relative who’s done something terrible, but whom I care for no less. His struggle to shake off his identity, as if doing so would fix the curse on his family — it breaks my heart. The harder he tries to save himself, the closer he gets to his own misery. If you are have ever tried to run away from your family to keep from becoming them, literally or metaphorically, you may know what I mean. Or you may have tried to run away from yourself, but find that you can’t. I think of Langston Hughes’ poem, “Final Curve”:

       When you turn the corner

       And you run into yourself

       Then you know you have turned

       All the corners that are left.

Before I talk any more about Oedipus, or myself, I need to tell the tale as we know it from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, first performed around 425 BCE. That’s the Oedipus I know, not Freud’s taboo-driven infant, who is in no way the product of a tragic flaw (a mistranslation of a word that means ‘mistake,’ and something I’ll talk about in a later post).

In order to understand the play as a tragedy, and not merely as a portrait of a killer who gets caught up in his own net, we have to remember that Oedipus did not want to do what he was fated to do. He didn’t even know that he had committed these terrible deeds. He couldn’t know, because he didn’t know who his real parents were. And then he found out, because the one thing he really did want was to save his city from divine punishment by solving a murder. He succeeded. He found out that he himself had been the murderer, long ago.

Sophocles’ audience already knew the outlines of the story when they saw the play sometime around 425 BCE. The myth was not his invention; it was a widely known, traditional story, a muthos, from which we get ‘myth.’ What Sophocles made of the myth, however, resulted in what Aristotle, writing 100 years later, described as the most perfectly constructed tragedy of them all. And there were lots, hundreds more than the handful we have now.

Some of what follows is what we might call backstory, and some is revealed in the play itself. The play begins well after Oedipus’ birth, when he is already king of Thebes. I’ll start with his parents, where it all began.

So: King Laius and Queen Jocasta had a son. News came to them from the oracle from Delphi, Apollo’s oracle: it was Laius’ fate to be killed by his son; this son would then have sex with his own mother, Jocasta.

To avoid the prophecy coming true, they gave the baby to a servant with orders to leave him at the top of Mt. Cithaeron and let him die of exposure. (This action didn’t count as actual murder, because there was no blood on their hands.) They pierced the baby's ankles with a leather thong to make sure that he could not crawl away. But the servant took pity on the baby and gave him to a shepherd, telling him nothing about the prophecy surrounding the child.

The shepherd in turn took the baby to the city of Corinth and gave him to the king, whose name was Polybus, and the queen, Merope. The shepherd had heard that Polybus and Merope had no children, and thought they might want this one. They received the baby gladly, and named him Oedipus, 'swollen foot,' because of the injury to his feet. The shepherd didn’t tell them who the baby really was. They never told the boy that he was adopted, and so Oedipus grew up believing that Polybus and Merope were his natural mother and father.

When Oedipus was grown into young manhood, he was at a party where a drunken guest taunted him. “You,” he said, “you are a bastard, not the true son of the king and queen.” This gossip had never reached Oedipus’ ears. Oedipus went to the oracle of Apollo to ask if it were true. The oracle did not answer his question directly, but said that it was required that he kill his father and marry his mother. To make sure that the prophesy would never come true, he decided to run away from Corinth without ever seeing his King Polybus and Queen Merope again to make sure the fate prophesied would not be fulfilled.

He headed towards Thebes, where his biological father and mother were king and queen. There is no indication that he made up his mind to go there, only that he was trying to get far away from home.

On the road to Thebes he met a kingly old man in a chariot. The old man was in fact a king. King of Thebes. Oedipus’ own father Laius, who thought that his cursed son was dead. The two didn’t recognize each other, of course. He told Oedipus to make way, and hit him on the head with his goad. Oedipus, who had grown up as a king's son and had never experienced such treatment, killed the old man and his attendants. He thought he had killed them all, and no witnesses ever appeared.

The city of Thebes was too preoccupied with other troubles to investigate the death of the king. Thebes was under the power of a monster called the Sphinx, which means "strangler." She strangled one after another passerby who failed to answer the question she posed: what walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening? The prize for answering the Sphinx correctly and freeing the city was marriage to the queen, Jocasta.

Clever Oedipus, the man named ‘swollen foot,’ figured out the answer. The creature was man, who crawls on all fours as a baby, stands on two feet in his prime, and walks with a stick in his old age.

So Oedipus was given the queen in marriage. By marriage, rather than birth – he thought, everyone thought – he became the ruler of Thebes. The king and queen have four children, Eteocles, Polyneices, Antigone and Ismene.

As the play begins, the citizens of Thebes are dying of a mysterious plague. We find out that the god Apollo is its source. He is angered that Laius’ killer lives on, and in his own city of Thebes.

Oedipus vows to find the murderer and save the city.

The spectators will now observe the unfolding of events like gods who watch mortals struggle in their ignorance. But they watch also as humans, feeling pity for the increasingly frantic Oedipus and Jocasta, and dread as they approach the knowledge that will destroy them both.

Coming soon:  Oedipus Turns All the Corners That Are Left