Oedipus the King: summary and themes

Oedipus the King is a tragedy by Sophocles, set in the city of Thebes. A plague, λοιμός (line 28), is destroying the crops, the herds and the people. King Oedipus, famous for freeing the city from the Sphinx, has sent Creon, his wife's brother, to ask Apollo at Delphi what to do. The god's answer: the killer of the old king, Laius, lives in the land and must be driven out or pay with his life (96–101). The blind seer Tiresias, after refusing, tells him: you are the murderer (362). Oedipus thinks it is a plot by Creon.

To calm him, his wife Jocasta says that seers know nothing: Laius was told he would die by his son's hand, yet robbers killed him where three roads meet, and the baby had been left on a mountain with his ankles pinned. But Oedipus remembers killing an old man at such a place (800–813). A messenger from Corinth brings news: Polybus, the man Oedipus thought was his father, is dead, and was never his real father. An old herdsman of Laius is forced to tell the rest. Oedipus is the son of Laius and Jocasta. Without knowing it, he has killed his father and married his mother. Jocasta hangs herself. Oedipus takes the brooches from her dress and blinds himself (1268–1270). He begs for exile, but Creon will ask the god first (1438–1439), and the play ends with Oedipus sent back indoors.

The play turns on one irony: the man who can see knows nothing, and the blind man knows everything. Oedipus insults Tiresias with the word τυφλός, blind: τυφλὸς τά τ᾽ ὦτα τόν τε νοῦν τά τ᾽ ὄμματ᾽ εἶ, «you are blind in your ears, your mind and your eyes» (371). Tiresias warns that the man they seek will become τυφλὸς ἐκ δεδορκότος, blind after seeing (454). In the end Oedipus takes his own sight.

Even his name plays a part. The messenger tells him it comes from his pierced ankles (1034–1036). It is usually explained as «swollen foot», from οἰδέω, to swell, and πούς, foot, and scholars also hear a pun on οἶδα, I know. Oedipus calls himself ὁ μηδὲν εἰδὼς Οἰδίπους, «Oedipus who knew nothing» (397), the man who solved the riddle, αἴνιγμα, with no help from a seer. The play never quotes that riddle. Its wording comes from later writers: Athenaeus (10.456b), citing Asclepiades, begins it ἔστι δίπουν ἐπὶ γῆς καὶ τετράπον, and in Apollodorus (3.5.8) Oedipus gives the answer, a human being: on four limbs as a baby, on two as an adult, with a stick in old age.

Readers have long disagreed about what the play is really about. Each theme below starts from the Greek text, not from a ready answer.

• Fate or free choice? A χρησμός, an oracle, told Laius that his μοῖρα was to die by his son's hand (711–713), and Apollo told Oedipus that he would kill his father and marry his mother (791–793). Yet it is Oedipus who flees Corinth, strikes in anger, δι᾽ ὀργῆς (807), and drives the search. At the end he says both things: Apollo brought these sufferings about, but no other hand struck his eyes: ἀλλ᾽ ἐγὼ τλάμων (1329–1331). Scholars still divide: Bernard Knox, for one, argued that Oedipus acts freely.
• Trust in oracles. Jocasta says that no human has the art of a seer (708–709). The chorus, frightened, sings ἔρρει δὲ τὰ θεῖα, religion is vanishing (910). Then every oracle comes true.
• Power and suspicion. Oedipus is called τύραννος (514, 925), and the word need not mean a cruel ruler here: the messenger uses it simply for the king. Today τύραννος is only the cruel kind. Even so, Oedipus is quick to see a plot against his throne (535).
• Aristotle's model. The Poetics says the finest recognition, ἀναγνώρισις, comes together with a reversal, περιπέτεια, «as in the Oedipus» (1452a). Oedipus falls not through vice but through some ἁμαρτία (1453a), a word that can suggest both an error and a fault, and the debate over it continues.

The date of the play is not secure. Only two plays by Sophocles have firm production dates, and this is not one of them. Because it opens with a plague, many place it soon after the plague that struck Athens in 430 BC (Thucydides 2.47), with dates from about 429 to the mid-420s, but that is an inference. The ancient scholar Dicaearchus reports that it was defeated by Philocles, and P. J. Finglass points out that this does not help to date it. Aristotle simply calls it Οἰδίπους. Τύραννος is usually thought to be a later addition, to separate it from Oedipus at Colonus.

Sigmund Freud read the story in his own way. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899, dated 1900) he used it for his theory that a small boy feels drawn to his mother and sees his father as a rival. The term «Oedipus complex» first appears in a paper of 1910. Critics answer that there is little evidence for the theory, and a 1967 essay by Jean-Pierre Vernant carries the title «Oedipus without the complex». The play itself gives readers reason to pause: Oedipus has no idea who his parents are, and he leaves Corinth precisely to escape the oracle (794–797).