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The Complete Tragedies, Volume 2: Oedipus, Hercules Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, Agamemnon
By Shadi Bartsch, Susanna Braund, David Konstan The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-01374-9
CHAPTER 1
Oedipus
The story of the house of Oedipus starts with Oedipus' father, Laius, king of Thebes. An oracle tells Laius that he will be killed by his own son. He and his wife Jocasta therefore give their baby to the royal shepherd Phorbas with instructions to fasten its ankles together and leave it to die on Mount Cithaeron. Phorbas instead hands the baby to a Corinthian shepherd, who gives it to the childless king and queen of Corinth, Polybus and Merope. They raise the baby as their own with the name Oedipus or "Swollen-Foot." When the teenage Oedipus visits Delphi, he is told by Apollo's oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother, so he does not return home to Corinth. Roaming as an exile in a remote area, Oedipus is driven off a crossroad by an imperious old man in a chariot — King Laius. In his anger he kills the old man. Soon afterward, Oedipus arrives at Thebes and sets the city free from the tyranny of the Sphinx, a ravenous monster who is terrorizing the citizens, by solving her riddle. He is made king and marries the queen, Jocasta, with whom he has a number of children, including Antigone, Ismene, Polynices, and Eteocles.
The drama starts years later when a devastating plague has overwhelmed the city and Oedipus as king attempts to discover the cause so he can eradicate it. The chorus now sings of the deadly effect of this plague on all living things in Thebes. Oedipius' brother-in-law Creon reports that the Delphic oracle says Laius' murderer must leave Thebes before the plague will end, and Oedipus curses the murderer who must be in the city. Tiresias summons Laius' ghost to find out the perpetrator. As Creon announces to Oedipus, it is Oedipus himself. In outrage and disbelief, Oedipus has Creon jailed on charges of collusion with Tiresias to seize the throne. The choral ode that follows is likewise skeptical, suggesting that the cause of the plague is the gods' hostility to Thebes.
Oedipus questions three figures carefully: Jocasta, Phorbas, and the old Corinthian shepherd who was given the baby by Phorbas and handed it over to the king and queen of Corinth. He now realizes that his worst fears have been realized and that the Delphic oracle has come true: he has unwittingly killed his father, Laius, and married his mother, Jocasta. Upon discovering this, Jocasta commits suicide, and Oedipus punishes himself by blinding himself and voluntarily departing into exile, thus removing the pollution from the city.
Introduction
Susanna Braund
Oedipus, king of Thebes, is one of the giant figures of ancient mythology. Through the centuries his story has inspired works of epic poetry, tragedy, and opera and been famously used in psychology. The complexities of the story have engendered a variety of treatments. And yet, because our culture knows and values Greek tragedy over Roman and because the story of Oedipus is most familiar from Sophocles' play King Oedipus(and from Freud's deployment of the myth), we might readily fall into the trap of assessing Seneca's Roman treatment of the myth as secondary, as belated, as a response to Sophocles that struggles under the anxiety of influence. That would be a mistake. There is no evidence that Seneca conceived his tragedies as derived from or competing with those of the Attic tragedians. If we seek any earlier influences on Seneca as a tragedian, we do well to turn to Latin tragedy of the Roman Republican period (which survives only in fragments) and to Ovid's synthesis of Greco-Roman mythology in his epic poem, Metamorphoses. But even that is not essential. What is most illuminating is to set Seneca in the context of his own times. Let us ask what influenced him to shape his version of the famous myth as he does and what elements in the play correspond to particular interests of Seneca and his likely audience.
Of the several striking features of Seneca's articulation of his play, most significant is his elaboration of Oedipus' search for knowledge, which is the essence of the story, into three different scenes in addition to the conventional conversation with the shepherds: the report of the Delphic oracle, the divination scene, and the necromancy. Evidence from Seneca's contemporary, his nephew Lucan, suggests that these types of material were in vogue in the mid-first century CE: all three are incorporated into his epic poem on the Civil War between Pompey and Caesar, including a necromancy that lasts for half of a book. The divination scene includes a detailed account ofharuspicy — that is, an examination of the entrails of the sacrificial animals, a practice that was likely familiar to many of Seneca's audience. Using the correct technical terminology, Seneca imagines details such as the twin heads on the liver (359) and the seven veins (364) that foretell the conflict between Oedipus' two sons Polynices and Eteocles and the attack by the seven champions mustered by Polynices on the seven gates of Thebes. The necromancy in act 3 allows Seneca to depict an inverted form of ritual, again with details designed to horrify his Roman audience: the setting is a grove dark as night, the priest is dressed in black and wearing a wreath of yew (a tree associated with death), the sheep and cattle he sacrifices are black instead of flawless white, he drags them backward to the altar (victims were supposed to approach willingly) and throws them into the fire while still alive instead of slaughtering them first (548–58). Besides all this, the necromancy gives Seneca the opportunity for an atmospheric description of the sinister grove in which the rite takes place; it is clear from similar passages in Ovid and Lucan as well as Seneca's Thyestes that this era relished such set-pieces.
