Athens and the Theater
Sophocles (c. 496–406 B.C.), the Athenian tragic poet, wrote Oedipus the King for the Athenian stage, but the action takes place at Thebes, a city of Boeotia in central Greece. The play names places in Boeotia, Phocis, Corinth and the Peloponnese. Some of these were still visited and described in the second century A.D. by the travel writer Pausanias, whose Description of Greece is the fullest ancient account of them.
The play was first staged at the City Dionysia, the Athenian festival of Dionysus, in the Theater of Dionysus below the Acropolis. The evidence for its date is indirect. The ancient report of its defeat by Philocles rests on a single scholarly note. Aristotle’s Poetics supplies the fourth-century account of the actors and of the parts of a tragedy.
Places of the play
A city of Boeotia, the setting of the play. Its people are called the children and folk of Cadmus, the legendary founder. The Priest of Zeus names the marketplaces, the two shrines of Pallas, and the place “where Ismenus gives answer by fire”, the oracular sanctuary of Apollo beside the Theban stream Ismenus. The Chorus places Artemis on her throne “above the circle of our Agora” (161). The Sphinx, whose riddle held the city before Oedipus came, is named in the prologue and recalled by Oedipus in his quarrel with Teiresias. Pausanias locates the mountain from which the Sphinx sallied beyond Thebes and gives two accounts of her. In one she is a pirate who landed at Anthedon and was overcome by Oedipus with an army from Corinth. In the other she is a natural daughter of Laius who knew an oracle given to Cadmus. The play does not name the mountain or say where the Sphinx sat.
The oracle of Apollo in Phocis. The play calls it the Pythian house of Phoebus, golden Pytho, the Delphian rock and “Earth’s central shrine” (480). Creon is sent there in the prologue. He reports that Laïus left Thebes on a visit to Delphi and did not return. Oedipus says that he went there in secret from his Corinthian parents. Pausanias reports that the oracle was said to have belonged first to Earth, then to Themis, who gave it to Apollo, and he cites the Eumolpia on a shared tenure of Earth and Poseidon. He records five temples of Apollo, the last built by the Amphictyons with Spintharus of Corinth as architect. He gives the ascent to Parnassus through Daulis as longer but easier than the ascent from Delphi.
Iocasta reports that Laïus was killed “where three highways meet” (716). She says that the land is Phocis and that roads to the spot lead from Delphi and from Daulia. Oedipus’s account of the encounter follows, and in his final lament he addresses the three roads, the glen and the narrow way. Iocasta says the party was five, with a herald and one carriage. Pausanias calls the place the Cleft Road, the road on which Oedipus killed his father. He reports that the tombs of Laius and of the servant who followed him stood in the middle of the meeting of three roads under piles of unhewn stones, and that Damasistratus, king of Plataea, was said to have buried the bodies. Pausanias speaks of one servant’s tomb, whereas the play counts four attendants.
A town of Phocis, named by Iocasta as one of the places from which roads lead to the spot where Laïus died. Pausanias gives its name as Daulis and places it twenty-seven stades from Panopeus. He calls its men few but unsurpassed among the Phocians in size and strength. He offers two derivations of the name, from a nymph Daulis and from daula, an ancient word for shaggy, wooded ground. He connects the city with the story of Tereus. Strabo gives Daulis as the Homeric form and Daulia as the later one.
The city of the Isthmus, where Polybus was king and Merope queen. Oedipus gives his parentage as Polybus of Corinth and “the Dorian Merope” (774–775) and says that he left Corinth after the Delphic response. The Corinthian messenger announces that the people will make Oedipus king of the “Isthmian land” (939–940). He then reveals that Polybus was not his father. Pausanias names Corinth and the Isthmus as the scene of the upbringing of Oedipus.
The mountain range between Boeotia and Attica, close to Thebes. Teiresias predicts that all Cithaeron will ring with the cries of Oedipus. The Corinthian messenger says that he found the child in “Cithaeron’s winding glens” (1026). The Theban herdsman names Cithaeron among his pastures. Their acquaintance covered three half-years there, “from spring to Arcturus” (1133–1139). In the third stasimon the Chorus addresses the mountain as native to Oedipus. In the exodos Oedipus asks why it sheltered him and asks to be allowed to live there, since his parents had set it as his tomb. Pausanias says that Oedipus was exposed on Cithaeron in Plataean territory, with his ankles pierced by goads.
