Is Oedipus Rex the Mother of All Drama?

Written in the 5th century BCE by one of the greatest ancient Greek playwrights, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is a masterpiece of theatrical construction, fraught with horrific, methodically realized dramatic irony. In the modern era, the play also gave its name to pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s description of what he deemed the central psychological and emotional challenge a boy faces growing up. Since Sophocles’s tragedy is about a young man who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother, it is just what the doctor ordered to describe the neurotic attachment a son may feel towards his mother. If in Freud’s “Oedipus complex” the son doesn’t go so far as to do with Dad, he at least would like to have Mom all to himself!

Like so much of what constitutes Oedipus’s personal story as crafted by Sophocles, the vexing details happen well before the play begins. Thus, the tragedy is predetermined, even if Sophocles’s hero exercises a certain amount of free will in how he goes about discovering his egregious, universally taboo past actions. As in Shakespeare’s similarly archetypal play Hamlet, Oedipus is very much like a detective — only here, the culprit he obsessively searches for turns out to be none other than himself!

Over the centuries, one of the most longstanding literary arguments is the degree to which Oedipus is at fault for his crimes and eventual fate. In retracing his steps, could he have avoided doing the wrong thing, at the proverbial wrong place and wrong time?

None of this is apparent as the play opens in Thebes, then a powerful city-state northwest of Athens. In front of the royal palace, citizens and priests have gathered to implore King Oedipus to save the city from a terrible plague ravaging the land. Oedipus tells them that he has already dispatched his brother-in-law Creon to a divine oracle to learn what—or who—is responsible for the pestilence. The “good news” according to a returning Creon is that Thebes can be saved, but only if it duly drives out the scourge who murdered its previous king, Laius.

Characteristic for the willful Oedipus, when he hears Creon’s words he immediately jumps into action — and to conclusions. He pledges to use all his powers to track down the assailant, firstly by summoning Thebes’s aged, all-seeing (but blind) seer Tiresias for answers. Reluctantly, and under physical threat by Oedipus, Tiresias spills the beans to his incredulous and indignant king: You, Oedipus, are “the accursed defiler of the land.”

Ergo, within the play’s first 20 minutes the audience knows the answer to the plot’s central mystery. Or do they? Many might side with Oedipus, who immediately suspects that Tiresias is truly a blind prophet or, worse, a lying “mouthpiece” for Creon in a treacherous scheme to smear Oedipus and take his crown.

Step by step, calling any and all witnesses relevant to the slaying of Laius, Oedipus sets out to prove that he couldn’t possibly be the culprit. For one thing, he learns from his wife Queen Jocasta—that is, Creon’s sister—an old prophecy foretold that her first husband Laius would die at the hands of his own child. Guess what, Sherlock? Oedipus’s parents were the noble Polybus and his wife Merope from faraway Corinth, so that rules him out from the start.

With that, Oedipus could have stopped his investigation right there, but that would have left him without a guilty party. So he plunges ahead with all the dogged inquisitional intent of Hercule Poirot or Inspector Clouseau. In the words of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, from there the case of Oedipus gets “curiouser and curiouser” as he dives down his own dark, twisted personal rabbit hole.

Fearing the worst, Queen Jocasta begs her husband to back off his quest, even as he continues to pepper her with questions about the circumstances of Laius’s murder, which occurred at a place in the hills “where three roads meet.” When Oedipus learns these details, they jog his memory about his own violent encounter decades ago with several men leading a wagon that was blocking his way. Neither belligerent party would step aside and a sword fight ensued. Not only did Oedipus singlehandedly slay the escorts but also their liege riding in the wagon. Though the two stories are eerily similar, Jocasta calls out the critical difference: Laius was attacked by more than one assailant. But the questions beget more questions.

At this point, you may be asking another important question about Oedipus’s past. How exactly did he become king? Years ago while en route to Thebes, he learned that the Sphinx—a winged monster with a woman’s head and a lion’s body—had closed the only pass into the city. Any traveler wishing for access had to answer a riddle correctly or suffer the consequences of the man-eating she-beast.

