Introduction

INTRODUCTION.

§ 1. The Oedipus Tyrannus is in one sense the masterpiece of Attic Tragedy. No other shows an equal degree of art in the development of the plot; and this excellence depends on the powerful and subtle drawing of the characters. Modern drama, where minor parts can be multiplied and scene changed at will, can more easily divorce the two kinds of merit. Some of Voltaire’s plays, for instance, not first-rate in other ways, are models of ingenious construction. The conditions of the Greek stage left less room for such a result. In the Oedipus Tyrannus the highest constructive skill is seen to be intimately and necessarily allied with the vivid delineation of a few persons.

Here it is peculiarly interesting to recover, so far as we can, the form in which the story of Oedipus came to Sophocles ; to remark what he has altered or added ; and to see how the same subject has been handled by other dramatists.

The essence of the myth is the son slaying his unknown father, and thereby fulfilling a decree of fate. The subsequent marriage, if not an original part of the story, seems to have been an early addition. The central ideas are, (1) the irresistible power of destiny, and (2) the sacredness of the primary natural ties, as measured by the horror of an unconscious sin against it. The direct and simple form in which these ideas are embodied gives the legend an impress of high antiquity. This might be illustrated by a comparison with the story of Sohrab and Rustum as told in Mr Matthew Arnold’s beautiful poem. The slaying of the unknown son by the father is there surrounded with a pathos and a chivalrous tenderness which have no counterpart in the grim simplicity of the Oedipus myth, as it appears in its earliest known shape.

Homeric Poems.

§ 2. The Iliad, which knows the war of Polyneices and his allies against Thebes (4. 378), once glances at the tale of Oedipus—where Mecisteus, father of Euryalus, is said to have visited Thebes in order to attend tne funeral games which were celebrated after the death of Oedipus (23. 679 f.):—
ὅς ποτε Θήβασδ’ ἦλθε δεδουπότος Οἰδιπόδαο
ἐς τάφον,—
—‘who came to Thebes of yore, when Oedipus had fallen, to his burying.’

The word δεδουπότος plainly refers to a violent death in fight, or at the hand of an assassin; it would not be in accord with the tone of epic language to understand it as a figurative phrase for a sudden fall from greatness. But more than this the Iliad does not tell. The poet of the 23rd book imagines Oedipus as having died by violence, and received burial at Thebes, in the generation before the Trojan war.

The Nekyia in the Odyssey gives the earliest sketch of an integral story (11. 271 ff.):—
Μητέρα τ’ Οἰδιπόδαο ἴδον, καλὴν Ἐπικάστην,
ἣ μέγα ἔργον ἔρεξεν ἀϊδρείῃσι νόοιο
γημαμένη ᾧ υἱεῖ· ὁ δ’ ὃν πατέρ’ ἐξεναρίξας
γῆμεν· ἄφαρ δ’ ἀνάπυστα θεοὶ θέσαν ἀνθρώποισιν.
ἀλλ’ ὁ μὲν ἐν Θήβῃ πολυηράτῳ ἄλγεα πάσχων
Καδμείων ἤνασσε θεῶν ὀλοὰς διὰ βουλάς·
ἡ δ’ ἔβη εἰς Ἀΐδαο πυλάρταο κρατεροῖο,
ἁψαμένη βρόχον αἰπὺν ἀφ’ ὑψηλοῖο μελάθρου,
ᾧ ἄχεϊ σχομένη· τῷ δ’ ἄλγεα κάλλιπ’ ὀπίσσω
πολλὰ μάλ’, ὅσσα τε μητρὸς Ἐρινύες ἐκτελέουσιν.
‘And I saw the mother of Oedipodes, fair Epicastè, who wrought a dread deed with unwitting mind, in that she wedded her son; but he had slain his father ere he wedded her; and presently the gods made these things known among men. Yet he still ruled over the Cadmeans in lovely Thebes, suffering anguish by the dire counsels of the gods; but she went to the house of Hades, the strong warder, when she had fastened a noose on high from the roof-beam, possessed by her pain; and to him she bequeathed sorrows full many, even all that a mother’s Avengers bring to pass.’

With regard to this outline in the Odyssey, it is to be noted that it ignores (a) the deliverance of Thebes from the Sphinx—though this may be implied in the marriage with Epicastè: (b) the self-blinding of Oedipus: (c) the expulsion of Oedipus from Thebes—herein agreeing with the indication in the Iliad. It further seems to exclude the notion of Epicastè having borne children to Oedipus, since the discovery followed ‘presently’ on the union,—unless, indeed, by ἄφαρ the poet merely meant ‘suddenly.’

§ 3. Lost poems of Hesiod may have touched on the story of Oedipus; but in his extant work there is only a passing reference to the war at Thebes (between Polyneices and Eteocles), in which heroes fell, ‘fighting for the flocks of Oedipus.’ Hesiod knows the Sphinx as the daughter of Echidna and as the pest of Thebes¹.

• 1.Hes. Op. 162: war slew the heroes, τοὺς μὲν ἐφ’ ἑπταπύλῳ Θήβῃ...μαρναμένους μήλων ἕνεκ’ Οἰδιπόδαο. The Sphinx: Theog. 326, ἡ δ’ (Echidna) ἄρα Φῖκ’ ὀλοὴν τέκε, Καδμείοισιν ὄλεθρον. The hill near Thebes on which the Sphinx sat was called Φίκειον ὄρος. References in lost Hesiodic poems: schol. on Il. 23. 680.

But the story of Oedipus was fully treated in some of those lost epics which dealt with the Theban cycle of myths. One of these was the ‘Oedipodeia,’ Οἰδιπόδεια (ἔπη). According to this, the four children of Oedipus were not borne by Iocasta, but by a second wife, Euryganeia. Pausanias, who follows this account, does not know the author of the poem². It will be observed that this epic agrees with the Odyssey in not making Iocasta bear issue to Oedipus. It is by Attic writers, so far as we know, that she was first described as doing so. Poets or logographers who desired to preserve the favour of Dorians had a reason for avoiding that version. There were houses which traced their line from the children of Oedipus,—as Theron, tyrant of Acragas, claimed descent from Thersandros, son of Polyneices³. To represent these children as the offspring of an incestuous union would have been to declare the stream polluted at its source.

• 2.He speaks merely of ὁ τὰ ἔπη ποιήσας ἃ Οἰδιπόδεια ὀνομάζουσι (9. 5. 11). But the inscription known as the ‘marmor Borgianum’ refers it to Cinaethon, a Lacedaemonian poet who treated epically the Dorian family legends, and who is said to have flourished about 775 B.C. Pausanias, however, who quotes Cinaethon on several points of genealogy, certainly did not regard the Oedipodeia as his work.
• 3.Pind. Ol. 2. 35.

We learn from Proclus that in the epic called the Cyprian Lays (Κύπρια), which included the preparations for the Trojan war, Nestor related ‘the story of Oedipus’ (τὰ περὶ Οἰδίπουν) in the course of a digression (ἐν παρεκβάσει) which comprised also the madness of Heracles, as well as the story of Theseus and Ariadne. This was probably one of the sources used by the Attic dramatists. Another source, doubtless more fertile in detail, was the epic entitled the Thebaid (Θηβαΐς), and now usually designated as the ‘Cyclic Thebaid,’ to distinguish it from a later epic of the same name by Antimachus of Colophon, the contemporary of Euripides. Only about 20 verses remain from it⁴. The chief fragment relates to the curse pronounced by Oedipus on his sons. They had broken his strict command by setting on his table the wine-cups (ἐκπώματα) used by Laïus; and he invoked a curse upon them:—
αἶψα δὲ παισὶν ἑοῖσι μετ’ ἀμφοτέροισιν ἐπαρὰς
ἀργαλέας ἠρᾶτο· θεὸν δ’ οὐ λάνθαν’ Ἐρινῦν·
ὡς οὔ οἱ πατρώϊ’ ἐνηείῃ φιλότητος
δάσσαιντ’, ἀμφοτέροισι δ’ ἕοι πόλεμός τε μάχαι τε.
‘And straightway, while his two sons were by, he uttered dire curses,—and the Avenging goddess failed not to hear them,—that they should divide their heritage in no kindly spirit, but that war and strife should be ever between them.’

• 4.See the Didot ed. of the Cyclic fragments, p. 587.

This Thebaid—tracing the operation of a curse through the whole history of the house—must have had an important share in moulding the conception of the Aeschylean trilogy.

§ 4. Pindar touches on the story of Oedipus in Ol. 2. 42 ff. Destiny has often brought evil fortune after good,—
ἐξ οὗπερ ἔκτεινε Λᾷον μόριμος υἱὸς
συναντόμενος, ἐν δὲ Πυθῶνι χρησθὲν
παλαίφατον τέλεσσεν·
ἰδοῖσα δ’ ὀξεῖ’ Ἐρινὺς
ἔπεφνέ οἱ σὺν ἀλλαλοφονίᾳ γένος ἀρήϊον— ‘—from the day when his doomed son met Laïus and killed him, and accomplished the word given aforetime at Pytho. But the swift Erinys beheld it, and slew his warlike sons, each by the other’s sword.’

Here the Fury is represented as destroying the sons in direct retribution for the parricide, not in answer to the imprecation of Oedipus. A fragment of Pindar alludes to the riddle of the Sphinx, and he uses ‘the wisdom of Oedipus’ to denote counsel wrapped in dark sayings,—since the skill which solves riddling speech can weave it⁵.

• 5.Pind. fr. 62 αἴνιγμα παρθένου | ἐξ ἀγριᾶν γνάθων: Pyth. 4. 263 τὰν Οἰδιπόδα σοφίαν. Pindar’s elder contemporary Corinna had sung of Oedipus as delivering Thebes not only from the Sphinx but also from τὴν Τευμησσίαν ἀλώπεκα—a fox from the Boeotian village of Teumessus: but we hear no more of this less formidable pest. (Bergk, Poet. Lyr. p. 949.)

§ 5. The logographers could not omit the story of Oedipus in a systematic treatment of the Theban myths. Hellanicus of Mitylene (circ. 450 B.C.) is mentioned by the Scholiast on the Phoenissae (61) as agreeing with Euripides in regard to the self-blinding of Oedipus⁶. The contemporary Pherecydes of Leros (usually called ‘Athenian’ since Athens was his home) treated the legends of Thebes in the fifth of ten books forming a comprehensive survey of Greek tradition⁷. According to him, Iocasta bore two sons to Oedipus, who were slain by the Minyae: but, as in the Oedipodeia, his second wife Euryganeia bore Eteocles and Polyneices, Antigone and Ismene. This seems to be the earliest known version which ascribes issue to the marriage of Iocasta with Oedipus.

