Oedipus Rex

On Misunderstanding the 'Oedipus Rex' Author(s): E. R. Dodds Reviewed work(s): Source: Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Apr., 1966), pp. 37-49 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/642354 . Accessed: 29/02/2012 16:03 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Cambridge University Press and The Classical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Greece & Rome. http://www.jstor.org ON MISUNDERSTANDING THE OEDIPUS REX' By E. R. DODDS ON the last occasion when I had the misfortune to examine in Honour Moderations at Oxford I set a question on the Oedipus Rex, which was among the books prescribed for general reading. My question was 'In what sense, if in any, does the Oedipus Rex attempt to justify the ways of God to man?' It was an optional question; there were plenty of alternatives. But the candidates evidently considered it a gift: nearly all of them attempted it. When I came to sort out the answers I found that they fell into three groups. The first and biggest group held that the play justifies the gods by showing-or, as many of them said, 'proving'--that we get what we deserve. The arguments of this group turned upon the character of Oedipus. Some considered that Oedipus was a bad man: look how he treated Creon-naturally the gods punished him. Others said 'No, not altogether bad, even in some ways rather noble; but he had one of those fatal apap-rial that all tragic heroes have, as we know from Aristotle. And since he had a &apap-ria he could of course expect no mercy: the gods had read the Poetics.' Well over half the candidates held views of this general type. A second substantial group held that the Oedipus Rex is 'a tragedy of destiny'. What the play 'proves', they said, is that man has no free will but is a puppet in the hands of the gods who pull the strings that make him dance. Whether Sophocles thought the gods justified in treating their puppet as they did was not always clear from their answers. Most of those who took this view evidently disliked the play; some of them were honest enough to say so. The third group was much smaller, but included some of the more thoughtful candidates. In their opinion Sophocles was'a pure artist' and was therefore not interested in justifying the gods. He took the story of Oedipus as he found it, and used it to make an exciting play. The gods are simply part of the machinery of the plot. Ninety per cent. of the answers fell into one or the other of these three groups. The remaining ten per cent. had either failed to make up their minds or failed to express themselves intelligibly. IA paper read at a 'refresher course' for teachers, London Institute of Education, 24 July x964. 38 ON MISUNDERSTANDING THE OEDIPUS REX It was a shock to me to discover that all these young persons, sup- posedly trained in the study of classical literature, could read this great and moving play and so completely miss the point. For all the views I have just summarized are in fact demonstrably false (though some of them, and some ways of stating them, are more crudely and vulgarly false than others). It is true that each of them has been defended by some scholars in the past, but I had hoped that all of them were by now dead and buried. Wilamowitz thought he had killed the lot in an article published in Hermes (34 [1899], 55 ff.) more than half a century ago; and they have repeatedly been killed since. Yet their unquiet ghosts still haunt the examination-rooms of universities-and also, I would add, the pages of popular handbooks on the history of European drama. Surely that means that we have somehow failed in our duty as teachers? It was this sense of failure which prompted me to attempt once more to clear up some of these ancient confusions. If the reader feels-as he very well may-that in this paper I am flogging a dead horse, I can only reply that on the evidence I have quoted the animal is unaccountably still alive. I I shall take Aristotle as my starting point, since he is claimed as the primary witness for the first of the views I have described. From the thirteenth chapter of the Poetics we learn that the best sort of tragic hero is a man highly esteemed and prosperous who falls into misfortune because of some serious (PEyd&rM) &ap-rtia: examples, Oedipus and Thyestes. In Aristotle's view, then, Oedipus' misfortune was directly occasioned by some serious lapTria; and since Aristotle was known to be infallible, Victorian critics proceeded at once to look for this aapTria. And so, it appears, do the majority of present-day undergraduates. What do they find? It depends on what they expect to find. As we all know, the word &apapria is ambiguous: in ordinary usage it is some- times applied to false moral