by Sophocles
May the gods guard you better than they did me.
Children, where are you? Come to me.
These are your brother’s hands, hands
of the man who created you, hands that caused 1680
my once bright eyes to go dark.
He, children, saw nothing, knew nothing.
He fathered you where his own life began,
where his own seed grew. Though I can’t
see you, I can weep for you . . .
—OEDIPUS takes his daughters in his arms—
when I think how bitter your lives will be.
I know the life that men will make you live.
What public gatherings, what festivals
could you attend? None! You would be sent home
in tears, without your share of holy joy. 1690
When the time comes to marry, my daughters,
what man will risk the revulsion—
the infamy!—that will wound you
just as it wounded your parents?
What evil is missing? Your father killed
his father. He had children with the mother
who bore him, fathered you
at the source of his own life.
Those are the insults
you will face. Who will marry you?
No one, my children. You will grow old 1700
unmarried, living a dried-up childless life.
Kreon, you’re all the father they have now.
The parents who conceived them are both lost.
Keep these two girls from rootless wandering—
unmarried and helpless. They are your kin.
Don’t bring them down to what I am.
Pity them. They are so young, and but for you,
alone. Touch my hand, kind man,
make that touch your promise.
KREON touches him.
Children, had you been old enough 1710
to comprehend, I would have taught you more.
Now, all I can do is ask you to pray
that you live only where you’re welcomed,
that your lives be happier than mine was—
the father from whose seed you were born.
KREON
Enough grief. Go inside now.
OEDIPUS
Bitter words that I must obey.
KREON
Time runs out on all things.
OEDIPUS
Grant my request before I go.
KREON
Speak. 1720
OEDIPUS
Banish me from my homeland.
KREON
Ask god to do that, not me.
OEDIPUS
I am the man the gods hate most.
KREON
Then you will have your wish.
OEDIPUS
You consent?
KREON
I never promise if I can’t be sure.
OEDIPUS
Then lead me inside.
KREON
Come. Let go of your children now.
OEDIPUS
Don’t take them from me.
KREON
Give up your power, too. 1730
You won the power once, but you couldn’t
keep it to the end of your life.
KREON leads OEDIPUS into the palace.
LEADER
Thebans, that man is the same Oedipus
whose great mind solved the famous riddle.
He was a most powerful man.
Which of us seeing his glory, his prestige,
did not wish his luck could be ours?
Now look at what wreckage the seas
of savage trouble have made of his life.
To know the truth of a man, wait 1740
till you see his life end.
On that day, look at him.
Don’t claim any man is god’s friend
until he has passed through life
and crossed the border into death—
never having been god’s victim.
ALL leave.
Oedipus at Kolonos
INTRODUCTION
“HIS DEATH WAS A CAUSE FOR WONDER”
The Oedipus we meet in Kolonos, a lush country village a mile north of Athens, where Sophocles was raised, has suffered through years of blindness, poverty, and exile. He is old and frail, but still recognizable as the fearless, vengeful, and quick-witted hero of Oedipus the King. Traits that characterized his youth (and contributed to his downfall) still energize the aged Oedipus as he repeatedly recalls, and forcefully defends, his earlier conduct. Only at the end of his journey, as he approaches the afterlife that Apollo promised would somehow distinguish him, does Oedipus become a gentler and more loving man.
The Greek word for the grace or favor extended by men and gods to the worthy, the needy, the damaged, and the miserable is charis. By setting Oedipus at Kolonos on the edge of a sacred grove blessed with flowers, grape vines, nightingales, shade trees, and clearings suitable for dancing, Sophocles creates a physical setting where men and gods converge, one that makes manifest the metaphysical space where the human and divine pay their respects and offer charis to each other. Charis becomes a palpable presence onstage, its promise growing more significant as the drama unfolds.
In the sacred grove of the Eumenides, Oedipus will find the mercy, and in a sense the rebirth, Apollo promised him at Delphi—almost as an afterthought—when as a troubled young man he received the worst news any Greek ever heard from a god: he was doomed to kill his father and his mother would bear his children. Now, within the grove’s precincts, the weakened Oedipus will be transformed from a reviled exile into a revered hero. As the classicist John Gould put it, “Nowhere else in Greek tragedy does the primitively mysterious power of boundaries and thresholds, the ‘extraterritoriality’ of the sacred, make itself felt with the fierce precision that Sophocles achieves” in the song the Old Men sing as they arrive on the scene (1973, 90). We sense immediately the primitive dread aroused by the grove’s divine inhabitants. Oedipus, guided by Antigone, hides in the trees as the chorus sweeps angrily onstage. The Old Men denounce the hidden intruder. They scour the grove for signs of him and sing their terror of the all-seeing Furies, whom they refer to circumspectly as the Kindly Ones. To escape the goddesses’ withering glances, the old men walk with their eyes lowered. As even the uttering of the Furies’ names is forbidden, the prayers they mouth are silent.