• 6.Müller, Frag. Histor. I. 85.
• 7.Müller, ib. I. 48.

§ 6. However incomplete this sketch may be relatively to the materials which existed in the early part of the fifth century B.C., it may at least serve to suggest the general conditions under which Tragedy entered on the treatment of the subject. The story of Oedipus, defined in its main features by a tradition older than the Odyssey, had been elaborated in the epics of later poets and the prose of chroniclers. There were versions differing in detail, and allowing scope for selection. While the great outlines were constant, minor circumstances might be adapted to the dramatist’s chosen view.

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides agree in a trait which does not belong to any extant version before theirs. Iocasta, not Euryganeia, is the mother of Eteocles and Polyneices, Antigone and Ismene. They agree also in connecting the doom of the two brothers with a curse pronounced by Oedipus. Neither the scanty fragments⁸ which alone represent the Oedipus of Euripides, nor the hints in the Phoenissae, enable us to determine the distinctive features of his treatment. With regard to Aeschylus, though our knowledge is very meagre, it suffices at least to show the broad difference between his plan and that of Sophocles.

• 8.Nauck Eur. Fragm. 541—561, to which Unger adds Soph. fr. incert. 663, Meineke adespota 107, 309, others adesp. 6. Almost all the verses are commonplaces. From fr. 546, 547 I should conjecture that the Creon of Eur. defended himself against a charge of treason in a passage parallel with Soph. O. T. 583—615. One fragment of two lines is curious (545): ἡμεῖς δὲ Πολύβου παῖδ’ ἐρείσαντες πέδῳ | ἐξομματοῦμεν καὶ διόλλυμεν κόρας. Quoting these, the Schol. on Eur. Ph. 61 says: ἐν δὲ τῷ Οἰδίποδι οἱ Λαΐου θεράποντες ἐτύφλωσαν αὐτόν. This would seem to mean that, after the discovery, the old retainers of Laïus blinded Oedipus—for the Schol. is commenting on the verse which says that he was blinded by himself. But the tragic force of the incident depends wholly on its being the king’s own frantic act. I incline to suspect some error on the Scholiast’s part, which a knowledge of the context might possibly have disclosed.
  From the prologue of the Phoenissae it appears that Eur. imagined Oedipus to have been found on Cithaeron by the ἱπποβούκολοι of Polybus, and taken by them to the latter’s wife. The Iocasta of Eur. herself relates in that play how, when the sons of Oed. grew up, they held him a prisoner in the palace at Thebes—that the disgrace might be hidden from men’s eyes. It was then that he pronounced a curse upon them. When they have fallen, fighting for the throne, Iocasta kills herself over their bodies, and Creon then expels Oedipus from Thebes. The mutilated ὑπόθεσις to the Phoenissae does not warrant us in supposing that the Oenomaus and Chrysippus of Eur.,—the latter containing the curse of Pelops on Laïus—formed a trilogy with his Oedipus.

Aeschylus treated the story of Oedipus as he treated the story of Agamemnon. Oedipus became the foremost figure of a trilogy which traced the action of an inherited curse in the house of Labdacus, even as the Oresteia traced the action of such a curse in the house of Pelops. That trilogy consisted of the Laïus, the Oedipus, and the extant Seven against Thebes; the satyric drama being the Sphinx. From the Laïus only a few words remain; from the Oedipus, three verses; but some general idea of the Oedipus may be gathered from a passage in the Seven against Thebes (772—791). Oedipus had been pictured by Aeschylus, as he is pictured by Sophocles, at the height of fame and power. He who had delivered Thebes from ‘the devouring pest’ (τὰν ἁρπαξάνδραν κῆρα) was admired by all Thebans as the first of men. ‘But when, hapless one, he came to knowledge of his ill-starred marriage, impatient of his pain, with frenzied heart he wrought a twofold ill’: he blinded himself, and called down on his sons this curse, that one day they should divide their heritage with the sword. ‘And now I tremble lest the swift Erinnys bring it to pass.’

Hence we see that the Oedipus of Aeschylus included the imprecation of Oedipus upon his sons. This was essential to the poet’s main purpose, which was to exhibit the continuous action of the Erinnys in the house. Similarly the Laïus doubtless included the curse called down on Laïus by Pelops, when bereft by him of his son Chrysippus. The true climax of the Aeschylean Oedipus would thus have consisted, not in the discovery alone, but in the discovery followed by the curse. And we may safely infer that the process of discovery indicated in the Seven against Thebes by the words ἐπεὶ δ’ ἀρτίφρων | ἐγένετο...γάμων (778) was not comparable with that in the play of Sophocles. It was probably much more abrupt, and due to some of those more mechanical devices which were ordinarily employed to bring about a ‘recognition’ on the stage. The Oedipus of Aeschylus, however brilliant, was only a link in a chain which derived its essential unity from ‘the mindful Erinnys.’

§ 7. The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles was not part of a trilogy, but a work complete in itself. The proper climax of such a work was the discovery, considered in its immediate effects, not in its ulterior consequences. Here the constructive art of the dramatist would be successful in proportion as the discovery was naturally prepared, approached by a process of rising interest, and attended in the moment of fulfilment with the most astounding reversal of a previous situation. In regard to the structure of the plot, this is what Sophocles has achieved. Before giving an analysis of his plot, we must notice two features of it which are due to his own invention.

(1) According to previous accounts, the infant Oedipus, when exposed on Mount Cithaeron, had been found by herdsmen, and reared either in Southern Boeotia, or at Sicyon, a place associated with the worship of the Eumenides. Sophocles makes the Theban herd of Laïus give the babe to the herd of Polybus, king of Corinth, who rears it as his own. Thus are prepared the two convergent threads of evidence which meet in the final discovery. And thus, too, the belief of Oedipus concerning his own parentage becomes to him a source, first of anxiety, then of dread, then of hope—in contrast, at successive moments, with that reality which the spectators know.

(2) The only verses remaining from the Oedipus of Aeschylus show that in that drama Oedipus encountered and slew Laïus at a meeting of three roads near Potniae, a place in Boeotia, on the road leading from Thebes to Plataea. At the ruins of this place Pausanias saw ‘a grove of Demeter and Persephone’⁹.
It appears to have been sacred also to those other and more terrible goddesses who shared with these the epithet of πότνιαι,—the Eumenides (ποτνιάδες θεαί, Eur. Or. 318). For the purpose of Aeschylus, no choice of a scene could have been more fitting. The father and son, doomed by the curse in their house, are brought together at a spot sacred to the Erinnyes:—

ἐπῇμεν τῆς ὁδοῦ τροχήλατον
σχιστῆς κελεύθου τρίοδον, ἔνθα συμβολὰς
τριῶν κελεύθων Ποτνιάδων ἠμείβομεν¹⁰.

‘We were coming in our journey to the spot from which three high-roads part, where we must pass by the junction of triple ways at Potniae.’

• 9.ἄλσος Δήμητρος καὶ Κόρης, 9. 8. 1.
• 10.Aesch. fr. 173 (Nauck).

But for Sophocles this local fitness did not exist. For him, the supernatural agency which dominates the drama is not that of the Furies, but of Apollo. He transfers the scene of the encounter from the ‘three roads’ at Potniae to the ‘three roads’ near Daulia¹¹ in Phocis. The ‘branching ways’ of Potniae can no longer be traced. But in the Phocian pass a visitor can still feel how the aspect of nature is in unison with the deed of which Sophocles has made it the theatre¹². This change of locality has something more than the significance of a detail. It symbolises the removal of the action from the control of the dark Avenging Powers to a region within the influence of that Delphian god who is able to disclose and to punish impurity, but who will also give final rest to the wanderer, final absolution to the weary mourner of unconscious sin.

• 11.Daulis was the Homeric form of the name, Daulia the post-homeric (Strabo 9. 423).
• 12.See the note on verse 733.

§ 8. The events which had preceded the action of the Oedipus Tyrannus are not set forth, after the fashion of Euripides, in a formal prologue. They have to be gathered from incidental hints in the play itself. It is an indispensable aid to the full comprehension of the drama that we should first connect these hints into a brief narrative of its antecedents as imagined by Sophocles.

Laïus, king of Thebes, being childless, asked the oracle of Apollo at Delphi whether it was fated that a son should be born to him. The answer was, ‘I will give thee a son, but it is doomed that thou leave the sunlight by the hands of thy child: for thus hath spoken Zeus, son of Cronus, moved by the dread curse of Pelops, whose own son (Chrysippus) thou didst snatch from him; and he prayed all this for thee.’ When a son was indeed born to Laïus of Iocasta his wife, three days after the birth he caused it to be exposed in the wilds of Mount Cithaeron. An iron pin was driven through the feet of the babe, fastening them together—that, if perchance it should live to be found by a stranger, he might have the less mind to rear a child so maimed; from which maiming the child was afterwards called Oedipus¹³.

• 13.The incident of the pierced feet was evidently invented to explain the name Οἰδίπους (‘Swellfoot,’ as Shelley renders it). In v. 397 ὁ μηδὲν εἰδὼς Οἰδίπους suggests a play on οἶδα.

The man chosen to expose the babe received it from the hands of the mother, Iocasta herself, with the charge to destroy it. This man was a slave born in the house of Laïus, and so belonging to the class of slaves whom their masters usually treated with most confidence. He was employed in tending the flocks of Laïus on Mount Cithaeron, where they were pastured during the half-year from March to September.

In the glens of Cithaeron he had consorted with another herdsman, servant to Polybus, king of Corinth. Seized with pity for the babe, the Theban gave it to this herdsman of Polybus, who took it to Corinth. Polybus and his wife Meropè were childless. They reared the child as their own; the Corinthians regarded him as heir to the throne; and he grew to a man’s estate without doubting that he was the true son of the Corinthian king and queen.

But one day it chanced that at a feast a man heated with wine threw out a word which sank into the young prince’s mind; he questioned the king and queen, whose resentment of the taunt comforted him; yet he felt that a whisper was creeping abroad; and he resolved to ask the truth from Apollo himself at Delphi. Apollo gave him no answer to the question touching his parentage, but told him these things—that he was doomed to slay his father, and to defile his mother’s bed.

