Oedipus did nothing wrong. This must be distinctly understood, or else the wondrous snark I shall direct at this story may never be appreciated. (The Dickens you say.)
It all starts with Oedipus’s birth father, Laius, eventually King of Thebes. Laius’s father, a grandson of Thebes’s founder, Cadmus, died while Laius was a child. The throne was seized by usurpers, and little Laius was unfortunately smuggled out of the city before he could be executed by the new administration. I say “unfortunately,” because no good came from Laius. Literally everyone he touched died tragically.
Laius grew up in Pisa, the ward of King Pelops. Pelops no doubt had sympathy for a child who had escaped execution because, well, Pelops hadn’t. Pelops had been murdered and butchered into stew meat as a child, by his own father, who wanted to impress some important dinner guests. (Okay, they were the gods of Olympus.) His guests were not impressed. They restored little Pelops to life so he could become Poseidon the sea god’s lover (you can’t make this shit up, even though someone probably did). Pelops led a charmed life which culminated in his becoming a king. Then he welcomed The Omen into his house.
Laius became tutor to Chrysippus, Pelops’s favorite son. Chrys obviously had some of his father’s power to attract pervy older men, and Laius ended up professing his love for the boy. Chrysippus was having none of it, so Laius raped him. Chrysippus committed suicide out of shame, and Pelops placed a curse on Laius and all of his line. When you’ve been the boy-toy of a powerful god, that likely means something, right?
Laius shrugged and went back to Thebes. The usurpers had been usurped, and Laius became king. He married girl named Jocasta who was probably all of 14. Thebes, under Laius, was prone to plagues–probably a result of Pelops’s curse. Laius consulted the Oracle at Delphi to find out what to do. The answer, vetted by no less an authority than Apollo, god of light and reason, was, “Don’t have kids, dude. Your city will be fine if you keep it in your tunic.” Of course, given what we’ve already seen of Lai’s behavior, that was never gonna happen. Even though he was reputed to be immune to the charms of his teen bride (she was no Chrysippus), the new King got drunk and conceived a child with her. One wonders if Laius’s frontal cortex never fully developed, because he didn’t seem to be able to envision consequences. After all, the Oracle had also told him, “If you have a son, he’s gonna kill you.”
None of this is related in Sophocles’s trilogy, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. That’s odd, because this kind of torrid National Enquirer fodder made prime time miniseries conquer the Nielsens when I was a kid. Here’s where Sophocles picks up:
Laius and Jocasta had a son, and they knew this was a bad thing. So they did what a lot of heads of state do when their personal power is threatened: they arranged a cover-up. Now, they didn’t kill little Baby Boy Laius… that would have been wrong. They gave him to the palace gamekeeper to be “exposed.” This was some ancient peoples’ idea of family therapy–you put an unwanted child out in the wilderness and let him fend for himself. “Well I didn’t kill him!” you got to claim. “It was in the gods’ hands!”
And indeed it was. The baby, his ankles pierced with a cord to make him easy to carry along with the gamekeeper’s haul of dead foxes and squirrels, was carried into the woods to be hung upside down from a tree. Servants of Polybus, King of Corinth, encountered this murderous retinue and made a cash offer. Their king was impotent and really wanted an heir. Polybus and his queen Periboea were delighted with the baby, and named him Oedipus (“swollen foot”) because, well, his ankles had been pierced with an old rusty awl and probably got infected.
Oedipus grew up, cherished by two people he thought were his birth parents. Then one day on the football field at the local high school, he got called a “bastard.” He took this insult too seriously, and asked his father why someone would suggest that his birth was not legitimate. (I mean, it was legitimate. After all, both sets of his parents were married. Really, the guy was a double-anti-bastard.)
Polybus got a weird look in his eye, so Oed knew dad was hiding something, and he went to see… yep, the Oracle at Delphi. Sort of the ancient Greek Dr. Phil. The Oracle, un-helpfully, did not say, “Well, you had a rough start, and those aren’t your birth parents, but they love you. You’re gonna be King of Corinth. Be happy and marry someone nice.” No, the Oracle said, “You are destined to kill your father and marry your mother.” Eventual fact, yes. But it might not have been fact if the Oracle had, I dunno, told him the other facts!
Young Oed, being a good guy, did everything in his power to escape this fate. He loved his parents, but he didn’t love his mother that way, and he wanted his dad to grow old and die quietly in his sleep. He left Corinth to take a gap year before starting some new career. He rode his chariot toward, oh, Zagat says this city Thebes is a happening place, and he was minding his own business when he encountered another chariot.
