A Note on the Guilt of Oedipus

The plot of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos, is well known: Thebes is ravaged by a pestilence. The Delphic oracle, being enquired of, replies that the pollution caused by the murder of the former king, Laius, must be dealt with by driving out or killing whoever killed him. A series of investigations is therefore undertaken, at the end of which it is disclosed that the present king of Thebes, Oedipus, is not only the murderer, but that Laius was his father and that he, Oedipus, has married his own mother and has incestuously begotten children by her. Oedipus’ mother, Iocasta, thereupon hangs herself, and Oedipus puts out his eyes.

In other words, the play appears to be about patricide and incest, and the guilt for them. I have no doubt on one level at least this is true. But it not infrequently happens that works of art are concerned with other things than those which their creators consciously intended, and serve other purposes than those their creators willed for them. (Milton's Paradise Lost, for example, does not so much justify God's ways to man as it glorifies a heroic rebel.) It is to this multi-leveledness that much of the fascination of superior works of art is due. I hope to show here that something of the sort may be the case with Sophocles’ famous play.

Let us begin by observing that the detail of Oedipus’ self-blinding apparently originated with the dramatists. Homer knows the Oedipus story: he relates the patricide, incest, and suicide of Epicaste (Iocasta). But he says nothing about the blinding. Indeed, it appears that Oedipus went on ruling (

ν∝σσε enasse, imperf.) at Thebes, and was buried there with heroic honors after his death in battle (Od. 11, 271-280, Il. 23, 679). It is interesting to observe that several versions of the Oedipus story were current in later antiquity: in one, for example, Oedipus kills his mother as well as his father (Schol. Eur. Phoen. 26); in another his sons Eteocles and Polyneices are the children not of his mother but of