He turned away from Delphi with the resolve never again to see his home in Corinth; and took the road which leads eastward through Phocis to Boeotia.

At that moment Laïus was on his way from Thebes to Delphi, where he wished to consult the oracle. He was not escorted by the usual armed following of a king, but only by four attendants. The party of five met Oedipus at a narrow place near the ‘Branching Roads’ in Phocis; a quarrel occurred; and Oedipus slew Laïus, with three of his four attendants. The fourth escaped, and fled to Thebes with the tale that a band of robbers had fallen upon their company. This sole survivor was the very man who, long years before, had been charged by Laïus and Iocasta to expose their infant son on Cithaeron.

The Thebans vainly endeavoured to find some clue to the murderer of Laïus. But, soon after his death, their attention was distracted by a new trouble. The goddess Hera—hostile to Thebes as the city of her rival Semelè—sent the Sphinx to afflict it,—a monster with the face of a maiden and the body of a winged lion; who sat on a hill near Thebes (the Φίκειον ὄρος), and chanted a riddle. ‘What is the creature which is two-footed, three-footed, and four-footed; and weakest when it has most feet?’ Every failure to find the answer cost the Thebans a life. Hope was deserting them; even the seer Teiresias had no help to give; when the wandering stranger, Oedipus, arrived. He solved the enigma by the word man: the Sphinx hurled herself from a rock; and the grateful Thebans gave the vacant throne to their deliverer as a free gift. At the same time he married Iocasta, the widow of Laïus, and sister of Creon son of Menoeceus.

The sole survivor from the slaughter of Laïus and his company was at Thebes when the young stranger Oedipus ascended the throne. The man presently sought an audience of the queen Iocasta, knelt to her, and, touching her hand in earnest supplication, entreated that he might be sent to his old occupation of tending flocks in far-off pastures. It seemed a small thing for so old and faithful a servant to ask; and it was readily granted.

An interval of about sixteen years may be assumed between these events and the moment at which the Oedipus Tyrannus opens. Iocasta has borne four children to Oedipus: Eteocles, Polyneices, Antigone, Ismene. Touches in the closing scene of the play forbid us to suppose that the poet imagines the daughters as much above the age of thirteen and twelve respectively. Oedipus has become thoroughly established as the great king, the first of men, to whose wisdom Thebans turn in every trouble.

And now a great calamity has visited them. A blight is upon the fruits of the earth; cattle are perishing in the pastures; the increase of the womb is denied; and a fiery pestilence is ravaging the town. While the fumes of incense are rising to the gods from every altar, and cries of anguish fill the air, a body of suppliants—aged priests, youths, and children—present themselves before the wise king. He, if any mortal, can help them. It is here that the action opens.

§ 9. The drama falls into six main divisions or chapters. The following analysis exhibits in outline the mechanism of the plot, which deserves study.

I. Prologue: 1—150. Oedipus appears as the great prince whom the Thebans rank second only to the gods. He pledges himself to relieve his afflicted people by seeking the murderer of Laïus.

Parodos: 151—215. The Chorus bewail the pestilence and invoke the gods.

II. First Episode: 216—462. Oedipus publicly invokes a solemn curse upon the unknown murderer of Laïus. At Creon’s suggestion he sends for the seer Teiresias, who refuses to speak, but finally, stung by taunts, denounces Oedipus himself as the slayer.

First Stasimon: 463—512. The Chorus forebode that the unknown murderer is doomed; they refuse to believe the unproved charge brought by the seer.

III. Second Episode: 513—862. Creon protests against the suspicion that he has suborned Teiresias to accuse Oedipus. Oedipus is unconvinced. Iocasta stops the quarrel, and Creon departs. Oedipus then tells her that he has been charged with the murder of Laïus. She replies that he need feel no disquietude. Laïus, according to an oracle, was to have been slain by his own son; but the babe was exposed on the hills; and Laïus was actually slain by robbers, at the meeting of three roads.

This mention of three roads (v. 716) strikes the first note of alarm in the mind of Oedipus.

He questions her as to (1) the place, (2) the time, (3) the person and the company of Laïus. All confirm his fear that he has unwittingly done the deed.

He tells her his whole story—the taunt at Corinth—the visit to Delphi—the encounter in Phocis. But he has still one hope. The attendant of Laïus who escaped spoke of robbers, not of one robber.

Let this survivor—now a herdsman—be summoned and questioned.

Second Stasimon: 863—910. The Chorus utter a prayer against arrogance—such as the king’s towards Creon; and impiety—such as they find in Iocasta’s mistrust of oracles.

IV. Third Episode: 911—1085. A messenger from Corinth announces that Polybus is dead, and that Oedipus is now king designate. Iocasta and Oedipus exult in the refutation of the oracle which had destined Oedipus to slay his sire.

But Oedipus still dreads the other predicted horror—union with his mother.

The messenger, on learning this, discloses that Polybus and Meropè were not the parents of Oedipus. The messenger himself, when a herdsman in the service of Polybus, had found the infant Oedipus on Cithaeron, and had brought him to Corinth. Yet no—not found him; had received him from another herdsman (v. 1040).

Who was this other herdsman? The Corinthian replies:—He was said to be one of the people of Laïus.

Iocasta implores Oedipus to search no further. He answers that he cares not how lowly his birth may prove to be—he will search to the end. With a cry of despair, Iocasta rushes away.

Third Stasimon: 1086—1109. The Chorus joyously foretell that Oedipus will prove to be a native of the land—perchance of seed divine.

V. Fourth Episode: 1110—1185. The Theban herdsman is brought in¹⁴.

• 14.The original object of sending for him had been to ask,—‘Was it the deed of several men, or of one?’—a last refuge. But he is not interrogated on that point. Voltaire criticised this as inconsistent. It is better than consistent; it is natural. A more urgent question has thrust the other out of sight.

‘There,’ says the Corinthian, ‘is the man who gave me the child.’ Bit by bit, the whole truth is wrung from the Theban. ‘The babe was the son of Laïus; the wife of Laïus gave him to me.’ Oedipus knows all, and with a shriek of misery he rushes away.

Fourth Stasimon: 1186—1222. The Chorus bewail the great king’s fall.

VI. Exodos: 1223—1530. A messenger from the house announces that Iocasta has hanged herself, and that Oedipus has put out his eyes. Presently Oedipus is led forth. With passionate lamentation he beseeches the Chorus of Theban Elders to banish or slay him. Creon comes to lead him into the house. Oedipus obtains from him a promise of care for his young daughters; they are presently brought to their father, who takes what he intends to be a last farewell. For he craves to be sent out of the land; but Creon replies that Apollo must pronounce.

As Creon leads Oedipus within, the Chorus speak the closing words: No mortal must be called happy on this side death.

With reference to the general structure of the plot, the first point to observe is the skill with which Sophocles has managed those two threads of proof which he created by his invention of the second herdsman.

We have:—

(1) The thread of evidence from the reported statement of the Theban herdsman as to the place of the murder, in connection with Iocasta’s statement as to the time, the person of Laïus, and the retinue. This tends to show that Oedipus has slain Laïus—being presumably in no wise his kinsman. The proof of Oedipus having slain Laïus is so far completed at 754 (αἰαῖ, τάδ᾽ ἤδη διαφανῆ) as to leave no longer any moral doubt on the mind of Oedipus himself.

(2) The thread of evidence from the Corinthian, showing, in the first instance, that Oedipus is not the son of Polybus and Meropè, and so relieving him from the fear of parricide and incest. Hence the confident tone of Oedipus (1076 ff.), which so powerfully contrasts with the despair of Iocasta: she has known the worst from v. 1044.

(3) The convergence of these two threads, when the Theban herdsman is confronted with the Corinthian. This immediately follows the moment of relief just noticed. It now appears that the slayer of Laïus has also committed parricide and incest.

§ 10. The frequent references of Aristotle to the Oedipus Tyrannus indicate its value for him as a typical masterpiece, though the points for which he commends it concern general analysis of form, not the essence of its distinctive excellence. The points are these:—

1. The ‘recognition’ (ἀναγνώρισις) is contrived in the best way; i.e., it is coincident with a reversal of fortunes (περιπέτεια).

2. This reversal is peculiarly impressive, because the Corinthian messenger had come to bring tidings of the honour in store for Oedipus.

3. Oedipus is the most effective kind of subject for such a reversal, because he had been (a) great and glorious, (b) not preeminently virtuous or just, (c) and, again, one whose reverses are not due to crime, but only to unconscious error.

4. The story is told in such a manner as to excite pity and terror by hearing without seeing (as in regard to the exposure of the child, the killing of Laïus, the death of Iocasta).

5. If there is any improbability in the story, this is not in the plot itself (ἐν τοῖς πράγμασιν), but in the supposed antecedents (ἔξω τῆς τραγῳδίας).

In this last comment, Aristotle indicates a trait which is certainly open to criticism—the ignorance of Oedipus as to the story of Laïus. He knows, indeed, the name of his predecessor—though Creon does not think it unnecessary to remind him of the name (103). He also knows that Laïus had met a violent death: but he does not know whether this had befallen at Thebes, or in its neighbourhood, or abroad (109—113). Nor does he know that Laïus was reported to have been slain by robbers, and that only one of his followers had escaped (116—123): and he asks if no search had been made at the time (128, 566). Iocasta, who has now been his wife for many years, tells him, as if for the first time, the story of the oracle given to Laïus, and he tells her the story of his own early fortunes—though here we need not press the fact that he even names to her his Corinthian parents: that may be regarded as merely a formal preface to a connected narrative. It may be conceded that the matters of which Oedipus is supposed ignorant were themes of which Iocasta, and all the persons about the new king, might well have been reluctant to speak. Still it is evident that the measure of past reticence imagined, both on their part and on his, exceeds the limit of verisimilitude. The true defence of this improbability consists in frankly recognising it. Exquisite as was the dramatic art exercised within the scope of the action (ἐν τοῖς πράγμασι), this art was still so far naïve as to feel no offence at some degree of freedom in the treatment of that which did not come within the framework,—of that which, in Aristotle’s phrase, lay ‘outside the piece,’ ἔξω τῆς τραγῳδίας. It is as if a sculptor neglected to remove some roughness of support or environment which, he felt, would not come into account against the effect of a highly finished group.