judgements, sometimes to purely intellec- tual error-the average Greek did not make our sharp distinction between the two. Since Poetics 13 is in general concerned with the moral character of the tragic hero, many scholars have thought in the past (and many undergraduates still think) that the &fappria of Oedipus must in Aristotle's view be a moral fault. They have accordingly gone over the play with a microscope looking for moral faults in Oedipus, and have duly found them-for neither here nor anywhere else did Sophocles portray that insipid and unlikely character, the man of perfect virtue. Oedipus, they point out, is proud and over-confident; he harbours un- ON MISUNDERSTANDING THE OEDIPUS REX 39 justified suspicions against Teiresias and Creon; in one place (lines 964 ff-.) he goes so far as to express some uncertainty about the truth of oracles. One may doubt whether this adds up to what Aristotle would consider pEyduN ,pap-ria. But even if it did, it would have no direct relevance to the question at issue. Years before the action of the play begins, Oedipus was already an incestuous parricide; if that was a punishment for his unkind treatment of Creon, then the punishment preceded the crime- which is surely an odd kind of justice. 'Ah,' says the traditionalist critic, 'but Oedipus' behaviour on the stage reveals the man he always was: he was punished for his basically unsound character.' In that case, however, someone on the stage ought to tell us so: Oedipus should repent, as Creon repents in the Antigone; or else another speaker should draw the moral. To ask about a character in fiction 'Was he a good man?' is to ask a strictly meaningless question: since Oedipus never lived we can answer neither 'Yes' nor 'No'. The legitimate question is 'Did Sophocles intend us to think of Oedipus as a good man?' This can be answered-not by applying some ethical yard- stick of our own, but by looking at what the characters in the play say about him. And by that test the answer is 'Yes'. In the eyes of the Priest in the opening scene he is the greatest and noblest of men, the saviour of Thebes who with divine aid rescued the city from the Sphinx. The Chorus has the same view of him: he has proved his wisdom, he is the darling of the city, and never will they believe ill of him (504 ff-.). And when the catastrophe comes, no one turns round and remarks 'Well, but it was your own fault: it must have been; Aristotle says so.' In my opinion, and in that of nearly all Aristotelian scholars since Bywater, Aristotle does not say so; it is only the perversity of moralizing critics that has misrepresented him as saying so. It is almost certain that Aristotle was using &pappria here as he uses c.ap-rnpa in the Nicomachean Ethics (I135b12) and in the Rhetoric (1374b6), to mean an offence com- mitted in ignorance of some material fact and therefore free from Trovrlpia or KadKia.' These parallels seem decisive; and they are confirmed by Aristotle's second example-Thyestes, the man who ate the flesh of his own children in the belief that it was butcher's meat, and who sub- sequently begat a child on his own daughter, not knowing who she was. His story has clearly much in common with that of Oedipus, and Plato as well as Aristotle couples the two names as examples of the gravest atapria (Laws 838 c). Thyestes and Oedipus are both of them men who I For the full evidence see 0. Hey's exhaustive examination of the usage of these words, Philol. 83 (1927), 1-17; 137-63. Cf. also K. von Fritz, Antike und Moderne Trag6die (Berlin, I962), I ff. 40 ON MISUNDERSTANDING THE OEDIPUS REX violated the most sacred of Nature's laws and thus incurred the most horrible of all pollutions; but they both did so without -rrovrlpia, for they knew not what they did-in Aristotle's quasi-legal terminology, it was a apapprilpa, not an •8iKr'pa. That is why they were in his view especially suitable subjects for tragedy. Had they acted knowingly, they would have been inhuman monsters, and we could not have felt for them that pity which tragedy ought to produce. As it is, we feel both pity, for the fragile estate of man, and terror, for a world whose laws we do not understand. The &papria of Oedipus did not lie in losing his temper with Teiresias; it lay quite simply in parricide and incest-a py6rAl apap-ria indeed, the greatest a man can commit. The theory that the tragic hero must have a grave moral flaw, and its mistaken ascription to Aristotle, has had a long and disastrous history. It was gratifying to Victorian critics, since it appeared to fit certain plays of Shakespeare. But it goes back much further, to the seventeenth- century French critic Dacier, who influenced the practice of the French classical dramatists, especially Corneille, and was himself