Oedipus responds to the Old Men’s warnings by emerging from his hiding place in the grove. He gives himself up to them. He won’t reenter the grove until a god’s voice calls to him in the play’s climactic moments. Meanwhile, by dramatizing Oedipus’ claims to deserve the gods’ charis, Sophocles explores a subject that fascinated him—heroes and their deaths as paradigms for the fully empowered human spirit.
Thus the final surviving work by Sophocles, the second of his two dramas about Oedipus, brings his hero’s story to a tantalizing but still satisfying conclusion, one we could not have predicted for the broken and abandoned man we saw at the end of Oedipus the King. In addition to chronicling Oedipus’ reversal of fortune, the Kolonos also conveys the wise old citizen-playwright’s last reflections on themes keenly important to him: the damage that lives wrecked in one generation inflict on the next; the difference between moral guilt and religious defilement; the responsibilities of parents and children to each other; the miseries of old age; and the greatness of Athens.
The Kolonos, which was produced posthumously at the Theater of Dionysos in 401 BCE by Sophocles the Younger, coincides with Athens’ darker endgame—the final defeat by Sparta that closed Athens’ century-long era of political innovation, military hegemony, and theatrical genius. Sophocles celebrates Athens’ past and timeless moral and mythical glory throughout the play—most brilliantly in a song of gratitude to the “mother city, / for the great gifts the gods have given her” (775–776). A few incidents in the plot might also allude to Athens’ decline: Polyneikes’ reckless and self
-obsessed campaign against Thebes recalls Athens’ own military failures stretching back to the invasion of Sicily in 415. Theseus’ unsentimental appreciation of Oedipus, as well as his swift dispatch of troops that foil Kreon’s attempt to abduct Oedipus’ daughters, reminds us that skilled and gracious men, like Perikles and Themistokles, once led Athens.
The commanding presence with which Oedipus engages his benefactor Theseus (and his enemies—his own son Polyneikes and his old nemesis Kreon) revives Oedipus’ dormant greatness. Cumulative scenes of accusation and defense test and confirm Oedipus’ strengths and his sangfroid: his stubbornness, his quick analytic intelligence, his love for his caring daughters, his rhetorical flair, his sense of his own value to others, his unflinching moral fury. The play’s unusual length affords Sophocles the scope to develop and nuance his vision of an eternally embattled hero.
Modern readers will relate to most of Oedipus’ convictions and obsessions—belief that he’s innocent of willful murder and incest; confidence that he’ll achieve the good death the gods have promised—but will find others puzzling. A look at ancient Greek religious and social practices will bring these less familiar and ambiguous issues into focus.
We use the word “fate,” often casually, to describe the mysterious and invincible (but possibly nonexistent) force that may or may not govern our lives. Fate, to the Greeks, was a potent reality. Their word for it is tyche (pronounced too-KAY). Both the English and the Greek words point to life-altering events that happen outside a person’s control. But to possess the ancient context of tyche—which may also be translated as “luck” or “destiny”—we should imagine it as a force that puts constant pressure on a person’s mind, a reality beyond comprehension or appeal. No wonder then, considering how ordinary Greeks believed tyche governed the events of their lives, that plots which precipitate disaster, as do those of Oedipus the King and Euripides’ Medea, and plots with upbeat outcomes, such as Euripides’ Alkestis or Aeschylus’ Eumenides, were equally popular with Athenian audiences and playwrights. A theatrical plot was no more likely to be censured for its credulity-straining twists than a man’s action-packed life would have been interpreted as meaningless happenstance. Both a play’s and a life’s plot revealed the gods at work and therefore implicitly conveyed to observers the gods’ moral encouragement or their warning.
Just as the concept of the daimon helps explain why Oedipus’ seemingly rational choices turn out so badly in Oedipus the King, the charis finally granted him by the gods illuminates the significance of Oedipus’ death in the Kolonos. Oedipus the King shows the gods—through their proxy, the personal daimon who acts on behalf of Apollo to govern the events of Oedipus’ life—using cruel duplicity to destroy him. The Kolonos, on the other hand, reveals the gods’ change of heart, their ultimate, if long withheld, concern and grace. Both dramas thus share the goal of understanding and radically reinterpreting past events in the hero’s life that were predicted and, apparently, ordained by the gods. The earlier Oedipus’ intellect was helpless against the malevolence of his daimon. But in the Kolonos, Oedipus’ justifications, conscious choices, and cogent analyses are reinterpreted, rewarded, and finally blessed.
The secondary prophecy Apollo made to the young Oedipus—that at the point of death, safe haven would await him in a grove of the Eumenides near Athens—parallels the transformation in Aeschylus’ Orestia in which Orestes’ Furies, once the hounding tormentors of all kin murderers, are transformed by the gods at Orestes’ trial in Athens into benign protectors of the family. Both Oedipus and Orestes live through crises wherein their traumatic actions change who they are for the better. Fury has driven Oedipus to commit the acts that fulfilled Apollo’s original prophecy. His once self-destructive fury now attacks only his outward enemies—and will enduringly protect what Oedipus now values, his adopted city Athens. He achieves an inner peacefulness during his final hour that precedes his entry into Hades and his promised emergence into the afterlife as a hero.