§ 11. A drama is itself the only adequate commentary on its persons. It makes them live for us, or it does not. If we submit them to ethical analysis, this may be interesting to us, and instructive to those who have not seen or read the piece. But, for a spectator or reader of the play, the men and women must be those whom he finds there. When we personally know a character in real life, another’s estimate of it is seldom more than a key to his point of view—rarely a mental light which we feel that we can appropriate. And it may be permitted to say in passing that this is a reason why the reviving taste for good drama—a result for which, in this country, so much is due to Mr Irving—seems likely to aid in correcting a literary fault of the day which is frequently acknowledged—the tendency to adopt ready-made critical estimates of books which the adopter, at least, has not read. No one who sees a play can help forming some impression of his own about the characters. If he reports it honestly, that is criticism; not necessarily good, but not sham. To any one who reads this play of Sophocles with even moderate attention and sympathy, how living is Oedipus! Common experience proves so much; but almost every reader will probably feel that by no attempt at analysis or description could he enable another to see precisely his Oedipus: no, though the effort should bring out ‘a point or two as yet unseized by the Germans.’ The case is somewhat different, however, when a particular reading of certain characters in a play is the ground for the attribution to it of a tendency; then it is useful to inquire whether this reading is right—whether, that is, these persons of the drama do indeed speak and act in the tone ascribed to them.

And certainly one of the most interesting questions in the Oedipus Tyrannus concerns the intellectual position of Oedipus and Iocasta towards that divine power of which the hand is laid so heavily upon both. Sophocles had found in human nature itself the sanction of ‘the unwritten laws,’ and the seal of faith in a beneficence immortal and eternal; but his personal attitude towards the ‘sceptical’ currents of thought in his age was never, so far as we can judge, that of admonitory protest or dogmatic reproof. It was his temperament to look around him for elements of conciliation, to evoke gentle and mediating influences, rather than to make war on the forces which he regarded as sinister:—it might be said of him, as of a person in one of his own plays, οὔτοι συνέχθειν ἀλλὰ συμφιλεῖν ἔφυ. But is there any reason to think that the Oedipus Tyrannus marks a moment when this mind—‘which saw life steadily, and saw it whole’—was partly shaken in its self-centred calm by the consciousness of a spiritual anarchy around it which seemed fraught with ultimate danger to the cohesion of society, and that a note of solemn warning, addressed to Athens and to Greece, is meant to be heard throughout the drama? Our answer must depend upon the sense in which we conceive that he places Oedipus or Iocasta at issue with religion.

§ 12. As regards Oedipus, it might be said that, in this particular aspect, he is a modern character, and more especially, perhaps, a character of the nineteenth century. The instinct of reverence for the gods was originally fundamental in his nature: it appears in the first act of his manhood—the journey to Delphi. Nor did he for a moment mistrust the gods because the doom assigned to him was bitter. Then he achieved a great intellectual success, reached the most brilliant prosperity, and was ranked by his fellow-men as second to the gods alone. He is not spoiled by his good fortune. We find him, at the opening of the play, neither arrogant nor irreverent; full, rather, of tenderness for his people, full of reverence for the word of Apollo. Suddenly, however, the prophet of Apollo denounces him. Instantly his appeal is to the intellect. If it comes to that, what claim has any other human mind to interpose between his mind and Heaven? Is he not Oedipus, who silenced the Sphinx? Yes, but presently, gradually, his own mind begins to argue on the other side. No one is so acute as he, and of course he must be the first to see any facts which tell against himself. And now, when he is face to face with the gods, and no prophet stands between, the instinct of reverence inborn in his noble nature finds voice in the prayer, ‘Forbid, forbid, ye pure and awful gods, that I should see that day!’ After varying hopes and fears, his own mind is convinced of the worst. Reason, which had been the arbiter of faith, now becomes the inexorable judge of sin, the most instant and most rigorous claimant for his absolute abasement before the gods.

§ 13. Plainly, it would be a misreading to construe the fate of Oedipus as a dramatic nemesis of impiety; but the case of Iocasta is at first sight less clear. She, at least, is one who openly avows scorn for oracles, and urges her lord to share it. It may often be noticed—where the dramatist has known how to draw from life—that the true key-note of a dominant mood is struck by a short utterance on which no special emphasis is thrown, just as, in life itself, the sayings most truly significant of character are not always long or marked. For Iocasta, such a key-note is given in the passage where she is telling Oedipus that a response from the Delphian temple had warned Laïus that he was destined to be slain by the child whom she bore to him. ‘An oracle came to Laïus once—I will not say from Phoebus himself, but from his ministers’ (v. 712). Iocasta thoroughly believes in the power of the gods to effect their will (724),—to punish or to save (921). But she does not believe that any mortal—be he priest or prophet—is permitted by them to read the future. Had not the Delphian priests doomed her to sacrifice her first-born child,—and this, without saving the life of her husband, Laïus? The iron which years ago had entered into the soul of the wife and mother has wrought in her a result similar to that which pride of intellect has produced in Oedipus. Like Oedipus, she still believes in the wise omnipotence of the gods; like him also, she is no longer prepared to accept any mortal interpreter of their decrees. Thus are the two foremost persons of this tragedy separated from the offices of human intercession, and directly confronted in spirit—one by his self-reliance, the other by her remembered anguish—with the inscrutable powers which control their fate. It is as a study of the human heart, true for every age, not as a protest against tendencies of the poet’s own, that the Oedipus Tyrannus illustrates the relation of faith to reason.

§ 14. The central figure of the drama is brought into clearer relief by the characters of Teiresias and Creon. Teiresias exists only for the god whom he serves. Through him Apollo speaks. As opposed to Oedipus, he is the divine knowledge of Apollo, opposed to human ignorance and blindness. While ‘the servant of Loxias’ thus stands above the king of Thebes, Creon stands below him, on the humbler but safer ground of ordinary humanity. Creon is shrewd, cautious, practical, not sentimental or demonstrative, yet of a fervid self-respect, and with a strong and manly kindliness which comes out in the hour of need¹⁵. It might be said that the Creon of the Oedipus Tyrannus embodies a good type of Scottish character, as the Creon of the Antigone—an earlier sketch—is rather of the Prussian type, as it is popularly idealised by some of its neighbours. Teiresias is the gauge of human insight matched against divine; Creon, of fortune’s heights and depths, compared with the less brilliant but more stable lot of commoner men. ‘Crave not to be master in all things; for the mastery which thou didst win hath not followed thee through life’—are his words to Oedipus at the end; and his own position at the moment exemplifies the sense in which ‘the god ever gives the mastery to the middle state’¹⁶.

• 15.Lest it should be thought that in the note on p. 77 the harsher aspect of Creon’s character is unduly prominent, I may observe that this note relates to vv. 512—862, and deals with Creon only as he appears there. The scene which begins at v. 1422—and more especially vv. 1476 f.—must of course be taken into account when we offer, as here, a more general estimate of the character.
• 16.παντὶ μέσῳ τὸ κράτος θεὸς ὤπασεν, Aesch. Eum. 528.

§ 15. There is no external evidence for the time at which the Oedipus Tyrannus was first acted. Internal evidence warrants the belief that it was composed after the Antigone, and before the Oedipus Coloneus. The probable limits thus indicated might be roughly given as about 439—412 B.C. More than this we cannot say. Modern ingenuity has recognised Pericles in Oedipus,—the stain of Alcmaeonid lineage in his guilt as the slayer of Laïus,—the ‘Dorian war, and a pestilence therewith’ in the afflictions of Thebes. This allegorical hypothesis need not detain us. But it may be well briefly to remark the difference, for drama, between association of ideas and direct allusion. If Sophocles had set himself to describe the plague at Athens as he had known it, it might have been held that, in an artistic sense, his fault was graver than that of Phrynichus, when, by representing the capture of Miletus, he ‘reminded the Athenians of their own misfortunes.’ If, however, writing at a time subsequent to the pestilence which he had survived, he wished to give an ideal picture of a plague-stricken town, it would have been natural and fitting that he should borrow some touches from his own experience. But the sketch in the play is far too slight to warrant us in saying that he even did this; perhaps the reference to the victims of pestilence tainting the air (θαναταφόρα v. 180) is the only trait that might suggest it. Thucydides (II. 50), in describing the plague of 430 B.C., notices the number of the unburied dead. The remarks just made apply equally to the supposed allusion in vv. 883 ff. to the mutilation of the Hermae (see the note on 886).

A tradition, dating at least from the 2nd century B.C.¹⁷, affirmed that, when Sophocles produced the Oedipus Tyrannus, he was defeated for the first prize by Philocles,—a poet of whose work we know nothing. Philocles was a nephew of Aeschylus, and, as Aristeides observes¹⁸, achieved an honour which had been denied to his uncle. The surprise which has been expressed by some modern writers appears unnecessary; the composition of Philocles was probably good, and it has never been held that the judges of such prizes were infallible.

• 17.The words in the prose ὑπόθεσις (given on p. 4) are simply, ἡττηθέντα ὑπὸ Φιλοκλέους, ὥς φησι Δικαίαρχος. The Dicaearchus who wrote ὑποθέσεις τῶν Εὐριπίδου καὶ Σοφοκλέους μύθων has been generally identified with Dicaearchus of Messana, the Peripatetic, a pupil of Aristotle and a friend of Theophrastus. We might place his ‘floruit,’ then, somewhere about 310 B.C.; there are indications that he survived 296 B.C. If, on the other hand, the ὑποθέσεις were ascribed to the grammarian Dicaearchus of Lacedaemon, a pupil of Aristarchus, this would bring us to about 140 B.C.
• 18.II. 256.

§ 16. The name of an actor, once famous in the chief part of this play, is of interest also on more general grounds. Polus, a native of Aegina, is said to have been the pupil of another tragic actor, Archias of Thurii¹⁹. He flourished, then, in the middle or latter part of the 4th century B.C.—only some 50 or 60 years after the death of Sophocles. Physically well-gifted, and of versatile grace, he was equally successful as Oedipus the King, and in the very different but not less difficult part of Oedipus at Colonus²⁰. Like the poet whose masterpieces he interpreted, he enjoyed a vigorous old age; and it is recorded that, at seventy, he acted ‘eight tragedies in four days’²¹. In the Electra of Sophocles, an urn, supposed to contain the ashes of Orestes, is placed in the hands of his sister, who makes a lament over it. Polus once acted Electra not long after the death of his son. An urn, containing the youth’s ashes, was brought from the tomb; the actor received it, and, on the scene, suffered a natural grief to have vehement course²².