influenced by the still older nonsense about 'poetic justice'-the notion that the poet has a moral duty to represent the world as a place where the good are always rewarded and the bad are always punished. I need not say that this puerile idea is completely foreign to Aristotle and to the practice of the Greek dramatists; I only mention it because on the evidence of those Honour Mods. papers it would appear that it still lingers on in some youthful minds like a cobweb in an unswept room. To return to the Oedipus Rex, the moralist has still one last card to play. Could not Oedipus, he asks, have escaped his doom if he had been more careful? Knowing that he was in danger of committing parricide and incest, would not a really prudent man have avoided quarrelling, even in self-defence, with men older than himself, and also love-relations with women older than himself? Would he not, in Waldock's ironic phrase, have compiled a handlist of all the things he must not do? In real life I suppose he might. But we are not entitled to blame Oedipus either for carelessness in failing to compile a handlist or for lack of self- control in failing to obey its injunctions. For no such possibilities are mentioned in the play, or even hinted at; and it is an essential critical principle that what is not mentioned in the play does not exist. These considerations would be in place if we were examining the conduct of a real person. But we are not: we are examining the intentions of a drama- tist, and we are not entitled to ask questions that the dramatist did not intend us to ask. There is only one branch of literature where we are entitled to ask such questions about Tr E.KTOs TO"to 8p&iparog, namely the ON MISUNDERSTANDING THE OEDIPUS REX 41 modern detective story. And despite certain similarities the Oedipus Rex is not a detective story but a dramatized folktale. If we insist on reading it as if it were a law report we must expect to miss the point., In any case, Sophocles has provided a conclusive answer to those who suggest that Oedipus could, and therefore should, have avoided his fate. The oracle was unconditional (line 790): it did not say 'If you do so-and- so you will kill your father'; it simply said 'You will kill your father, you will sleep with your mother.' And what an oracle predicts is bound to happen. Oedipus does what he can to evade his destiny: he resolves never to see his supposed parents again. But it is quite certain from the first that his best efforts will be unavailing. Equally unconditional was the original oracle given to Laius (711 ff.): Apollo said that he must (Xp'vat) die at the hands of Jocasta's child; there is no saving clause. Here there is a significant difference between Sophocles and Aeschylus. Of Aeschylus' trilogy on the House of Laius only the last play, the Septem, survives. Little is known of the others, but we do know, from Septem 742 ff., that according to Aeschylus the oracle given to Laius was conditional: 'Do not beget a child; for if you do, that child will kill you.' In Aeschylus the disaster could have been avoided, but Laius sinfully disobeyed and his sin brought ruin to his descendants. In Aeschylus the story was, like the Oresteia, a tale of crime and punishment; but Sopho- cles chose otherwise-that is why he altered the form of the oracle. There is no suggestion in the Oedipus Rex that Laius sinned or that Oedipus was the victim of an hereditary curse, and the critic must not assume what the poet has abstained from suggesting. Nor should we leap to the conclusion that Sophocles left out the hereditary curse be- cause he thought the doctrine immoral; apparently he did not think so, since he used it both in the Antigone (583 ff.) and in the Oedipus at Colonus (964 ff.). What his motive may have been for ignoring it in the Oedipus Rex we shall see in a moment. I hope I have now disposed of the moralizing interpretation, which has been rightly abandoned by the great majority of contemporary 1 The danger is exemplified by Mr. P. H. Vellacott's article, 'The Guilt of Oedipus', which appeared in this journal (vol. xi [1964], I37-48) shortly after my talk was de- livered. By treating Oedipus as an historical personage and examining his career from the 'common-sense' standpoint of a prosecuting counsel Mr. Vellacott has no difficulty in showing that Oedipus must have guessed the true story of his birth long before the point at which the play opens-and guiltily done nothing about it. Sophocles, ac- cording to Mr. Vellacott, realized this, but unfortunately could not present the situation in these terms because 'such a conception was impossible to express in the conventional forms of tragedy'; so for most of the time he reluctantly fell back on 'the popular con- cept of an innocent