Oedipus Rex — Commentary

In brief

Plague has fallen on Thebes. Its king, Oedipus, a stranger who won the throne and the widowed queen Jocasta by answering the riddle of the Sphinx, sends his brother-in-law Creon to the oracle at Delphi. The answer is that the killer of the last king, Laius, must be driven out. Oedipus curses the unknown killer and sends for the blind prophet Teiresias, who names Oedipus himself. Oedipus accuses Creon of a plot. Trying to calm him, Jocasta mentions a place where three roads meet, and Oedipus remembers killing an old man at such a place. His one hope is that a surviving servant spoke of robbers in the plural. A messenger from Corinth then brings news that the man Oedipus thinks is his father has died, and adds that he was no father at all: the baby was handed over on the mountain by a shepherd of Laius. That shepherd is the same servant. Under threat he confesses that the child was Laius’s own, given up by Jocasta to die. Jocasta hangs herself. Oedipus blinds himself with her brooches and begs to be sent away.

Almost nothing happens during the play except people finding things out. Everything terrible has already been done, years before the first line.

The argument

This is a detective plot twenty-four centuries old, and its central piece of evidence is never tested.

Oedipus sets the test himself. Creon reports what the one survivor said: “Robbers, he told us, not one bandit but / A troop of knaves” (line 122). Oedipus’s reply already slips to the singular, “Did any bandit dare so bold a stroke” (line 124). When he has told Jocasta his own story of the crossroads, he hangs everything on the number: “Laius was slain by robbers; now if he / Still speaks of robbers, not a robber, I / Slew him not; ‘one’ with ‘many’ cannot square” (line 842). Jocasta supports the test, “Nor can he now retract what then he said; / Not I alone but all our townsfolk heard it” (line 849).

The herdsman arrives some 270 lines later, and nobody asks him. By then the Corinthian has changed the subject, and Oedipus questions the old man only about a baby (fourth episode). At “all brought to pass, all true!” (line 1182) he has established who his parents are. He has not established that he killed Laius, and the only witness on the point has gone without being asked.

That witness is a poor one in any case. He ran, in Creon’s words, “flying for dear life”. Returning to find Oedipus on the throne, “He clasped my hand and supplicated me / To send him to the alps and pastures” (line 760), which looks like a man who recognises someone and is afraid. A servant who fled a single attacker has every reason to report a gang. Oedipus’s own account is no better: “And so I slew them every one” (line 813). Yet someone got away. The two accounts disagree on how many attacked and how many died.

Sandor Goodhart, in an article of 1978, and Frederick Ahl, in Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction (1991), press this to the conclusion that the play never proves Oedipus guilty and that he convicts himself. Most classicists have not followed them that far, and nor do I. The prophet and the oracle say he did it, the audience knew the myth, and the crossroads and the five-man party fit. But Sophocles could have had the herdsman say one line. He did not, and the effect is a precise picture of how certainty arrives. Oedipus stops asking who killed Laius when he starts asking who he is: “To learn my lineage, be it ne’er so low” (line 1076). Once he knows the answer to the second, the first needs no evidence. He accepts it as fast as he accused Creon, and he is right, and that does not make it a proof.

The shape of the play

Aristotle’s Poetics gives the terms for the parts of a tragedy, and editors divide this play accordingly: the prologue (lines 1–150), the entry song or parodos (151–215), then four episodes each followed by a choral ode or stasimon: the first episode (216–462) and stasimon (463–512), the second (513–862) and stasimon (863–910), the third (911–1085) and stasimon (1086–1109), the fourth (1110–1185) and stasimon (1186–1222), and the exodos (1223–1530). The free text does not label these, but its lines run close to the Greek count.

Every attempt to comfort does the damage. Jocasta, to show that prophets are worthless, mentions the three roads. The Corinthian, to free Oedipus from fear of his parents, tells him he has none. The third ode, a joyful song to Mount Cithaeron, “If my soul prophetic err not” (third stasimon), is sung just after Jocasta has run into the palace knowing the truth. I would call it the cruellest moment in the play.