• 19.Plut. Dem. 28 τοῦτον δὲ [Archias] Θούριον ὄντα τῷ γένει λόγος ἔχει τραγῳδίας ὑποκρίνεσθαί ποτε, καὶ τὸν Αἰγινήτην Πῶλον, τὸν ὑπερβαλόντα τῇ τέχνῃ πάντας, ἐκείνου γενέσθαι μαθητὴν ἱστοροῦσιν.—Schaefer (Dem. u. s. Zeit, I. 219 f.) and A. Müller (Gr. Bühnenalterthümer, p. 186, n. 3) distinguish this Polus from an elder, whom they place in the time of Socrates. They seem mistaken. In Plut. περὶ φιλίας, fr. 16 (p. 833 ed. Wyttenbach), Socrates is quoted, and then Polus is mentioned; but not as contemporary with Socrates. As to Lucian calling Polus ὁ Σουνιεύς, see below, note 4.
• 20.Stobaeus Floril. p. 522 (XCVII. 28), in an extract from the προτρεπτικαὶ ὁμιλίαι of Arrian: ἢ οὐχ ὁρᾷς ὅτι οὐκ εὐφωνότερον οὐδὲ ἥδιον ὁ Πῶλος τὸν τύραννον Οἰδίποδα ὑπεκρίνετο ἢ τὸν ἐπὶ Κολωνῷ ἀλήτην καὶ πτωχόν; (οὐδὲ ἥδιον is Gaisford’s emendation of οὐδὲν δι’ ὧν.)
• 21.Plut. Mor. 785 C Πῶλον δὲ τὸν τραγῳδὸν Ἐρατοσθένης καὶ Φιλόχορος ἱστοροῦσιν ἑβδομήκοντα ἔτη γεγενημένον ὀκτὼ τραγῳδίας ἐν τέτταρσιν ἡμέραις διαγωνίσασθαι μικρὸν ἔμπροσθεν τῆς τελευτῆς.
• 22.Aulus Gellius 7. 5 Histrio in terra Graecia fuit fama celebri qui gestus et vocis claritudine ceteris antestabat....Polus lugubri habitu Electrae indutus ossa atque urnam a sepulcro tulit filii, et quasi Orestis amplexus opplevit omnia non simulacris neque imitamentis sed luctu atque lamentis veris et spirantibus.
  Lucian Iupp. Tragoed. § 3 οὐχ ὁρῶ...ἐφ’ ὅτῳ Πῶλος ἢ Ἀριστόδημος ἀντὶ Διὸς ἡμῖν ἀναπέφηνας. Id. Menippus § 16 (on the contrast between the life of actors on and off the stage) ἤδη δὲ πέρας ἔχοντος τοῦ δράματος, ἀποδυσάμενος ἕκαστος αὐτῶν τὴν χρυσόπαστον ἐκείνην ἐσθῆτα καὶ τὸ προσωπεῖον ἀποθέμενος καὶ καταβὰς ἀπὸ τῶν ἐμβατῶν πένης καὶ ταπεινὸς περιέρχεται, οὐκέτʼ Ἀγαμέμνων ὁ Ἀτρέως οὐδὲ Κρέων ὁ Μενοικέως, ἀλλὰ Πῶλος Χαρικλέους Σουνιεὺς ὀνομαζόμενος ἢ Σάτυρος Θεογείτονος Μαραθώνιος. [‘Polus, son of Charicles, of Sunium,’ is not inconsistent with τὸν Αἰγινήτην in Plut. Dem. 28, for the great actor may have been a native of Aegina who was afterwards enrolled in the Attic deme of Sunium.] Id. De mercede conduct. § 5 τοῖς τραγικοῖς ὑποκριταῖς...οἳ ἐπὶ μὲν τῆς σκηνῆς Ἀγαμέμνων ἕκαστος αὐτῶν ἢ Κρέων ἢ αὐτὸς Ἡρακλῆς εἰσιν, ἔξω δὲ Πῶλος ἢ Ἀριστόδημος, ἀποθέμενοι τὰ προσωπεῖα, γίγνονται.
  The Aristodemus coupled by Lucian with Polus is the actor mentioned by Aeschines and Demosthenes; the latter specially notices that he and Theodorus had both often acted the Antigone of Sophocles (or. 19. § 246): Satyrus is the comic actor mentioned by the same orators (Aeschin. 2. § 156, Dem. or. 19. § 193). Thus we see how, in later Greek literature, Polus had become one of a small group of names typical of the best histrionic art of the classical age.

Little as such an incident may accord with modern feeling or taste, it is at least of very clear significance in relation to the tone of the Attic stage as it existed for a generation whose grandfathers were contemporary with Sophocles. Whether the story was true or not, it must have been conceived as possible. And, this being so, nothing could better show the error of supposing that the old Greek acting of tragedy was statuesque in a cold or rigid sense,—in a sense excluding declamation and movement suitable to the passions which the words expressed. Play of feature, indeed, was excluded by the use of masks; but this very fact would have increased the need for appropriate gesture. The simple grouping—as recent revivals have helped us to feel—must have constantly had a plastic beauty rarely seen on our more crowded stage²³; but it is inconceivable, and the story just noticed affords some direct ground for denying, that this result was obtained at any sacrifice of life and truth in the portrayal of emotion. Demosthenes tells us that some of the inferior tragedians of his time were called ‘ranters’²⁴. It might be said, of course, that this indicates a popular preference for an undemonstrative style. But it might with more force be replied that ‘ranting’ is not a fault which a coldly ‘statuesque’ tradition would have generated.

• 23.On the sense in which a ‘plastic’ character is common to Greek Sculpture, Tragedy, and Oratory, cp. my Attic Orators, vol. I. pp. xcviii—ciii.
• 24.Dem. or. 18. § 262 μισθώσας αὑτὸν τοῖς βαρυστόνοις ἐπικαλουμένοις ἐκείνοις ὑποκριταῖς, Σιμύλῳ καὶ Σωκράτει, ἐτριταγωνίστεις.

§ 17. The story of Oedipus was one of a few subjects which the Greek dramatists never tired of handling. Some eight or nine tragedies, entitled Oedipus, are known by the names of their authors, and by nothing else²⁵. Plato, the poet of the Old Comedy, wrote a Laïus, which was perhaps a parody of the Aeschylean play; and the Middle Comedy was indebted to Eubulus for an Oedipus from which a few verses are left—a travesty of the curse pronounced upon the unknown criminal²⁶. Julius Caesar, like the younger Pitt, was a precocious dramatist, and Oedipus was his theme²⁷. The self-blinded Oedipus was a part which Nero loved to act²⁸, and the last public recitation which he ever gave, we are told, was in this character. The Greek verse at which he stopped is on record : whose it was, we know not²⁹. Of all the Greek versions, not one remains by which to gauge the excellence of Sophocles. But the literatures of other languages make some amends.

• 25.An Οἰδίπους by the Carcinus whom Aristophanes ridicules is quoted by Arist. Rhet. 5. 16. 11. Xenocles is said to have been victorious, with a series of plays including an Οἰδίπους, against Euripides, one of whose pieces on that occasion was the Troades, probably in 415 B.C. An Οἰδίπους is also ascribed to Achaeus (Nauck Trag. fr. p. 584), Theodectes (p. 623), and, more doubtfully, to Diogenes of Sinope (p. 627); also by Suidas to Philocles, and to each of two poets named Nicomachus (one of Athens, the other of the Troad).
• 26.Meineke Com. Frag. pp. 231 (Plato), Eubulus (451). Of the latter’s five verses, the last three are—ὅστις δ’ ἐπὶ δεῖπνον ἢ φίλον τιν’ ἢ ξένον | καλέσας ἔπειτα συμβολὰς ἐπράξατο, | φυγὰς γένοιτο μηδὲν οἴκοθεν λαβών. It seems quite possible, as has been suggested, that Eubulus was parodying verses from the Oedipus of Euripides.
• 27.Sueton. Iul. Caes. 56 Feruntur et a puero et ab adolescentulo quaedam scripta, ut laudes Herculis, tragoedia Oedipus.
• 28.Sueton. Nero 21 Tragoedias quoque cantavit personatus. Inter cetera cantavit Canacen parturientem, Orestem matricidam, Oedipodem excaecatum, Herculem insanum.
• 29.ib. 46 Observatum etiam fuerat novissimam fabulam cantasse eum [Neronem] publice Oedipum exsulem, atque in hoc desisse versu, οἰκτρῶς θανεῖν μ’ ἄνωγε σύγγαμος πατήρ. Dio Cassius (63. 28) also quotes the verse as one on which Nero’s mind dwelt: τὸ ἔπος ἐκεῖνο συνεχῶς ἐνενόει.

Nothing can better illustrate the distinctive qualities of the Sophoclean Oedipus than to compare it with the treatment of the same theme by Seneca, Corneille, Dryden and Voltaire. So far as the last three are concerned, the comparison has a larger value. The differences between the spirit of the best Greek Tragedy and that of modern drama are not easily expressed in formulas, but can be made clearer by a particular example. Perhaps the literature of drama hardly affords any example so apposite for this purpose as the story of Oedipus.

§ 18. Seneca has followed, and sometimes paraphrased, Sophocles with sufficient fidelity to heighten the contrast between the original and the rhetorical transcript. For the comparative student of drama, however, the Roman piece is by no means devoid of instruction or of interest. Seneca’s plot diverges from that of Sophocles in three main points. (i) Teiresias does not intuitively know the murderer of Laïus. When his aid is invoked by Oedipus, he has recourse to the arts of divination. Manto, the daughter of the blind seer, reports the signs to him, and he declares that neither voice of birds nor inspection of victims can reveal the name. Laïus himself must be called up from the shades. In a grove near Thebes, Teiresias performs the awful rites which evoke the dead; the ghastly shape of Laïus rises—

Stetit per artus sanguine effuso horridus—

and denounces his son. This scene is related to Oedipus by Creon in a long and highly-wrought speech (530—658). Here, as in the earlier scene with Manto (303—402), copious use is made of detail from Roman augural lore, as well as of the Nekyia in the eleventh book of the Odyssey—suggesting a contrast with the lightness of touch which marks that passage of the Sophoclean Antigone (998—1011) where Teiresias describes the failure of his appeal to augury. There, the technical signs are briefly but vividly indicated; in Seneca, the erudition is heavy and obtrusive.

(ii) After the discovery of the parricide and the incest, and when Oedipus has now blinded himself, Iocasta meets and thus accosts him:—

Quid te vocem?
Natumne? dubitas? natus es, natum pudet.
Invite, loquere, nate: quo avertis caput
Vacuosque vultus? Oed. Quis frui et tenebris vetat?
Quis reddit oculos? matris, heu, matris sonus.
Perdidimus operam. Congredi fas amplius
Haud est. Nefandos dividat vastum mare...