Road rage ensued.
This surly old guy in the other chariot was hogging the road. Harsh words were exchanged, the servants of both rich passengers started brawling, and the old guy attacked Oed with a horsewhip. Oedipus fought back. The old guy wound up dead. All of the old guy’s servants also wind up dead, except one, who runs away.
Now, I don’t know about the moral stance of Oedipus vis a vis the servants, but I think a case can certainly be made that he killed the old guy in self-defense. Apparently, Oed’s takeway from this was, “Wow, the traffic on the road to Thebes is murder these days!” He headed on into the city, where he was stopped at the gate by the latest plague.
This plague was a sphinx, a woman with the lower body of a lion, and wings. She could kill a strong man in about three seconds simply by pouncing, which she would do to anyone who tried to enter or exit the city. But there’s an out here, a sort of one-factor authentication. If the traveler could answer a riddle, he got through. Had it been, “Click all the squares with motorcycles in them,” our story would end here, because no one ever knows if a handlebar counts. Fortunately, it was just, “What animal walks on four legs at dawn, two during the day, and three in the evening.”
Oedipus, who had once studied up to be a contestant on Corinthian Jeopardy, knew this. It’s man. He crawls in the morning of his life, walks during the day, and uses a cane in the twilight of his days. The sphinx, traumatized, flung herself down from the high city walls and died, not knowing scooters would be invented someday.
The latest plague had been vanquished and no more came immediately, despite the curse. Probably the gods were laughing their asses off at the joke they just played on creepy old Laius. Oedipus was a hero, and the queen’s brother Creon (Oed’s uncle, in fact) advised, “Marry my sister and be our king.”
Oed was an–ahem–healthy teenager, and Jocasta was about 30 at this point. She was rich, she was beautiful… Sir Launcelot wasn’t around to get him out of it. He idn’t know she was his mom, much less that she stood idly by sixteen years ago while he was pierced and carried off to the trees.
Oed had four children (amazingly free of obvious birth defects) via his May-August romance: two sons, two daughters. All went well until the kids were of college age. Then plague struck. Every parent old enough will understand the concept. No, the Thebans don’t have a student debt crisis, and the parents aren’t suddenly transformed into babbling idiots who know far less about life than their now-worldly children. Instead, people started dropping dead, and women gave birth to monsters. Not that they didn’t before, but think Godzilla monsters instead of Dennis-the-Menace monsters.
On the advice of Brother Creon, who gave such wonderful advice, the blind soothsayer Tiresias was summoned. Tiresias said the plagues would end when the killer of Laius was brought to justice. It says here that twenty years passed between the death of Laius and the call for his killer’s recompense. Why the delay in getting it to trial? This being ancient Greece, the gods were the judicial branch of government.. and all the other branches too. I guess Zeus was breaking in a new cupbearer and couldn’t be bothered to hear the case?
I’m gonna stop here and point out what a great story this could have been with the right setup. Hercule Poirot would have handled it with style, and can you imagine Perry Mason getting his hands on it? Here’s dead Laius. King Pelops hated him. Creon wanted his throne. His wife probably didn’t like him very much, because he’s always hanging out with the boys. Anyone mighta murdered this douchebag, and Jocasta is probably the beautiful accused who hires Mr. Mason to save her. Perry corners the unexpected killer, Oed’s adoptive dad.
“Isn’t it true that Oedipus is not you natural son? Isn’t it true that you found him exposed in the woods? Isn’t it true that your lies to him about his birth led him to the very city of Thebes where his birth father lived?”
“Yes! Yes!” shrieks Polybus on the witness stand. Tears leak from his eyes as he addresses Oedipus. “I’m sorry, son. I didn’t want you to be ashamed. I loved you like you were my own. And then that lousy god of reason and his stupid dog took you away from me and sent you running to Laius. I poisoned Laius’s Viagra before you hit him! I had to kill him. I just had to!”
But no, it was not to be. It’s far more boring to have it revealed that Oedipus killed a guy he didn’t know was his father in a case of road rage. Doesn’t matter that it was self-defense. Doesn’t matter that Laius started the fight. Oedipus is technically guilty, and that’s all that matters to the gods. They don’t have time to examine the nuances, because have you seen those nymphs in the forests of Calydon? Oh my me!