A town of Phocis. The Chorus in the second stasimon says it will no more go to “Abae’s temple or Olympia” if the oracles are not fulfilled. Pausanias reports that Abae was held sacred to Apollo from of old and had an oracle of the god. The army of Xerxes burned the sanctuary. The Greeks resolved to leave the burnt shrines as memorials, and Rome later gave Abae self-government out of reverence for Apollo.
The sanctuary of Zeus in Elis in the Peloponnese, seat of the Olympic Games. It is named with Abae in the second stasimon, where the Chorus links the credit of Apollo’s oracles to the reverence paid at such shrines.
The Chorus calls Apollo the Delian healer, the island of Delos being his birthplace. It prays that the plague god may be driven to the “Thracian wave” (197) and speaks of Artemis in the Lycian hills. In the third stasimon it mentions “Cyllene’s lord”, Hermes, and the Nymphs of Helicon, the Boeotian mountain of the Muses. The Second Messenger says that neither the Ister (the lower Danube) nor the Phasis (a river of Colchis on the Black Sea) could wash the house of Labdacus clean.
The first performance
Athenian tragedy was performed in competition at festivals of Dionysus, chiefly the City Dionysia, held in spring. Each of the competing poets presented three tragedies and a satyr play. Pausanias places the oldest sanctuary of Dionysus near the theater, with two temples and statues of Dionysus Eleuthereus. He reports that the Athenians set up statues of poets in the theater, with Euripides and Sophocles named as the two illustrious tragic poets. The stone theater that survives dates largely from the fourth century B.C., after the lifetime of Sophocles.
No ancient source records the year or the festival of the first performance. Many later scholars place it in the 420s B.C., partly because of the plague in the play. The description of the epidemic in Thucydides records the outbreak at Athens in the second year of the war, and the oracular line “A Dorian war shall come and with it death” (2.54.2). Such a link is inference. The description of the plague in the play is brief.
The report of a defeat comes from the prose argument (hypothesis) to the play, which says that Sophocles was defeated by Philocles, on the authority of Dicaearchus. The Dicaearchus concerned is usually identified with the Peripatetic Dicaearchus of Messana, a pupil of Aristotle, active about 300 B.C. Philocles is reported to have been a nephew of Aeschylus and is known from very little of his work. The rhetorician Aristeides remarks that Philocles gained a distinction denied to his uncle. The hypothesis names neither the plays that competed nor the year.
Staging
Aristotle’s Poetics reports that Aeschylus raised the number of actors from one to two and that Sophocles introduced the third actor and scene-painting. The play has eight speaking parts besides the Chorus: the Priest of Zeus, Oedipus, Creon, Teiresias, Iocasta, the Corinthian messenger, the herdsman and the Second Messenger. The parts were therefore shared among three actors. The children Antigone and Ismene and the Boy who leads Teiresias are silent figures. The stage directions in the printed translation are editorial.
The action is set before the royal palace, whose doors serve for the exits and entrances. Suppliants with wreathed branches sit at the altars. Oedipus goes into the palace at the end of the first episode, and Iocasta rushes in during the third. Creon comes crowned with bay, and Iocasta carries a wreathed branch and incense. The self-blinding is reported by the Second Messenger. The bars of the doors are then withdrawn, and Oedipus is shown to the Chorus. The children are brought out and heard before they are seen.
The Chorus consists of Theban elders, addressed as “princes of the land” (911) and “elders” (1110). Aristotle’s Poetics names the parts of a tragedy as prologue, episode, exodos and choral song, the last divided into parodos and stasimon, with the kommos as a lament shared by chorus and actors. The play has a parodos, four stasima and two passages of shared lament. Later sources give the number of choristers in tragedy as fifteen.
Actors wore masks. Lucian’s Menippus refers to the actor laying aside costume and mask after the play. Arrian, quoted in Stobaeus’ Florilegium, names the actor Polus as playing both Oedipus the King and the beggar Oedipus at Colonus.