Iocasta presently kills herself on the stage. Here, at least, Seneca has the advantage of Euripides, whose Iocasta speaks the prologue of the Phoenissae, and coldly recites the horrors of her past life,—adding that Oedipus has been imprisoned by his sons, ‘in order that his fate might be forgotten—for it needs much art to hide it’³⁰. The Iocasta of Sophocles rushes from the scene, not to re-appear, at the moment when she finds Oedipus resolved to unbare that truth of which she herself is already certain, and leaves the terrible cry thrilling in our ears—
ἰού, ἰού, δύστηνε· τοῦτο γάρ σ’ ἔχω
μόνον προσειπεῖν, ἄλλο δ’ οὔποθ’ ὕστερον.

• 30.Eur. Phoen. 64 ἵν’ ἀμνήμων τύχη | γένοιτο, πολλῶν δεομένη σοφισμάτων.

In the truth and power of this touch, Sophocles is alone. Neither Seneca, nor any later dramatist, has managed this situation so as to express with a similar union of delicacy and strength the desperate anguish of a woman whom fate has condemned to unconscious crime.

(iii) Seneca had no ‘Oedipus at Colonus’ in view. He was free to disregard that part of the legend according to which Oedipus was expelled from Thebes by Eteocles and Polyneices, and can therefore close his play by making Oedipus go forth into voluntary exile:—
Mortifera mecum vitia terrarum extraho.
Violenta fata et horridus morbi tremor
Maciesque et atra pestis et tabidus dolor
Mecum ite, mecum: ducibus his uti libet.

§ 19. The closeness with which Seneca has studied Sophocles Seneca’s relation to Sophocles. can be judged from several passages³¹. It is instructive to notice that, while Seneca has invented rhetorical ornament (as in the opening dialogue, 1—105, and the Nekyia, 530—568), he has not known how to vary the natural development of the action. He has compressed the incidents of Sophocles into the smallest compass; and hence, notwithstanding the rhetorical episodes, the whole play consists only of 1060 lines, and would not have occupied more than an hour and a half in representation. Seneca is thus a negative witness to the mastery shown by the artist who could construct such a drama as the Oedipus Tyrannus with such materials. The modern dramatists, as we shall see, teach the same lesson in a more positive form. Walter Scott’s estimate of Seneca’s Oedipus needs modification, but is just in the main. ‘Though devoid of fancy and of genius,’ he says, it ‘displays the masculine eloquence and high moral sentiment of its author; and if it does not interest us in the scene of fiction, it often compels us to turn our thoughts inward, and to study our own hearts.’ Seneca’s fault, however, so far as the plot is concerned, seems less that he fails to interest, than that, by introducing the necromantic machinery, and by obliterating the finer moral traits of his Greek original, he has rendered the interest rather ‘sensational’ than properly dramatic³².

• 31.Such are, the scene in which Oedipus upbraids Creon (Sen. 678—708, cp. Soph. 532—630); the questioning of Iocasta by Oedipus (Sen. 773—783, cp. Soph. 740—755); the scene with the messenger from Corinth, and the final discovery (Sen. 783—881. Cp. Soph. 955—1185).
• 32.A small trait may be noticed as amusingly characteristic of the Roman poet of the Empire. The Laïus of Sophocles goes to Delphi βαιός—with only four attendants (752). Seneca makes Laïus set out with the proper retinue of a king;—but most of them lose their way. Plures fefellit error ancipitis viae: Paucos fidelis curribus iunxit labor.

§ 20. The Oedipe of Corneille was produced at Paris in 1657. After an interval which followed the unfavourable reception of his Pertharite in 1653, it was with the Oedipe that Corneille returned to the theatre, at the instance of his patron, Nicolas Fouquet, to whom it is dedicated. It is immaterial for our purpose that this play is far from exhibiting Corneille at his best; nor need we here inquire what precise rank is to be assigned to it among his less successful works. For the student of Sophocles, it has the permanent interest of showing how the subject of the Oedipus Tyrannus was adapted to the modern stage by a typical artist of the French classical school. The severely simple theme of Sophocles, with its natural elements of pity and terror, is found too meagre by the modern dramatist. He cannot trust to that alone; he feels that he needs some further source of variety and relief. To supply this, he interweaves an underplot of secondary persons—‘the happy episode of the loves of Theseus and Dircè.’ Theseus is the king of Athens; Dircè is a daughter of the deceased Laïus.

The drama opens with a love-scene, in which Theseus is urging Dircè not to banish him from her presence at Thebes:—

N’écoutez plus, madame, une pitié cruelle,
Qui d’un fidèle amant vous feroit un rebelle...

To the end, the fortunes of this pair divide our attention with those of Oedipus and Iocasta. Corneille does not bring Teiresias on the scene; but Nérine, ‘lady of honour to Iocasta,’ relates how the seer has called forth the shade of Laïus. The ghost does not (as with Seneca) denounce Oedipus, but declares that the woes of Thebes shall cease only ‘when the blood of Laïus shall have done its duty.’ The discovery is brought about nearly as in Sophocles, though the management of the process is inferior in a marked degree. The herdsman of Laïus—whom Corneille, like Dryden and Voltaire, names Phorbas, after Seneca’s example—kills himself on the stage; Iocasta, snatching the poniard from him, plunges it in her own breast. Oedipus blinds himself. No sooner have the gory drops flowed from his eyes, than the pest which is ravaging Thebes ceases: the message of the spirit is fulfilled:—‘the blood of Laïus has done its duty.’ Theseus and Dircè, we understand, are made happy.

The chief character, as drawn by Corneille, shows how an artificial stoicism can destroy tragic pathos. The Oedipus of Corneille is an idealised French king of the seventeenth century—one of those monarchs concerning whom Dircè says,

Le peuple est trop heureux quand il meurt pour ses rois;

he learns the worst with a lofty serenity; and his first thought is to administer a stately rebuke to the persons whose misdirected forethought had saved him from perishing in infancy:—

Voyez où m’a plongé votre fausse prudence.

Dircè admires his impassive fortitude:— La surprenante horreur de cet accablement
Ne coûte à sa grande âme aucun égarement.

Contrast with this the life-like and terrible power of the delineation in Sophocles, from the moment when the cry of despair bursts from the lips of Oedipus (1182), to the end.

§ 21. Twenty-two years after Corneille, Dryden essayed the same theme. His view was that his French predecessor had failed through not rendering the character of Oedipus more noble and attractive. On the other hand, he follows Corneille in the essential point of introducing an underplot. Dryden’s Eurydicè answers to Corneille’s Dircè, being, like her, the daughter of Laïus. Corneille’s Theseus is replaced by Adrastus, king of Argos,—a personage less likely, in Dryden’s opinion, to eclipse Oedipus. When the play opens, Oedipus is absent from Thebes, and engaged in war with Argos. Meanwhile plots are being laid against his throne by Creon—a hunch-backed villain who makes love to Eurydicè, and is rejected by her much as Shakspeare’s Richard, Duke of Gloster—who has obviously suggested some traits—is repulsed by the Lady Ann. Presently Oedipus returns, bringing the captive Adrastus, whom he chivalrously sets free to woo Eurydicè. From this point, the piece follows the general lines of Sophocles, so far as the discovery is concerned. Oedipus is denounced, however, not by Teiresias, but, as in Seneca, by the ghost,—which Dryden, unlike Seneca, brings on the stage.

It is singular that Dryden should have committed the same mistake which he perceived so clearly in Corneille. Eurydicè and Adrastus are less tiresome than Dircè and Theseus, but their effect is the same. The underplot spoils the main plot. The tragic climax is the death of Eurydicè, who is stabbed by Creon. Creon and Adrastus next kill each other; then Iocasta slays herself and her children; and finally Oedipus throws himself from an upper window of the palace. ‘Sophocles,’ says Dryden, ‘is admirable everywhere; and therefore we have followed him as close as we possibly could.’ In a limited verbal sense, this is true. There are several scenes, or parts of scenes, in which Dryden has almost transcribed Sophocles³³. But the difference of general result is complete. The Oedipus of Sophocles does perfectly that which Tragedy, according to Aristotle, ought to do. It effects, by pity and terror, the ‘purgation’ of such feelings; that is, it separates them from the alloy of mean accident, and exercises them, in their pure essence, on great objects—here, on the primary instincts of natural affection. In relation to pity and terror, Tragedy should be as the purgatorial fire,—

exempt labem, purumque reliquit
Aetherium sensum atque aurai simplicis ignem.

• 33.As in the scene with the suppliants (Act I. Sc. i.); that between Oedipus and Iocasta (Act III. Sc. i.); and that between Oedipus and Aegeon (the messenger from Corinth, Act IV. Sc. i.).

Now, Dryden’s play first divides our sympathy between the fate of Eurydicè and that of Oedipus; next, it involves it with feelings of a different order,—loathing for the villainy of Creon, and disgust at the wholesale butchery of the end. Instead of ‘purging’ pity and terror, it stupefies them; and the contrast is the more instructive because the textual debt of Dryden to Sophocles has been so large.

It is right to add that, while the best parts of the play—the first and third acts—are wholly Dryden’s, in the rest he was assisted by an inferior hand³⁴. And, among the places where Dryden’s genius flashes through, it is interesting to remark one in which he has invented a really Greek touch,—not in the manner of Sophocles, certainly, yet such as might occur in Euripides. Oedipus is pronouncing the curse on the unknown murderer:—

But for the murderer’s self, unfound by man,
Find him, ye powers celestial and infernal!
And the same fate, or worse than Laïus met,
Let be his lot: his children be accurst;
His wife and kindred, all of his, be cursed!
Both Priests. Confirm it, heaven! Enter JOCASTA, attended by Women.

Joc. At your devotions? Heaven succeed your wishes;
And bring the effect of these your pious prayers
On you, and me, and all.
Pr. Avert this omen, heaven!
Oedip. O fatal sound! unfortunate Jocasta!
What hast thou said? an ill hour hast thou chosen
For these foreboding words! why, we were cursing!
Joc. Then may that curse fall only where you laid it.
Oedip. Speak no more!
For all thou say’st is ominous: we were cursing;
And that dire imprecation hast thou fasten’d
On Thebes, and thee, and me, and all of us.

