OEDIPUS
Children, young sons and daughters of old Cadmus,
Why do you sit here with your suppliant crowns?
The town is heavy with a mingled burden
of sounds and smells, of groans and hymns and incense;
I did not think it fit that I should hear
of this from messengers but came myself,--
I Oedipus whom all men call the Great.
Oedipus the King, known also as Oedipus Rex (Ancient Greek: Οἰδίπους Τύραννος, Oidipous Tyrannos) is one of the seven remaining tragedies written by Sophocles, the first of the so-called Theban Plays series (the other two are Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone). It tells the story of how Oedipus became aware of having killed his father and married his mother.
The play is set in Thebes and the main characters are Oedipus, Jocasta, Creon, Tiresias and the priest, while the other characters are two messangers and a herdsman. The chours is composed by old men of Thebes, while the characters of Antigone, Ismene and Tiresias helper stay mute.
The play starts in medias res, as a terrible plague caused by a mysterious sin spreads through the city. Adviced by his brother-in-law, Creon, Oedipus goes to the Oracle of Delphi, where he discovers that the plague is caused by the fact that the murderer of the former king Laius, hasn’t been caught and remains unpunished.
Oedipus then summons Tiresias, the blind prophet, which claims to know the answer to the Oracle’s riddle, but firmly refuses to tell it. The king enrages, so Tiresias reveals that he is the murderer ("You yourself are the criminal you seek") and, revealing further, he says that the criminal is a native citizen of Thebes, brother and father to his own children, and son and husband to his own mother . Oedipus can’t believe and accuses Creon to being plotting with Tiresias against him.
Jocasta, Oedipus’s wife, enters and tries to comfort him by saying that not all the prophecies are true: in fact she tells him the prophecy that her former husband, king Laius, had received, which told that he was meant to be killed by his own son, while everybody knows that he was killed by bandits.
At this point Oedipus freezes and starts to suspect that Tiresias was telling the truth: he summons one of the witnesses of Laius’s deadly attack, then explain to Jocasta that he left Corinth, the town he grew in, to escape a prophecy that said that he would’ve killed his father and laid whith his mother, and while he headed to Thebes, he killed a man on the road where Laius was told to be killed.
A messanger comes to the palace and tells that Oedipus father in Corinth is dead. Oedipus seems relieved as the prophecy result to be half unaccomplished, but the messanger reveal that actually he wasn’t really a son of the king of Corinth, but he was given to him by a man from Laius’s palace. This man results to be also the witness of Laius’s death.
This man arrives and reveals everything: Oedipus is Jocasta and Laius’s son.
The king is in despair. Jocasta hangs herself in her bedroom after Oedipus curses his own descendants and himself. After discovering Jocasta’s corpse, Oedipus blinds himself with the pins of her dress.
Oedpius then asks Creon to be sent in exile, but Creon convince him to consult the Oracles before. Oedipus then asks him to watch over his daughters and half sisters, Antigone and Ismene, and their brothers Polynices and Eteocles.
This is considered to be one of the most important tragedies of the whole ancient greek tradition. Not only it reflects the themes of despair and loneliness, favoured by Sophocles, but it also depicts with an incredible realistic attitude the fall from greatness to misery: Oedipus in his first line calls himself “Great”, people of Thebes love him and acclaim him for having killed the Sphynx. But then Oedipus results to be not only the ruin of his city Thebes, but also of his own family: better it would be if he didn’t come to life at all.
The curse falls upon his children: we know from the other two plays of the series that Antigone goes to exile with the blind father, which dies in Clonus, Attics, just when the war for power between his sons Eteocles and Polynices has begun. The boys will kill each other in war, and the authority of Creon, the new king of Thebes, will lead to Antigone’s death.
