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A Misunderstood Scene in Sophokles, Oidipous (O.T. 300–462)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

David Bain
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Extract

Just as(pace Blaydes and Dawe) ὒβριζ φυτει τ⋯ραννον, Sophokles' Oidipous continues to beget misunderstanding. One can guarantee that any conversation about the play will soon produce any one of at least four large-scale misconceptions regarding it. One of these is discussed here, not so much for the purpose of dispelling it, as in the hope that such discussion will lead to some general conclusions about the dramatic technique of the Greek tragedians.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , October 1979 , pp. 132 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1979

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References

Notes

1. I have discussed this scene more briefly in Actors and Audience (Oxford, 1977), pp. 73 ffGoogle Scholar. I did not then know of the treatment in Vickers, Brian, Towards Greek Tragedy (London, 1973), pp. 496 ff.Google Scholar, to which I am much indebted. My debts towards the pioneering work of von Wilamowitz, Tycho, Die dramatische Technik des Sophokles (Berlin, 1917)Google Scholar, should also be obvious. For a chalcenteric bibliography of the various heresies treated in the text see now Hester, D. A., PCPhS n.s. 13 (1977), 49 f., 51 ff., 59 fGoogle Scholar.

2. ‘Greek Tragedy: problems of interpretation’ in The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, edited by Donato, E. and Macksey, R. (Baltimore, 1970), p. 293Google Scholar (a reference I owe to Vickers). See also the chapter ‘Oedipe sans complexe’ in Vernant, J.-P. and Vidal-Naquet, P., Mythe et tragédie en Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1973), especially pp. 91 ffGoogle Scholar.

3. I am sorry that Dr. Dawe who in his Teubner edition of the play is normally generous in mentioning conjectures does not take note in the apparatus of Nauck's τεκμαρο⋯μενος in 795. The conjecture as explained by A, E. Housman (The Classical Papers, Cambridge, 1972, p. 1096)Google Scholar seems to me to belong in the text.

4. I will not go into the suggestion that Oidipous was repressing an unconscious desire or the arguments put forward by Freudians to explain why non-Freudians are. not convinced by Freudian explanations. For an attack on ‘the olympian glibness of psychoanalytic thought’ see Medawar, P. B., The Hope of Progress (London, 1972), pp. 63 ffGoogle Scholar.

5. G & R 13 (1966), 37–49Google Scholar, reprinted in Dodds's collection of essays The Ancient Concept of Progress(Oxford, 1973), pp. 64–77, and in other places.

6. I am not sure that Dodds has been quite so successful in dealing with what Lloyd-Jones, Hugh (The Justice of Zeus, Berkeley, 1971, pp. 106 ff.)Google Scholar terms the ‘third heresy of interpretation’, that which claims the play conveys no particular ‘meaning’ or ‘message’ but merely exploits the terror of coincidence.

7. On asides in tragedy see Bain, , op. cit., p. 56Google Scholar (Euripides) and pp. 82 f. (Sophokles).

8. For argument against the transposition of lines 404–7 to precede this line (readvocated by Dawe, , Studies on the Text of Sophocles (Leiden, 1973), p. 230Google Scholar, but not adopted in his text), see Bain, , op. cit., p. 72 n. 3Google Scholar.

9. Against this see Bain, , op. cit., p. 74Google Scholar, Kamerbeek on 449–62 and Taplin, O., The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford, 1977), p. 91 n. 1Google Scholar.

10. Regarding Oidipous' silent exit here compare Taplin, , op. cit., p. 310 on the significance of characters having the last wordGoogle Scholar.

11. For an attack on them see Vickers, , op. cit., p. 547 n. 9Google Scholar.

12. See Poetics1454b7 and 1460a30. The second passage makes it clear that he was thinking of the improbability of Oidipous not knowing how Laios was killed.