• 34.‘What Sophocles could undertake alone, Our poets found a work for more than one’ (Epilogue). Lee must be held accountable for the worst rant of Acts IV. and V.; but we are not concerned here with the details of execution, either in its merits or in its defects.

§ 22. More than either Dryden or Corneille, Voltaire has treated this subject in the spirit of the antique. His Oedipe was composed when he was only nineteen. It was produced in 1718 (when he was twenty-four), and played forty-six times consecutively—a proof, for those days, of marked success. In 1729, the piece having kept its place on the stage meanwhile, a new edition was published. It is not merely a remarkable work for so young a man; its intrinsic merit, notwithstanding obvious defects, is, I venture to think, much greater than has usually been recognised. The distinctive ‘note’ of the modern versions—the underplot—is there, no doubt; but, unlike Corneille and Dryden, Voltaire has not allowed it to overshadow the main action.

The hero Philoctetes revisits Thebes, after a long absence, to find Oedipus reigning in the seat of Laïus. The Thebans are vexed by pestilence, and are fain to find a victim for the angry god; Philoctetes was known to have been the foe of the late king, and is now accused of his murder. Iocasta had been betrothed to Philoctetes in youth, and loves him still. She urges him to fly, but he resolves to remain and confront the false charge. At this moment, the seer Teiresias denounces Oedipus as the criminal. Philoctetes generously protests his belief in the king’s innocence; and from this point (the end of the third Act) appears no more.

Thenceforth, the plot is mainly that of Sophocles. The first scene of the fourth Act, in which Iocasta and Oedipus inform each other of the past, is modelled on Oed. Tyr. 698—862, with some characteristic differences. Thus, in Sophocles, the first doubt of Oedipus as to his parentage springs from a taunt uttered at a feast (779). Here is Voltaire’s substitute for that incident (the scene, of course, being Corinth):—

Un jour, ce jour affreux, présent à ma pensée,
Jette encor la terreur dans mon âme glacée;
Pour la première fois, par un don solennel,
Mes mains, jeunes encore, enrichissaient l’autel:
Du temple tout-à-coup les combles s’entr’ouvrirent;
De traits affreux de sang les marbres se couvrirent;
De l’autel, ébranlé par de longs tremblemens,
Une invisible main repoussait mes présens;
Et les vents, au milieu de la foudre éclatante,
Portèrent jusqu’à moi cette voix effrayante:
“Ne viens plus des lieux saints souiller la pureté;
“Du nombre des vivans les dieux t’ont rejeté;
“Ils ne reçoivent point tes offrandes impies;
“Va porter tes présens aux autels des Furies;
“Conjure leurs serpens prêts à te déchirer;
“Va, ce sont là les dieux que tu dois implorer.”

This is powerful in its way. But where Voltaire has introduced a prodigy—the supernatural voice heard amid lightnings—Sophocles was content to draw from common life, and to mark how a random word could sink into the mind with an effect as terrible as that of any portent. Voltaire has managed the final situation on Corneille’s plan, but with infinitely better effect. The High Priest announces that Oedipus has blinded himself, thereby appeasing the gods; and the play closes with the death of Iocasta:

IOCASTE.

O mon fils! hélas! dirai-je mon époux?
O des noms les plus chers assemblage effroyable!
Il est donc mort? LE GRAND PRÊTRE.
Il vit, et le sort qui l’accable
Des morts et des vivans semble le séparer³⁵;
Il s’est privé du jour avant que d’expirer.
Je l’ai vu dans ses yeux enfoncer cette épée,
Qui du sang de son père avait été trempée;
Il a rempli son sort, et ce moment fatal
Du salut des Thébains est le premier signal.
Tel est l’ordre du ciel, dont la fureur se lasse;
Comme il veut, aux mortels il fait justice ou grâce;
Ses traits sont épuisés sur ce malheureux fils:
Vivez, il vous pardonne.

• 35.Voltaire borrowed this verse from Corneille,—‘parce qu’ayant précisément la même chose à dire,…il m’était impossible de l’exprimer mieux’; and Corneille was himself translating Seneca’s ‘nec vivis mixtus, nec sepultis.’ Voltaire was perhaps unconscious that the ground which he assigns here was exactly that on which the repetition of passages in the Greek orators was defended—viz. that τὸ καλῶς εἰπεῖν ἅπαξ περιγίγνεται, δὶς δὲ οὐκ ἐνδέχεται (Theon, προγυμνάσματα 1: see my Attic Orators, vol. I. p. lxxii).

IOCASTE.
Et moi je me punis. (Elle se frappe.)
Par un pouvoir affreux réservée à l’inceste,
La mort est le seul bien, le seul dieu qui me reste.
Laïus, reçois mon sang, je te suis chez les morts:
J’ai vécu vertueuse, et je meurs sans remords.

LE CHOEUR.
O malheureuse reine! ô destin que j’abhorre!

IOCASTE.
Ne plaignez que mon fils, puisqu’il respire encore.
Prêtres, et vous Thébains qui fûtes mes sujets,
Honorez mon bûcher, et songez à jamais
Qu’au milieu des horreurs du destin qui m’opprime
J’ai fait rougir les dieux qui m’ont forcée au crime.

§ 23. Voltaire was conscious of the objections to his own episode of Philoctetes; no one, indeed, could have criticised it with more wit or force. ‘Philoctetes seems to have visited Thebes only for the purpose of being accused’: not a word is said of him after the third Act, and the catastrophe is absolutely independent of him. In a letter to the Jesuit Porée, with whom he had read the classics, Voltaire apologises for Philoctetes by saying that the Parisian actors would not hear of an Oedipus with no love in it; ‘I spoiled my piece,’ he says, ‘to please them.’

But it is certain, from what he says more than once elsewhere, that he regarded some underplot as a necessity. His remarks on this point are worth noting, because they touch an essential difference between the old Greek view of drama and that which has prevailed on our stage. ‘The subject (Oedipus) did not, in itself, furnish me with matter for the first three Acts; indeed, it scarcely gave me enough for the last two. Those who know the theatre—that is, who are as much alive to the difficulties as to the defects of composition—will agree with what I say.’ ‘In strictness, the play of Oedipus ought to end with the first Act.’ Oedipus is one of those ancient subjects ‘which afford only one scene each, or two at most—not an entire tragedy.’ In short, to demand a modern drama on the simple story of Oedipus was like setting one to make bricks without straw. Corneille found himself constrained to add the episode of Theseus and Dircè; Dryden introduced Adrastus and Eurydicè³⁶.

• 36.‘All we could gather out of Corneille,’ says Dryden, ‘was that an episode must be, but not his way.’ Dryden seems to have felt, however, that it was demanded rather by convention than by artistic necessity. The following passage is interesting as an indication that his instinct was better than his practice:—‘The Athenian theatre (whether more perfect than ours, is not now disputed), had a perfection differing from ours. You see there in every act a single scene, (or two at most), which manage the business of the play; and after that succeeds the chorus, which commonly takes up more time in singing, than there has been employed in speaking. The principal person appears almost constantly through the play; but the inferior parts seldom above once in the whole tragedy.. The conduct of our stage is much more difficult, where we are obliged never to lose any considerable character, which we have once presented.’ [Voltaire’s Philoctetes broke this rule.] ‘Custom likewise has obtained, that we must form an underplot of second persons, which must be depending on the first; and their bye-walks must be like those in a labyrinth, which all of them lead into the great parterre; or like so many several lodging chambers, which have their outlets into the same gallery. Perhaps, after all, if we could think so, the ancient method, as it is the easiest, is also the most natural and the best. For variety, as it is managed, is too often subject to breed distraction; and while we would please too many ways, for want of art in the conduct, we please in none.’ (Preface to Oedipus.)

§ 24. Now, why could Sophocles dispense with any such addition, and yet produce a drama incomparably more powerful? The masterly art of Sophocles in the structure and development of the plot has already been examined, and is properly the first attribute of his work which claims attention. But this is not the only, or the principal, source to which the Oedipus Tyrannus owes its greatness; the deeper cause is, that Sophocles, in the spirit of Greek Tragedy, has known how to make the story of Oedipus an ideal study of character and passion. Corneille, Dryden, Voltaire—each in his own way—were thinking, ‘How am I to keep the audience amused? Will they not find this horrible story of Oedipus rather too painful and monotonous? Will they not desire something lighter and pleasanter—some love-making, for instance, or some intrigue?’ ‘What an insipid part would Iocasta have played,’ exclaims Voltaire, ‘had she not retained at least the memory of a lawful attachment, and trembled for the existence of a man whom she had once loved!’ There is the secret frankly told.

Sophocles, on the other hand, concentrates the attention of the audience on the destiny of Oedipus and Iocasta. The spectators are enchained by the feelings which this destiny moves at each step in its course. They are made to see into the depths of two human souls. It is no more possible for them to crave minor distractions than it would be for our eyes or thoughts to wander, if we were watching, without the power of arresting, a man who was moving blindfold towards a precipice. The interest by which Sophocles holds us is continuous and intense; but it is not monotonous, because alternations of fear lead up to the worst; the exciting causes of pity and terror are not unworthy or merely repulsive, for the spectacle offered is that of a noble and innocent nature, a victim to unknown and terrible forces which must be counted among the permanent conditions of life, since the best of mankind can never be sure of escaping them. When the worst has befallen, then Sophocles knows how to relieve the strain; but it is a relief of another order from that which Corneille affords by the prospect of Theseus being made happy with Dircè. It is drawn from the natural sources of the tragedy itself; the blind king hears the voices of his children.

§ 25. A comparison may fitly close with a glance at two points in which the modern dramas illustrate Sophocles, and which have more than the meaning of details. Dryden has represented Oedipus and Iocasta as haunted, from the first, by a mysterious instinct of their true relationship. Thus she says to him:—
When you chid, methought
A mother’s love start³⁷ up in your defence,
And bade me not be angry. Be not you;
For I love Laïus still, as wives should love,
But you more tenderly, as part of me³⁸.

• 37.= ‘started,’ as again in this scene: ‘Nature herself start back when thou wert born.’
• 38.Act I. Sc. i.: cp. what Oedipus says in Act II. Sc. i.

Voltaire has the same thought (Act II. Sc. ii.), where Iocasta is speaking of her marriage with Oedipus:
je sentis dans mon âme étonnée
Des transports inconnus que je ne conçus pas:
Avec horreur enfin je me vis dans ses bras.