Oedipus takes on the challenge. “What animal,” asks the Sphinx, “is on four legs in the morning, two in the day, and three at night?” Oedipus sees through the trickery and correctly answers: “Man.” For it is man who first crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs rising to maturity, and gets around with the “third leg”—a cane—in old age. Shocked, the Sphinx hurls herself off the pass to her death on the rocks below. When Oedipus gets to Thebes the citizens are so grateful that they make him king. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), their King Laius had vacated his throne, the victim of murder up in the mountains “where three roads meet.”

An extraordinary man, this Oedipus, a hero to many, is faced with another do-or-die riddle. What about Jocasta’s infant child who was evidently killed years before on Laius’s order to prevent the oracle’s awful prophecy from coming true? To get to the truth (“to make dark things plain”), Oedipus summons citizens and servants from far and wide to face his relentless, sometimes hostile questioning. He must piece together the evidence, and so too can the audience or reader.

It is keenly ironic and tragic that Oedipus’s steely, admirable determination to solve this mystery and save his people sows the seeds of his own undoing. Throughout the play, Sophocles provides instance after instance of his protagonist making pledges and oaths that, in retrospect, not only prove to be wrong but serve to implicate him in the “cold case” of Laius’s homicide. But perhaps the greatest irony in Oedipus Rex is that its hero undertakes a noble and indeed universal human quest—to discover his true origins, that is, find out who he is—but the answer itself spells his own doom.

Two more decisive witnesses now appear in the court. First comes a messenger from Corinth relaying to Oedipus a double dose of grievous news: first that Polybus has died and, second, that he was not Oedipus’s real father. Here, Oedipus could lament with Romeo that “I am fortune’s fool!” Why? Oedipus reveals that he ruefully fled Polybus and Merope’s lordly home as a youth after a different oracle told him that he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Coincidentally (or not), it is on Oedipus’s subsequent odyssey that he tangled with those road-hogging travelers.

The messenger goes on to say that he rescued Oedipus as a baby abandoned in the hills, presenting him to Polybus for adoption. Curiously, the baby’s ankles had been tied together, scarring him for life (Oedipus means “swollen feet” in Greek). For the last time, Jocasta exits the palace, vainly warning her king, “Mayst thou never come to know who thou are!”

Again Oedipus makes the wrong assumption even if he is on the right track. He thinks that Jocasta’s dire warning stems from her fear that her king may not be from a royal line, but instead was born into servility or slavery. The messenger’s last revelation is that the baby had been given to him by a Theban herdsman who worked in the house of Laius.

Summoned immediately, the herdsman arrives under duress. He will not admit to anything, insisting that his memory is hazy. But Oedipus is relentless. He threatens torture, sealing his fate. He demands to know where the herdsman got this baby, and under what circumstances. Finally, the blinding truth comes out: The baby was Laius’s own, but given up by the queen to nip that ominous patricidal prophecy in the bud, if not the cradle. Sophocles’s terrible irony strikes again since the herdsman’s compassion to save the baby from death comes back to haunt not just the royal family but Thebes itself.

As is typical in Greek tragedy, the play’s horrific (and singularly grisly) climax occurs offstage and is relayed to the audience in the past tense. Oedipus and his mother—and, gulp, wife—suffer perhaps the most severe self-punishment in all of classic drama. In a play that intentionally makes vision a pronounced theme, it is dreadfully fitting that Oedipus blinds himself. Even more ghoulish, he takes his revenge on himself using the bejeweled pins from Jocasta’s dress.

While among the most renowned plays in the theatrical canon, and certainly one of the most performed, Oedipus Rex is also a profoundly pessimistic one about the human condition. It has been criticized on this score, as well as for the plot coincidences and conceits that appear stacked like dominos against its doomed hero (for instance, was there no discussion of Laius’s death between Jocasta and Oedipus in all those years after they wed?).

While Sophocles does try to show that Oedipus bears at least some responsibility for his sins by underlining his rash character flaws, ultimately he seems as much a hapless victim (of the gods?) as the guilty party, condemned to immeasurable suffering despite his earnest attempts to do the right thing later on.

It might take years of therapy with Dr. Freud to convince him, but Oedipus could at least take some solace in successfully solving the crime, which is what his subjects begged of him and what he resolves to do with an Olympian vengeance. But at what ungodly price? Ere the mighty Oedipus Rex exits as Oedipus … wrecked.