In the midst of this, a messenger arrived from Corinth to tell Oedipus that his father was dead. Obviously this messenger hated being the bearer of bad news, because he tried to cheer Oedipus: “Hey, it’s okay! Dude, he wasn’t really your father.”
Um… thanks? And how did the messenger happen to know the best-kept secret in Corinth? It doesn’t matter. Remember the gamekeeper? Well, he had been sitting in the wings for 20 years waiting for his next entrance. He was in the way and starting to smell, so they hauled him back out to explain that, yes, he handed off the baby to the King of Corinth, and, by the way, he, the gamekeeper just happened to be the one servant who escaped the day Laius died, so Oedipus was the killer of his father, Oedipus had married his mother, and Oedipus was at fault for the timed-release plague that has struck Thebes lo those decades later.
Jocasta, who had been fine all along with having sent her baby off to die, suddenly grew a conscience and hanged herself. Oedipus found her and stabbed out his eyes with the pin of her broach. Oedipus spent the next play wandering as a beggar, then died. Then Oedipus’s sons got into a war over who got to be King of Thebes. They killed each other. Problem solved. Except… With all of the direct descendants of Cadmus dead, who was in charge again? The brother-in-law, Creon, he what gives such wonderful advice. His advice in this case was that one brother be buried in state, and the other be left outside the city wall to be eaten by rodents. Oedipus’s daughter and sister Antigone (daughter and granddaughter of Jocasta) took umbridge. She stomped off and buried her brother/uncle/nephew, Polynices. Creon declared that she has violated his edict and must die. All the other Thebans spent a whole play talking him out of it. They succeeded. Creon ordered that Antigone be released, only to find her hanging dead in her prison cell. Creon’s wife committed suicide (probably on his advice) and the sons of the army of Polynices destroyed the whole city.
All because Laius couldn’t keep it in his tunic.
I Hate Oedipus
Okay, I don’t hate him. He probably wasn’t real, and, if he was, it’s not his fault that he’s the protagonist in the single most boring set of dramas ever written in human language. And I’ve read Elsie Dinsmore. (To my mother, when she was dying. Don’t judge me!)
Nothing was Oedipus’s fault, actually. Which, in addition to making Sophocles’s dramas boring makes them irritating and ungodly unfair.
Ungodly. Heh. You see what I did there. The gods are the whole problem in Oedipus.
I love the Greek Myths. One of two things touched off that love. The first was The Mighty Hercules, a cartoon produced for three years by Adventure Productions and syndicated by Trans-Lux. The show roundly bastardized classical mythology, but, at seven or eight, I was enthralled by Herc’s ring of power, his pretty girlfriend Helena, his sinister archenemy Daedalus–even his faithful centaur pal Newton didn’t annoy me as much as he probably should have.
The second trigger was pulled in third grade. We had story time in the library one day at Glenelg Country School. Mrs. McCauley read us “Jason and the Argonauts” from D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths. I glossed over the stuff about Medea cutting her little brother up in chunks and then eventually murdering her own children. I just got hooked on the idea that, thousands of years before Batman and Super Friends, someone had written a story about a bunch of super-powered people going on a quest. And I loved all the gods with their different personalities and abilities. I think Athena was my first crush. I was eight. No. Elizabeth Montgomery was my first crush. I was five. But my feelings for Athena were three years more adult.
I checked out the D’Aulaires’ book from the school library until my name filled the card in the back, and then my dad ordered me my own copy. I made Greek god action figures. I drew endless pictures. I loved the Greek myths.
But Oedipus? I really wondered why Sophocles was remembered as a giant of literature while I had to go into the dreaded field of Computer Science in order to feed my family. I still wonder that.
To be fair, I did once see a nice live production of the Sophocles trilogy, done by the Rude Mechanicals, a group with which I am now proudly affiliated. My dear friend Scott played Theseus, and I attended a play I already knew I hated only because he can talk me into anything. The cast did a fantastic job, even though it was bloody Oedipus.
Writing it out now, the story seems more interesting to me. Maybe Sophocles just needed a better showrunner to bring out the finer points. But, as it’s always been presented, it’s not a story I enjoy. Next week I’ll tell you why at least one scholar and philosopher (Luc Ferry in The Wisdom of the Myths) thinks it is such a powerful and enduring tale, and whether or not I agree with him. (No spoilers on that least, ’cause I’m not sure yet.)