The exodos runs to more than three hundred lines, all of them after the discovery. The violence is reported by a messenger, and then the blind man comes out and is on stage for over two hundred lines. The ending is also less tidy than summaries say. He asks for exile, and Creon will not grant it: “Ask this of the gods, not me” (line 1518). The last we see, he is being led back inside, with his daughters taken from him.

The voices

Everything Oedipus says has a second meaning he cannot hear. He promises to avenge Laius “As though he were my sire” (line 264), and proclaims “And on the murderer this curse I lay” (line 246). Greek adds a joke English cannot catch: the name Oidipous can be heard as swollen-foot, the ankles of the exposed baby, and carries the verb oida, I know. Teiresias is entirely direct: “I say thou art the murderer of the man / Whose murderer thou pursuest” (line 362). Oedipus cannot hear that either.

The title is another of these double meanings. Aristotle calls the play Oedipus. The later epithet Tyrannus means a ruler who has taken power rather than inherited it, and Oedipus is the one man in Thebes who has in fact inherited it. Rex is a later Latin label.

The free English

The text linked here is the verse translation by Francis Storr, first published in the Loeb Classical Library in 1912, as Project Gutenberg #31. It is complete and roughly line for line with the Greek, which has 1,530 lines. Its weakness is its language, which is pseudo-Elizabethan: “A murrain on thee! Get thee hence! Begone” (line 429), and “Hath scot or lot in the prophetic art” (line 709). Its choruses often jingle, as in “Wasted thus by death on death” (parodos). The Gutenberg transcription has its own slips, including “Mehtinks unwittingly” (line 744) and “I have bee proved”. Its “one” with “many” is close to the Greek, though, and nothing is left out.

The obvious rival is Gilbert Murray’s rhymed version of 1911, Gutenberg #27673. It has Greek line numbers on every page and good notes. Murray, who thanks “my old master, Francis Storr” in his preface, was a prominent translator until T. S. Eliot was rude about him as a poet in 1920. It is not the reading text here, because it softens the two passages where the sexual fact is said aloud. Jocasta’s famous remark, in Storr “How oft it chances that in dreams a man / Has wed his mother!” (line 981), becomes in Murray a vague “Prophets deem / A deed wrought that is wrought but in a dream”. And the outburst at lines 1403–08, in Storr “O fatal wedlock” through to “Brides, wives and mothers, an incestuous brood” (line 1403), becomes in Murray the single broken line “O flesh, horror of flesh!...”, and the page label jumps from verse 1403 to verse 1409. The rhyme also pads: “’Twas not one man, ’twas robbers—that he knew—”.

Better versions cost money: David Grene’s (1942, revised 1991) is plain, Robert Fagles’s (1984) has more drive, and Emily Wilson’s (2022) is among the newest. Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s Loeb (1994) faces the Greek, Richard Jebb’s prose of 1904 is free at Perseus, and P. J. Finglass’s Cambridge edition (2018) gives the Greek with a translation and full commentary.

Not a trilogy

The Gutenberg file is headed “The Oedipus Trilogy”, and so are many books. There is no such thing. Sophocles wrote these plays over some 36 years, in the order Antigone (about 441 BC), Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, the last of which was produced in 401, after his death. Each belonged to a different group of plays, the rest of them lost. The group containing this one took second prize to a set by Philocles. A real Theban trilogy did exist, that of Aeschylus, which won in 467; only its last play, Seven Against Thebes, survives.

It matters, because the three plays do not agree. Creon, who is a blunt and decent man here, is a tyrant in Antigone. Read in story order, they make a false arc from guilt to redemption.

The people

Oedipus

Oedipus is quick, generous and frightening. He has sent to Delphi before his people ask; he also threatens an old servant with torture and sentences his brother-in-law to death on no evidence. The virtues and the temper are the same thing.