There is a similar touch in Corneille. Oedipus is watching Dircè—whom he believes to be his step-daughter, but who is in fact his sister—with her lover Theseus (Act III. Sc. iv.):
Je ne sais quelle horreur me trouble à leur aspect;
Ma raison la repousse, et ne m’en peut défendre.

Such blind warnings of nature are indeed fitted to make the spectator shudder; but they increase the difficulty of explaining why the truth was not divined sooner; and they also tend to lessen the shock of the discovery. In other words, they may be poetical,—they may be even, in the abstract, tragic,—but they are not, for this situation, dramatic; and it is due to the art of Sophocles to observe that he has nowhere admitted any hint of this kind.

§ 26. Next, it should be noticed that no one of the later dramatists has been able to avoid leaving a certain element of improbability in the story. We saw above that Aristotle alludes to the presence of such an element, not in the plot itself, but in the supposed antecedents. It consists in the presumed ignorance of Oedipus and Iocasta regarding facts with which they ought to have been familiar. Sophocles tacitly accepts this condition, and, by doing so, minimizes its prominence; so much so, that it may be doubted whether many readers or spectators of the Oedipus Tyrannus would think of it, if their attention had not been drawn to it previously. Seneca has not attempted to improve on that example. But the moderns have sought various ways of evading a critical censure which they foresaw; and it is instructive to consider the result. The Oedipus of Corneille knows that Laïus was said to have been killed by robbers; he also knows the place and the date. Further, he distinctly remembers that, at the same place and at the same date, he himself had slain three wayfarers. Strange to say, however, it never occurs to him that these wayfarers could possibly have been Laïus and his attendants. He mildly suggests to Iocasta that they may have been the robbers (Act I. Sc. i.); though, as appears from the circumstances which he himself afterwards relates (Act IV. Sc. iv.), he had not the slightest ground for such a supposition. This device cannot be deemed an improvement on Sophocles. Dryden’s expedient is simpler:—

‘Tell me, Thebans,
How Laïus fell; for a confused report
Pass’d through my ears, when first I took the crown;
But full of hurry, like a morning dream,
It vanish’d in the business of the day.

That only serves to show us that the dramatist has an uneasy conscience. Voltaire’s method is subtler. Oedipus thus excuses himself for having to question Iocasta concerning the death of Laïus:—

Madame, jusqu’ici, respectant vos douleurs,
Je n’ai point rappelé le sujet de vos pleurs;
Et de vos seuls périls chaque jour alarmée
Mon âme à d’autres soins semblait être fermée.

But, as the author admits, the king ought not to have been so long deterred, by the fear of displeasing his wife, from informing himself as to the death of his predecessor: ‘this is to have too much discretion and too little curiosity.’ Sophocles, according to Voltaire, ought to have suggested some explanation of the circumstance that Oedipus, on hearing how Laïus perished, does not at once recollect his own adventure in the narrow pass. The French poet seeks to explain it by hinting at a miraculous suspension of memory in Oedipus:—

Et je ne conçois pas par quel enchantement
J’oubliais jusqu’ici ce grand événement;
La main des dieux sur moi si long-temps suspendue
Semble ôter le bandeau qu’ils mettaient sur ma vue.

But this touch, though bold and not unhappy, must be classed with the transparent artifices of the stage. The true answer to the criticisms on this score which Voltaire directs against Sophocles, Corneille, and himself is contained in a remark of his own, that a certain amount of improbability is inherent in the story of Oedipus³⁹. If that improbability is excluded at one point, it will appear at another. This being so, it is not difficult to choose between the frank treatment of the material by Sophocles, and the ingenious but ineffectual compromises of later art.

• 39.In the fifth letter to M. de Genonville:—‘Il est vrai qu’il y a des sujets de tragédie où l’on est tellement gêné par la bizarrerie des événemens, qu’il est presqu’impossible de réduire l’exposition de sa pièce à ce point de sagesse et de vraisemblance. Je crois, pour mon bonheur, que le sujet d’Œdipe est de ce genre.’

§ 27. The recent revivals of Greek plays have had their great reward in proving how powerfully the best Greek Tragedy can appeal to modern audiences. Those who are furthest from being surprised by the result will be among the first to allow that the demonstration was needed. The tendency of modern study had been too much to fix attention on external contrasts between the old Greek theatre and our own. Nor was an adequate corrective of this tendency supplied by the manner in which the plays have usually been studied; a manner more favourable to a minute appreciation of the text than to apprehension of the play as a work of art. The form had been understood better than the spirit. A vague feeling might sometimes be perceived that the effectiveness of the old Greek dramas, as such, had depended essentially on the manners and beliefs of the people for whom they were written, and that a successful Sophocles presupposed a Periclean Athens. Some wonderment appeared to greet the discovery that a masterpiece of Aeschylus, when acted, could move the men and women of to-day. Now that this truth has been so profoundly impressed on the most cultivated audiences which England or America could furnish,—in Germany and France it had been less unfamiliar,—it is not too much to say that a new life has been breathed into the modern study of the Greek drama.

§ 28. Recent representations of the Oedipus Tyrannus have a peculiar significance, which claims notice here. The incestuous relationship—the entrance of Oedipus with bleeding eyes—these are incidents than which none could be imagined more fitted to revolt a modern audience. Neither Corneille nor Voltaire had the courage to bring the self-blinded king on the stage; his deed is related by others. Voltaire, indeed, suggested⁴⁰ that the spectacle might be rendered supportable by a skilful disposition of lights,—Oedipus, with his gore-stained face, being kept in the dim back-ground, and his passion being expressed by action rather than declamation, while the scene should resound with the cries of Iocasta and the laments of the Thebans. Dryden dared what the others declined; but his play was soon pronounced impossible for the theatre. Scott quotes a contemporary witness to the effect that, when Dryden’s Oedipus was revived about the year 1790, ‘the audience were unable to support it to an end; the boxes being all emptied before the third act was concluded.’

• 40.In one of his notes on Corneille’s Preface to the Oedipe (Oeuvres de Corneille, vol. VII. p. 262, ed. 1817).

§ 29. In May, 1881, after seven months of preparation, the Oedipus Tyrannus was acted in the original Greek by members of Harvard University. Archaeology, scholarship, and art had conspired to make the presentation perfect in every detail; and the admirable record of the performance which has been published has a permanent value for every student of Sophocles⁴¹. References to it will be found in the following commentary. But it is the impression which the whole work made on the spectators of which we would speak here. Nothing of the original was altered or omitted; and at the last Oedipus was brought on the scene, ‘his pale face marred with bloody stains.’ The performances were seen by about six thousand persons,—the Harvard theatre holding about a thousand at a time. As an English version was provided for those who needed it, it cannot be said that the language veiled what might else have offended. From first to last, these great audiences, thoroughly representative of the most cultivated and critical judgment, were held spell-bound. ‘The ethical situation was so overwhelming, that they listened with bated breath, and separated in silence.’ ‘The play is over. There is a moment’s silence, and then the theatre rings with applause. It seems inappropriate, however, and ceases almost as suddenly as it began. The play has left such a solemn impression that the usual customs seem unfitting, and the audience disperses quietly⁴².’ There is the nineteenth century’s practical interpretation of Aristotle. This is Tragedy, ‘effecting, by means of pity and terror, the purgation of such feelings.’

• 41.An Account of the Harvard Greek Play. By Henry Norman. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1882. The account is illustrated by 15 photographs of characters and groups, and is dedicated by the Author (who acted the part of Creon) to Professor J. W. White. See Appendix, p. 201.
• 42.Account of the Harvard Greek Play, pp. 36, 103.

§ 30. A few months later in the same year (1881), the Oedipus Tyrannus was revived in a fairly close French translation at the Théâtre Français. When the version of Jules Lacroix was played there in 1858, the part of Oedipus was filled by Geoffroy; but on this occasion an artist was available whose powers were even more congenial. Probably no actor of modern times has excelled M. Mounet-Sully in the union of all the qualities required for a living impersonation of the Sophoclean Oedipus in the entire series of moods and range of passions which the part comprises; as the great king, at once mighty and tender; the earnest and zealous champion of the State in the search for hidden guilt; the proud man startled by a charge which he indignantly repels, and embittered by the supposed treason of a friend; tortured by slowly increasing fears, alternating with moments of reassurance; stung to frenzy by the proof of his unspeakable wretchedness; subdued to a calmer despair; finally softened by the meeting with his young daughters. The scene between Oedipus and Iocasta (vv. 700—862) should be especially noticed as one in which the genius of Sophocles received the fullest justice from that of M. Mounet-Sully. In the words of a critic who has finely described the performance⁴³:—

• 43.Saturday Review, Nov. 19, 1881.

‘Every trait of the tragedian’s countenance is now a witness to the inward dread, always increasing upon him, as he relates his own adventure, and questions her for more minute details of the death of Laius. His voice sometimes sinks to a trembling gasp of apprehension, as the identity of the two events becomes more and more evident. He seems to be battling with fate.’

With a modern audience, the moment at which the self-blinded Oedipus comes forth is that which tests the power of the ancient dramatist; if, at that sight, repugnance overpowers compassion, the spell has been imperfect; if all other feelings are absorbed in the profound pathos of the situation, then Sophocles has triumphed. We have seen the issue of the ordeal in the case of the representation at Harvard. On the Paris stage, the traditions of the French classical drama (represented on this point by Corneille and Voltaire) were apt to make the test peculiarly severe. It is the more significant that the moment is thus described in the excellent account which we have cited above:—

‘Oedipus enters, and in the aspect of the man, his whole history is told. It is not the adjunct of the bleeding eyes which now most deeply stirs the spectators. It is the intensity of woe which is revealed in every movement of the altered features and of the tottering figure whose bearing had been so majestic, and the tone of the voice,—hoarse, yet articulate. The inward struggle is recognised in its necessary outward signs. The strain on the audience might now become too great but for the relief of tenderness which almost immediately succeeds in the parting of Oedipus from his children. Often as pathetic farewells of a similar kind have been presented on the stage, seldom has any made an appeal so forcible.’

In the presence of such testimonies, it can no longer be deemed that the Tragedy of ancient Greece has lost its virtue for the modern world. And, speaking merely as a student of Sophocles, I can bear witness that the representation of the Ajax at Cambridge (1882) was to me a new revelation of meaning and power. Of that performance, remarkable in so many aspects, I hope to say something in a later part of this edition. Here it must suffice to record a conviction that such revivals, apart from their literary and artistic interest, have also an educational value of the very highest order.