You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Some twenty or thirty years after he bared his soul in Oedipus the King, Sophocles turned again to the Theban hero in Oedipus at Colonus, probably his last play. Sophocles was by then a man late in years, as was his protagonist, the blind and tired wanderer. Old age did not lessen the poetic powers of Sophocles, nor break the spirit of long-suffering Oedipus. The years of exile rent his clothes, but not his pride. Willful and hot-tempered as before, Oedipus changes only in one respect: he no longer accepts his doom, but claims to have been dealt with unjustly: “I had been wronged, I retaliated; even had I / Known what I was doing, was that evil?” (1) Referring to Laius, his father, he pleads: “I did not know him and he wished to murder me. / Before the law, before God - I am innocent.” He who had blinded himself and asked as a boon to be cast out of Thebes, has come to think his punishment too great for what he had done. Burning with a hatred that many years of exile have nurtured, Oedipus fights back. Those who wronged him shall suffer his wrath, but those who supported the wretched wanderer, shall partake in benefits.
Oedipus at Colonus is the vindication of the hero, a wish-by-wish fulfillment. As the play opens, Oedipus, led by his daughter Antigone, enters the grove of the divinities, who had once been known as the Furies, “Daughters of darkness and mysterious earth,” but are lately revered as the “Gentle, All-seeing ones.” This holy grove in Colonus, outside of Athens, is the place foretold by Apollo where the outcast from Thebes shall find a refuge at last. We understand