Oedipus lured by Fate into a disastrous trap'. We are left to con- clude either that the play is a botched compromise or else that the common sense of the law-courts is not after all the best yardstick by which to measure myth. 42 ON MISUNDERSTANDING THE OEDIPUS REX scholars. To mention only recent works in English, the books of Whit- man, Waldock, Letters, Ehrenberg, Knox, and Kirkwood, however much they differ on other points, all agree about the essential moral innocence of Oedipus. II But what is the alternative? If Oedipus is the innocent victim of a doom which he cannot avoid, does this not reduce him to a mere puppet? Is not the whole play a 'tragedy of destiny' which denies human freedom? This is the second of the heresies which I set out to refute. Many readers have fallen into it, Sigmund Freud among them ;' and you can find it confidently asserted in various popular handbooks, some of which even extend the assertion to Greek tragedy in general-thus providing themselves with a convenient label for distinguishing Greek from 'Christian' tragedy. But the whole notion is in fact anachronistic. The modern reader slips into it easily because we think of two clear-cut alternative views-either we believe in free will or else we are deter- minists. But fifth-century Greeks did not think in these terms any more than Homer did: the debate about determinism is a creation of Hellen- istic thought. Homeric heroes have their predetermined 'portion of life' (poipa); they must die on their 'appointed day' (alaipov ~i"ap); but it never occurs to the poet or his audience that this prevents them from being free agents. Nor did Sophocles intend that it should occur to readers of the Oedipus Rex. Neither in Homer nor in Sophocles does divine foreknowledge of certain events imply that all human actions are predetermined. If explicit confirmation of this is required, we have only to turn to lines i230 f., where the Messenger emphatically distinguishes Oedipus' self-blinding as 'voluntary' and 'self-chosen' from the 'in- voluntary' parricide and incest. Certain of Oedipus' past actions were fate-bound; but everything that he does on the stage from first to last he does as a free agent. Even in calling the parricide and the incest 'fate-bound' I have per- haps implied more than the average Athenian of Sophocles' day would have recognized. As A. W. Gomme put it, 'the gods know the future, but they do not order it: they know who will win the next Scotland and England football match, but that does not alter the fact that the victory will depend on the skill, the determination, the fitness of the players, and a little on luck'.2 That may not satisfy the analytical philosopher, but it seems to have satisfied the ordinary man at all periods. Bernard Knox aptly quotes the prophecy of Jesus to St. Peter, 'Before the cock crow, Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London, Modern Library, 1938), io8. 2 A. W. Gomme, More Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford, 1962), z 211. ON MISUNDERSTANDING THE OEDIPUS REX 43 thou shalt deny me thrice.' The Evangelists clearly did not intend to imply that Peter's subsequent action was 'fate-bound' in the sense that he could not have chosen otherwise; Peter fulfilled the prediction, but he did so by an act of free choice.I In any case I cannot understand Sir Maurice Bowra'sz idea that the gods force on Oedipus the knowledge of what he has done. They do nothing of the kind; on the contrary, what fascinates us is the spectacle of a man freely choosing, from the highest motives, a series of actions which lead to his own ruin. Oedipus might have left the plague to take its course; but pity for the sufferings of his people compelled him to con- sult Delphi. When Apollo's word came back, he might still have left the murder of Laius uninvestigated; but piety and justice required him to act. He need not have forced the truth from the reluctant Theban herdsman; but because he cannot rest content with a lie, he must tear away the last veil from the illusion in which he has lived so long. Teire- sias, Jocasta, the herdsman, each in turn tries to stop him, but in vain: he must read the last riddle, the riddle of his own life. The immediate cause of Oedipus' ruin is not 'Fate' or 'the gods'-no oracle said that he must discover the truth-and still less does it lie in his own weakness; what causes his ruin is his own strength and courage, his loyalty to Thebes, and his loyalty to the truth. In all this we are to see him as a free agent: hence the suppression of the hereditary curse. And his self- mutilation and self-banishment are equally free acts of choice. Why does Oedipus blind himself? He tells us the reason (1369 ff.): he has done it in order to cut himself off fro