Another striking feature is Seneca's unflinching interest in gruesome physiological detail, which manifests itself in the descriptions of the plague reported by Oedipus and the chorus (ode 1) and in the report of Oedipus' self-mutilation as well as in the divination scene. Again, it seems fair to assume that Seneca is here delivering something his Roman audience craved; other poetry of this era shares Seneca's interest in bodily deformation and destruction, including Lucan again, who devotes a lengthy episode to the effects of fatal snake bites. He is surely also competing with other memorable plague narratives in earlier Latin literature — specifically, that which ends Lucretius' epic poem On the Nature of the Universe and that which closes the third book of Virgil's Georgics.
A third remarkable feature is Seneca's decision to have Jocasta commit suicide on stage (certainly a departure from the conventions of Greek tragedy) by typically masculine means: not by hanging herself but by a sword-thrust. For a Roman audience in the early principate, such a death evoked the famous death during the civil war of the Stoic Cato, who after the battle of Thapsus preferred to commit suicide rather than be spared by Caesar. Seneca deploys this episode with admiration several times in his prose writings, where it represents the ultimate act of self-sufficiency available to the Stoic. To say this is not to imply that Jocasta is a Stoic, but the prominent position of Jocasta's suicide at the climax of the play conveys admiration for her courage. Seneca has seen in the Oedipus myth an opportunity to incorporate plague narratives, a divination, a necromancy, and a memorable suicide.
The theme of knowledge necessarily pervades the play not only in the articulation of the plot but also at the linguistic level. Oedipus' conflicted attitude toward knowledge receives clear expression at line 209 — "the mind unsure desires knowledge, fears it too" — and the vocabulary of knowing recurs frequently, often interconnected with the motifs and antitheses of darkness and light, sight and blindness. Another motif closely connected with knowledge, and one also embedded in the ancient myth of course, is that of riddles. In act 1 Oedipus responds to Jocasta's criticisms of his weakness by reminding her that he had dared to face the Sphinx and that he was the only one able to solve her riddle (101–2): "But I untied the word-knots of the oracle, entangled tricks, / the fatal riddle of the beast with wings." His language of untying knots and his image of himself as solver of riddles recur as he seeks the cause of the plague. He urges Creon to report the obscure response of the oracle by saying, "Oedipus alone can understand enigmas" (216); he invites Tiresias to "untie / the oracle's response" (291–92); and he asks "soul-mate wife" to "unravel" his "perplexities" (773). But it turns out that his solving the new riddle of the plague and of Laius' murderer only renders him, in the words of Laius' ghost, "an evil all entwined, / a monster more entangled even than his Sphinx" (640–41). The final riddle in the play is one that he poses to himself in the speech reported by the messenger (926–57) — namely, how to find a punishment that is appropriate to his crimes: "You must find a way / to roam not mingling with the dead and buried, and yet / banished from the living. You must die, but not as much as father" (949–51). His solution is, of course, to pluck out his eyes.
Other key elements in Seneca's handling of the Oedipus myththat are foregrounded by this kind of reiteration are specifically Roman and specifically Senecan. First is a concern with kingship, a theme that occurs in most of Seneca's tragedies and in many other texts of the early principate, where good kings are contrasted with tyrants. Oedipus remarks on the "deceptive blessing" of kingship in his opening words (6–11); Jocasta appeals to the obligation of courage that goes with kingship in her first speech (82–86); Oedipus asserts that kings "must guard the well-being of kings" (239–43) as he institutes the search for the murderer of Laius and he later uses his absolute power to compel Creon to speak (518–29). Finally, in the dialogue with Creon in which Oedipus asserts that Creon is ambitious to replace him as king (668–706), Seneca delivers several of his typical sententiae (pithy points) about kingship: "He who is too much afraid of hatred / is incapable of ruling. It's fear keeps kingdoms safe," and "He who wields the scepter cruelly and tyrannically / dreads his victims. Fear rebounds against its instigator" (703–6).
A second motif is typical of Seneca's Stoic vocabulary and ideas: the fickleness of Fortune and the fixity of fate. Nowhere is this more explicit than in the final ode, which starts (980): "By fate we are driven — so yield to fate!" Oedipus' resistance to his fate — his heroic efforts to foil the oracle — are shown to be useless. In other words, the Oedipus story is recruited as evidence for the Stoic view of predetermination/predestination. Oedipus of course is aware of his vulnerability to Fortune (8–11) and has a sense that fate has something awful in store for him right from the start (28–36). Creon knows better than Oedipus does that he cannot alter his lot (681), and Jocasta urges Oedipus not to hurry to find out his fate when she says, "Without your challenge let the fates unfold themselves" (832). Once he understands his true identity, Oedipus depicts himself as an innocent victim of Fortune (934), a sentiment reiterated by Jocasta in further sententiae at line 1019: "The blame belongs to fate: no one is made guilty by his fate." In other words, Oedipus never gains the equanimity of the Stoic sage who is able to endure anything and everything that fate and Fortune throw at him, a topic explored in depth by Seneca in his essay on the wise man's endurance (De Constantia Sapientis).