Jocasta

Jocasta is the play’s great mind, and perhaps the first to understand. Her scepticism about prophets comes from having given up a child because of one. “Why should a mortal man, the sport of chance, / With no assured foreknowledge, be afraid?” (line 977) is the voice of a woman who has been living on that belief. Her last words are “henceforth silent evermore” (line 1071).

Creon and Teiresias

Creon makes a dry, sensible speech about why nobody would want to be king. Teiresias knew all along and came unwillingly: “what misery to be wise / When wisdom profits nothing” (line 316). He is also spiteful, and says it only when insulted.

The two shepherds

The Corinthian wants a tip, and the old servant wants to be left alone. The servant saved the child “Through pity, master” (line 1178), and that kindness made the catastrophe possible.

How it was made

No ancient record dates the play. It is usually placed about 429 BC, because the opening plague seems to recall the one that struck Athens from 430, but this is an inference, and Murray put it nearer 425. In the Odyssey Epicaste, as Jocasta is called there, hangs herself and Oedipus goes on ruling Thebes. The investigation by the guilty man is the part most likely to be Sophocles’ own, though with Aeschylus’s Theban plays mostly lost that cannot be proved.

Readers and critics

Aristotle made it the model. In the Poetics he uses it for reversal, where the Corinthian comes to cheer Oedipus and does the opposite (chapter 11), for the finest kind of recognition (chapters 11 and 16), and for the hero who falls through hamartia, some error, and not through vice (chapter 13). The story merely heard should make one shudder (chapter 14). He also marks a flaw: that Oedipus does not know how Laius died is irrational, and belongs outside the action (chapters 15 and 24). Murray’s preface agrees. Aristotle has found, from another side, the same soft spot: the inquiry depends on things nobody in Thebes has asked.

Sigmund Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess in October 1897 about love of the mother and jealousy of the father, and in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) he explained the play’s grip: “His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours”. He claimed that what moves us lies in the myth, and dismissed the play’s theology as a “misconceived secondary revision”. The theory has made the play known to people who have never read it. It fits the text badly, since this Oedipus runs from what he takes to be his parents precisely because he does not desire this, and he has no idea who Jocasta is. Yet Jocasta’s line shows that Sophocles knew about such dreams, and he gave it to the character with most reason to want them to mean nothing.

E. R. Dodds wrote the essay every reader needs, “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex” (Greece & Rome, 1966). As an Oxford examiner he had read many answers on whether the play justifies the ways of God to man. One large group said it proves the universe just, since Oedipus earned his fate. Another said it is a tragedy of destiny showing that man has no free will. Dodds rejected both. Aristotle’s hamartia is a mistake made in ignorance of a material fact and no moral flaw, and the search itself, everything Oedipus does on stage, is his own choice. The hero’s own words say it best: “Apollo, friend, Apollo, he it was / That brought these ills to pass; / But the right hand that dealt the blow / Was mine, none other” (line 1329). Later scholars have asked whether Dodds makes him too innocent, but the two errors he named are still where most students start.

Afterlives

Yeats produced his own prose and verse version, published in 1928. Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927), to a text by Cocteau put into Latin, is the coldest and perhaps the greatest. Martha Graham’s Night Journey (1947) tells it from Jocasta’s side. Tyrone Guthrie’s film of 1957 keeps the masks, and Pasolini’s Edipo Re (1967) was shot in Morocco, with a modern Italian frame. Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2003) drew on the play, and Robert Icke’s Oedipus, first seen in Amsterdam in 2018, reached the West End and Broadway in 2025.

How to read it

Read it in one sitting. It takes about an hour and a half, and the speed is part of the effect.
Keep a list of what each person knows, and when. Mark the moment you think Jocasta understands.
When the Herdsman arrives, listen for the missing question. Then go back to line 842.

Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus (about 406 BC). A different play written decades later, whose Oedipus argues his own innocence.
William Shakespeare, King Lear (about 1605–06). Another king undone by what he will not see, with a blinded father led by his own child.
Aristotle, Poetics (fourth century BC). The first reader’s notes, free at Gutenberg #1974 in S. H. Butcher’s translation.