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On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

E. R. Dodds
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Extract

On the last occasion when I had the misfortune to examine in Honour Moderations at Oxford I set a question on the Oedipus Rex, which was among the books prescribed for general reading. My question was ‘In what sense, if in any, does the Oedipus Rex attempt to justify the ways of God to man?’ It was an optional question; there were plenty of alternatives. But the candidates evidently considered it a gift: nearly all of them attempted it. When I came to sort out the answers I found that they fell into three groups.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , April 1966, pp. 37 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1966

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References

page 39 note 1 For the full evidence see O. Hey's exhaustive examination of the usage of these words, Philol. 83 (1927), 1–17; 137–63.Google Scholar Cf. also von Fritz, K., Antike und Moderne Tragödie (Berlin, 1962), 1 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 41 note 1 The danger is exemplified by Mr. P. H. Vellacott's article, ‘The Guilt of Oedipus’, which appeared in this journal (vol. xi [1964], 137–48) shortly after my talk was delivered. By treating Oedipus as an historical personage and examining his career from the ‘common-sense’ standpoint of a prosecuting counsel Mr. Vellacott has no difficulty in showing that Oedipus must have guessed the true story of his birth long before the point at which the play opens—and guiltily done nothing about it. Sophocles, according to Mr. Vellacott, realized this, but unfortunately could not present the situation in these terms because ‘such a conception was impossible to express in the conventional forms of tragedy’; so for most of the time he reluctantly fell back on ‘the popular concept of an innocent Oedipus lured by Fate into a disastrous trap’. We are left to conclude either that the play is a botched compromise or else that the common sense of the law-courts is not after all the best yardstick by which to measure myth.

page 42 note 1 Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams (London, Modern Library, 1938), 108.Google Scholar

page 42 note 2 Gomme, A. W., More Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford, 1962), 211.Google Scholar

page 43 note 1 Knox, B. M. W., Oedipus at Thebes (Yale, 1957), 39.Google Scholar

page 43 note 2 Bowra, C. M., Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford, 1944), ch. v.Google Scholar

page 44 note 1 Herodotus, I. 45.Google Scholar Cf. Funke, H., Die sogenannte tragische Schuld (Diss. Köln, 1963), 105 ff.Google Scholar

page 45 note 1 Waldock, A. J. A., Sophocles the Dramatist (Cambridge, 1951), 158, 168.Google Scholar

page 45 note 2 Kirkwaod, G. M., A Study of Sophoclean Drama (Ithaca, 1958), 271.Google Scholar

page 46 note 1 Whitman, C. H., Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), 133–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 47 note 1 Ehrenberg, V., Sophocles and Pericles (Oxford, 1954), 141 ff.Google Scholar

page 47 note 2 Knox, B. M. W., op. cit., ch. ii.Google Scholar

page 47 note 3 Heraclitus, fragm. 102.

page 48 note 1 Freud, Sigmund, op. cit. 109.Google Scholar

page 48 note 2 Ajax 124–6.Google Scholar

page 49 note 1 O.C. 607–15; 1211–49.Google Scholar