Moving from the place of Aeschylus we're
gonna now move into a couple of places one by Sophocles and one by Euripides.
These three playwrights Aeschylus Sophocles and Euripides make up the three
greats of ancient Athens. And we'll have a chance to sample each of
the materials that survived from, from these poets.
In the case of Oedipus and. Or in the case of Sophocles we're gonna
look at this play Oedipus. The question that we run into here is a
question that we're used to. We've seen it in the case of Odysseus.
We, we've talked a lot about the question of identity.
What makes up a, a Greek identity. Now in the case of Odysseus we tried to
look at how this identity gets reformed from Books five forward,
Recall Odysseus has to recover all the things that make him into a, a, an
important and powerful Greek male. He has to recover his name.
His lineage. The place he's from and his history,
His own background. What Sophocles does in taking the story of
Oedipus is to turn it into another kind treatment of this question of identity.
But in the case of Oedipus the question of identity at each turn is inverted.
Things are turned upside-down and knocked all, all a-kilter.
For Sophocles the question of the name comes up.
Yes, what's Oedipus' name? Well, he doesn't quite understand what it
is, it's gonna come back to get him. What's his lineage?
Well, he doesn't really know that either. In fact, that's kind of the point of the
play, his lineage is, not only upset, it's actually perverted, it's actually turned
upside-down in a awful way. His background, where does this...
Where is he from? What city is he from?
We don't know that. He thinks he knows, but he doesn't
actually know the correct answer there. And what's his past again.
It's something that he's completely unaware of.
So all these important pieces of a Greek identity in the play of Oedipus are gonna
come back in a in a way that is absolutely upside down.
Oedipus's story, we ran into before, it shows up when Odysseus goes to the
Underworld in Homer, page 258 in the Fagles' translation.
We got Odysseus underneath there, he runs into this woman named Epicasta.
We hear of a story about her that matches the story that w-, rest on a woman
Sophocles knows as Jocasta. And Epicasta we hear about her,
She has there are the elements there are come apart.
A son kills a father, a mother marries a son, and a mother commits suicide.
So the basic elements are there, but it's not detailed, and Homer doesn't go into,
any, grand, depth in, into this story. When Sophocles takes it over, he remakes
these bare details into an extremely powerful statement and exploration of,
Greek ideas of identity. For the whole play, Sophocles has his main
character, Oedipus, after something. He's trying to figure out an identity.
He's trying to figure out who is the murderer of this prior king of Thebes,
Laius. Well, at the same time.
The time he's doing that, unbeknownst to, unbeknownst to Oedipus.
He's also pursuing another kind of question.
The question of his own identity. So who is the murderer of Laius turns out
to be for Oedipus the same question as, who am I?
Once he gets on top of that question, then awful things are gonna come to his own
knowledge. What he thought was his background is
turned upside down. The question of his name, parents, city he
is from, and his past, all come back to haunt him.
In the staging the play, very much like what we see in, in tragedies, Up til now,
we saw this in Escalus. We're gonna see it again in Euripedes.
There's a central door back behind us. Lots of stuff is gonna go on behind that
door. Oedipus stands center stage.
And messengers come to him, and deliver him information that he then has to figure
out and riddle with. He's trying to come to some kind of,
Gather the information, so we can come to a clusion, about this, question of the
identity of the murderer, also behind that central door, Jocasta comes out, and then
she co-, goes back behind it, she commits suicide back behind there, and when
Oedipus makes his disappearance, toward the end of the play and rips out his own
eyeballs and that all happens, behind that door, as we're used to by now.
There are, background pieces to this play, not least the scene depicted famously on
this beautiful piece of ceramic, Oedipus has an interesting background, we learn
it, as the play goes on, it comes out. Some of it in choral odes, sometimes in
the reminisces, reminiscences of some of the characters.
But I thought it might be useful just to give a kind of schematic overview of this
past. All that's happened to Oedipus before the
play such that as it's going on, we can focus on what happens in the action of the
play itself. Oedipus is born.
Yes indeed he's born from Laius and Jocasta and they are upset that there is
this infant that's arrived at them. There's been an oracle, in fact, that the
person will overthrow Laius. He then decides to expose the baby, to
leave the baby out on a hillside. The idea is that the baby was going to
wind up being a gift to the gods and won't be around anymore.
He gives this nasty duty off to one of his servants who takes the child with him out
into the, Out into the hillside a shepherd.
He meets up with a shepherd from Corinth, and rather than exposing the child, gives
over baby Oedipus to this Corinthian shepherd.
The Corinthian shepherd then, goes back down to Corinth and presents it to the
king, who just so happened to be looking for a child himself, with his wife.
They then tell, take over this baby, thrilled, they've adopted him to their
family, call it their own. The king raises the child, and all is well
until Oedipus hears another oracle, which tells him that all is not quite right with
him, and that at some point, he's going to kill his father and marry his mother.
He then runs away. From who he thinks his father and mother
are and, on the way kills a man at a crossroad.
When he does, he comes back, he comes back to the city of thieves having just killed
who turned, the person that turned out to be Laius.
And they're having an awful time because they're is this sphinx that is plaguing
their city. And it won't leave until someone is
capable of answering it's riddle. Well, Oedipus is a very smart man, he can
go off and answer the riddle of the sphinx.
The sphinx then shrivels up and goes away. The plague is lifted and as an extreme
example of Xenia, the people of Thebes say oh wonderful, you are our hero, you've
saved us from this awful plague. Please come in.
Have our Kingdom. Marry our queen.
Welcome. You can be our new king.
Oedipus is thrilled. Takes that up.
All seems to be perfectly ready. This.
Just recently widowed queen, conveniently, turns out to be Oedipus' new wife.
But then, all is still not quite right, and in Thebes another plague arrives from
Apollo, and it's here that our story begins.
Oedipus discovers that the plague was sent because of the murder of Lias, the
murderer was never found, and there's going to be trouble.
The story is gonna unfold from here, and we're focused next, on some of the themes
that come up.