13. It is this consideration that prevents me from accepting Mrs. P. E. Easterling's explanation of Oidipous' failure to react to Teiresias' final predictions (G & R 24 (1977), 125)Google Scholar which seems to me a case of ‘reading between the lines'. If Sophokles had wanted the audience to believe that Oidipous did not think the man he killed was a king, Oidipous would have said so.

14. Ar. Frogs 1182 = Euripides fr. 157N. εὐτυχ⋯ς must be preferred to εὐδα⋯μων here. See Ed. Fraenkel, , Beohachtungen za Aristophanes (Rome, 1962), pp. 142 ffGoogle Scholar.

15. I differ from Robert, C., Oidipus (Berlin, 1915) I., pp. 257 ff.Google Scholar, who believes that Aischylos is here using Euripides' own Phoinissai as a stick with which to beat him. I cannot accept that here Iokaste is old because the Euripidean character is old: Oidipous is no longer young in Euripides' play so that the contrast is no more made there than in Sophokles' play. The one significant variation from the Sophoklean version in the narrative, ⋯ν ⋯στρ⋯κῳ, might be an allusion to Aischylos' Laios where the child was exposed in a jar (see the scholion on Ar. Wasps 289 explaining the word ⋯γχυτριεῑς, but it may simply be a reference to the most common way of exposing babies at the time of writing).

16. N.B. ε⋯θ' 1192, ἒπειτα 1193, ε⋯τ' 1195. See Trenkner, S., Le Style nai καί dans le récit attique orall 2 (Assen, 1960), p. 13, with n. 4Google Scholar, and Dover, K. J., Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum (Berkeley, 1968), pp. 84 fGoogle Scholar. Surprisingly Trenkner, who notes that Aristophanes uses the style to characterize vulgar persons, discounts this possibility here (op. cit., p. 78) and because Aischylos is the speaker argues for an affinity with somewhat more elevated passages in prose writers. This is to ignore the vulgar treatment of the subject matter.

17. For all this see Robert's great work. Since its publication more evidence has come to light on Euripides' Oidipous, a play whose structure and plot remain mysterious. See Vaio, J., GRBS 5 (1964), 43–55Google Scholar, Dingel, J., MH 27 (1970), 90–6Google Scholar, and Kannicht, R., WJb n.f. 1 (1975)Google Scholar (Festschrift Ernst Siegmann), 71–82.

18. Compare the remarks of Taplin, (op. cit., p. 292)Google Scholar on how the spectator has his sense of time manipulated by the dramatist.

19. Wilson, J. Dover, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge, 1935), pp. 230 ffGoogle Scholar. Cf. also Walcot, P., Greek Drama in its Theatrical and Social Context (Cardiff, 1976), pp. 1–21Google Scholar.

20. For these and other aspects of the scene not dealt with here, see Reinhardt, K., Sophokles 3 (Frankfurt, 1947), pp. 115 ff.Google Scholar, Drexler, H., Maia n.s. 8 (1956), 3 ff.Google Scholar, and Lattimore, S., California Studies in Classical Antiquity 8 (1975), 105 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21. Note ἂληθες 350 (see Stevens, P. T., CQ 39 (1945), 99CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hermes, Einzelschrift, 38 (1976), 23)Google Scholar; οὒ τι χα⋯ρων 363 (Stevens, (CQ), 100)Google Scholar; εἲπω τι 364 (cf. Ar. Frogs 1); ⋯…⋯ 385 (cf. Fraenkel, Ed., Glotto 41 (1963), 285–6)Google Scholar; κλα⋯ων 401 (see Fraenkel on Acs. Agamemnon 1148 and Stevens (Einzelschrift), 15); third-person address of 429 (Tarrant, D. J., CQ 8 (1958), 159Google Scholar and Bain, , op. cit., p. 72)Google Scholar; οὺκ ε⋯ς ὂλεθρν; 430 (cf. Platt, A., CQ 4 (1910), 158)Google Scholar; σχολη γ' 434 (see Stevens, (CQ), 99 f.)Google Scholar.