Oedipus’ sexual violation of his mother and the killing of his father are both forgiven and perhaps evoked during the miraculous vanishing into the Earth that Sophocles lets us imagine through the Messenger, a witness who does not have a close-up view—only Theseus has that privilege—but who tries to imagine what he partially sees. Here the Messenger recounts the death of Oedipus:
But the exact nature
of the death Oedipus died, no man
but Theseus could tell you. Zeus didn’t
incinerate him with a lightning blast,
no sudden squall blew inland from the sea.
So it was either a god spiriting
him away, or else the Earth’s lower world—
her deep foundations—opening to him,
for he felt nothing but welcoming kindness.
When this man vanished, there was no sorrow.
He suffered no sickness. His death, like no
other man’s, was a cause for wonder. (1812–1823)
The Messenger takes it upon himself to note what Oedipus’ death was not—no sudden skyward abduction by Zeus, no lightning blast, no hurricane blowing him out to sea. Sorrow, suffering, sickness—none is present. It was indeed a death that suggested forgiveness, a death administered in all its gentleness by the Earth Mother, Gaia. She opened to him, with no suggestion of violation, “for he felt nothing but welcoming kindness” (1820). After all the horrific violations he committed unaware, such a death was indeed “a cause for wonder.”
—RB
Oedipus at Kolonos
Translated by Robert Bagg
CHARACTERS
OEDIPUS, exiled king of Thebes
ANTIGONE, Oedipus’ daughter
STRANGER from Kolonos
OLD MEN of Kolonos (Chorus)
LEADER of the Chorus
ISMENE, Oedipus’ daughter
Ismene’s Servant
THESEUS, king of Athens
Theseus’ Men
KREON, Oedipus’ brother-in-law
Kreon’s Soldiers
POLYNEIKES, Oedipus’ son, deposed king of Thebes
MESSENGER
The play opens in the countryside a mile and a quarter northwest of the Acropolis in Athens. A sacred grove is at stage rear. Olives, grape vines, crocus, and narcissus bloom within it; birds sing and fountains splash. A path leads over the gentle rise down into the grove’s depths. A natural stone bench sits upstage just inside the grove. A rock ledge running across the slope has a flat sitting place at its lower downstage end; near it is a statue of the hero Kolonos. Entering from the road to Thebes, on the spectators’ left, ANTIGONE guides her father, the aged OEDIPUS, onstage. Both are dusty and weary. OEDIPUS carries a staff and a traveler’s pouch.
OEDIPUS
Daughter, I’m old and blind. Where are we now,
Antigone? Have we come to a town?
(calling out)
Who will indulge Wandering Oedipus
today—with some food and a place to sleep?
I ask little, I’m given less, but it’s
enough. The blows I’ve suffered
have taught me acquiescence. So has Time,
my enduring companion.
So has my noble birth.
Daughter, if you see somewhere 10
to rest—on public land, or in a grove
set aside for the gods—
guide me to it, sit me down there.
Then we’ll determine where we are.
We’re strangers here. We must listen
to the locals and do what they say.
ANTIGONE
My poor exhausted father!
Oedipus, the towers guarding the city
seem far off. I have the feeling
we’re in some holy place— 20
there’s so much olive and laurel and grape vine
running wild. Listen. Deep inside, it’s packed
with nightingales! Rest on this ledge.
For an old man, this has been a long tr
ek.
OEDIPUS
Ease the blind man down. Be my lookout.
ANTIGONE
No need to tell me! I’ve been doing this awhile.
OEDIPUS sits on a stone outcrop just inside the grove.
OEDIPUS
Now, can you tell me where we are?
ANTIGONE
Athens, but I don’t know which part.
OEDIPUS
Travelers on the road told us that much.
ANTIGONE
Shouldn’t I go ask what this place is called? 30
OEDIPUS
Do that, child. If this place can support life.
ANTIGONE
But people do live here. No need to search.
I see a man nearby. Right over there.
OEDIPUS
Is he headed in our direction?
Enter STRANGER, who strides toward them.
ANTIGONE
(whispering)
No. He’s already close. Whatever seems
called for, say it to him now. He’s here.
OEDIPUS
Stranger, this girl—whose eyes see for us both—
tells me that you’ve arrived opportunely,
to help us resolve our quandary . . .
STRANGER
Hold it.
Before you start asking me questions, 40
get off that rock! You’re on forbidden ground.
ANTIGONE helps OEDIPUS rise slowly to his feet.
OEDIPUS
What kind of ground? Belonging to which gods?
STRANGER
It’s off-limits. No one’s allowed to live here.
It’s sacred to some fearsome goddesses—
daughters of Darkness and the Earth.
OEDIPUS
By what respectful name do you call them—
since I’m about to offer them a prayer?
STRANGER
People here call them the Kindly Ones—
the goddesses who see everything.
Other places might give them harsher names. 50