Also treated from a Stoic perspective, the theme of Nature and her laws emerges strongly from Seneca's handling of the play. For the Stoics, the ideal life was one lived "in accordance with Nature"; for Seneca, the inversions and perversions of Nature are signs of moral as well as cosmological chaos. Oedipus in his horror at the predictions of the oracle has made every effort to keep Nature's laws intact, as we hear early in the play when he explains the motivation for his self-imposed exile from Corinth (12–26). Corresponding to this at the close of the play is Oedipus' realization that Nature "inverted / her established statutes in the case of Oedipus alone, / devising novel births" (he means the children he has fathered on his mother), and he accordingly requests an unnatural punishment for his unnatural crime: "to be allowed to live again, and die again, / to be reborn repeatedly, so every time you'll pay / with different punishments" (942–47). But the fullest and most shocking depiction of the perversion of Nature comes in the divination scene, when Manto is describing to her father Tiresias the strange formation of the sacrificial heifer's entrails (366–73):
Altered is the natural order, nothing in its proper place, but everything is back to front. On the right side lie the lungs, filled with blood, no room for air. The left is not the region of the heart. The caul does not conceal the entrails' folds of fat with soft embrace. Nature is inverted. Even in the womb no law persists: let me investigate the reason for such stiffness in its organs. What monstrosity is this? A fetus in a virgin heifer!
The breaking of the boundaries set by Nature is a theme typical of Senecan tragedy — it is a crucial theme in his Thyestes, for example — but here it is pervasive. The elision of proper barriers occurs in Oedipus' first speech, in his description of the effects of the plague, which is indiscriminating in its victims (young and old, fathers and sons), which kills a man and his wife on their wedding day, which produces funerals without lamentation because they have no tears left, which sees parents burying their children, which fells mourners during funeral processions, which makes people burn the bodies of their kin on strangers' pyres, which produces so many casualties that there is no land left for graves and not enough timber to supply the pyres (54–68). The same motif of the disruption of natural boundaries recurs in the final scene as Jocasta prepares to kill herself with the words, "Because of you, incestuous woman, / the decency of human law is jumbled and destroyed" (1025–26). She boldly articulates the unnatural relationships — her dead husband was also her husband's father — and logically targets "the fertile womb that bore me sons and husband" (1034–39).
The rules that should govern kinship relations are in Seneca's Oedipus couched in the essentially Roman framework of pietas, a word hard to translate but which denotes proper respect toward one's parents, one's nation, and one's gods. In this play, the obligations imposed by pietas drive Oedipus as he attempts to do the right thing. Seneca introduces the motif (the words translating the noun pietas and the adjectives pius and impius are emphasized) as early as line 19, where he writes "pro misera pietas!" or "Unhappy love of kin!" Oedipus fears the "wicked blaze of incest" (21) predicted by the oracle but has unwittingly produced "unnatural offspring" (639), which leads the ghost of Laius to promise "unnatural warfare" (646) to crush his incestuous house.
Ironically, in his curse on the murderer of Laius, Oedipus uses exactly this vocabulary of pietas (257–63):
may he find no peaceful shelter, no trusty hearth, no land to offer him a welcome in his exile. May shameful marriage and unnatural offspring bring him pain. May he with his own hand even slay his father and may he do — there cannot be a heavier curse — whatever I have run away from.
Still, after the announcement of Polybus' death, Oedipus believes in his innocence: "without offense I now can raise to heaven / hands undefiled, that need to fear no crimes" (790–91). Once he has discovered how wrong he is, "he lays his sinning hand upon his sword-hilt" (935) in his first impulse to kill himself, but then he realizes that although this might make atonement to his father it would leave unpaid his debts to his mother, his children, and his "grieving fatherland" (936–41), a conceptualization of obligation that is quintessentially Roman. The pietas motif makes its final appearance in the play's last speech when Oedipus shockingly calls Apollo, the god of the oracle, a "liar" because Jocasta's death was not foretold. His mother's death has made him even more guilty than he had feared; though unwillingly and unwittingly, he has "outdone the wickedness of fate" (1042–46). Seneca's language of pietas is designed to resonate for his Roman readers. There is much more to be said about Seneca's Oedipus, but I hope I have shown how rich and well-crafted the play is when studied in its Roman context as the literary creation of a Stoic philosopher of the early principate.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Complete Tragedies, Volume 2: Oedipus, Hercules Mad, Hercules on Oeta, Thyestes, Agamemnon by Shadi Bartsch, Susanna Braund, David Konstan. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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