How are we to understand what happens to Oedipus?Footnote 1 What or who is the cause of the terrible deeds—predicted by oracles to both Laius and Oedipus—that he has already committed before the play begins and that are revealed in its course? The purpose of the present essay, whose title alludes to a well-known article by E.R. Dodds,Footnote 2 is to draw attention to aspects of the play that have been ignored or explained away. To give them their due it will be necessary to take issue with two views of Dodds (one of which he owes to Wilamowitz) that I regard as mistaken. To argue against an article that is more than fifty years old might be thought a pointless exhumation, but Dodds's highly influential formulations, I will argue, have caused what Sophocles wrote to be either overlooked or misconstrued and are still causing misunderstanding in the second decade of the present century. It is time these views were examined critically.Footnote 3
A brief summary of Dodds's article will suffice. Dodds considers three sorts of answers made by Oxford Honours candidates to the question ‘In what sense, if in any, does the Oedipus Rex attempt to justify the ways of God to man?’. The first group of candidates thought the play showed that Oedipus’ suffering was deserved punishment for his guilt or his faults of character. Dodds makes short work of this moralizing interpretation. If Sophocles had meant for Oedipus’ grim fate to be seen as deserved, he would have written the play differently.Footnote 4
It is in reply to the second group that Dodds, I will argue, makes a mistake that has bedevilled interpretation ever since. This group regards Oedipus Tyrannos (OT) as a ‘tragedy of destiny’: the play shows that ‘man has no free will but is a puppet in the hands of the gods who pull the strings that make him dance’. If we take the image of a puppet literally, a doll that has no life in it and whose limbs are moved by another, this clearly describes a creature devoid of dramatic interest. But though human beings can be manipulated in ways that are not so extreme, Dodds thinks that the literal image of a puppet would describe an Oedipus who is manipulated by the gods. In order to avoid making Oedipus a puppet, Dodds runs hard the other way and says that Apollo does not cause what befalls Oedipus. ‘The gods know the future,’ says Dodds, ‘but they do not order it: they know who will win the next Scotland and England football match, but that does not alter the fact that the victory will depend on the skill, the determination, the fitness of the players, and a little on luck.’Footnote 5 But, as we will see, various kinds of divine interference with the actions of human beings are a frequent theme in tragedy, which makes the premise of Dodds's argument doubtful. And OT in particular contains quite a bit of language that suggests that such interference is going on here.
A third group of candidates argued that Sophocles is neither defending nor indicting the gods but is a pure artist who intends to write a gripping play. Dodds replies that, if Sophocles had wanted to sidestep the theological implications of his story, he would not have had the Chorus in a famous stasimon raise the question of the existence of the gods and ask why they should dance in their honour if their prophecies are not fulfilled. Dodds propounds two theses, first that Sophocles ‘did not believe (or did not always believe) that the gods are in any human sense “just”’; and second that ‘he did always believe that the gods exist and that man should revere them’. In support of the first proposition Dodds cites ‘the implicit evidence of the Oedipus Rex’ as well as the more explicit comment on the injustice of the gods at the end of Trachiniae. But if OT and Trachiniae show the gods to be unjust, that means that they have sent undeserved misery on Oedipus and Heracles. Since Oedipus’ misery consists in his having killed his father and married his mother, we must conclude that at this point Dodds is prepared to entertain the idea that they caused him to do these things and did not merely predict them. (The alternative, that they did not prevent what fate decreed, does not indict them for injustice at all if Oedipus’ fate was unalterable or to the same extent if it was alterable but not caused by the gods.) Dodds's answer to the third group thus stands in tension with his answer to the second since, if the gods caused Oedipus to do these actions, he becomes, in Dodds's own terms, a puppet. We may allow ourselves to wonder whether the image of puppetry serves him well.
Let us return to Dodds's reply to the second view. When he describes as a puppet any character who is manipulated by a god, he implies that such manipulation is alien to tragedy. But in fact gods do interfere with the actions of human beings in tragedy and in more than one way. At the mild end of the spectrum they can create in someone a momentary and natural emotion that will cause the performance of an action they want to see performed: for example Apollo, as described at Ion 36–48, caused the Pythia to feel pity for the exposed baby, so that instead of casting him out of the sanctuary she raised him. Another possibility is for the gods to put persons in a position where they are forced by circumstances to do something that will bring about their destruction, as Agamemnon in Aeschylus is forced to kill his daughter Iphigenia and incur the mortal enmity of Clytaemestra. At still other times the gods interfere with a person's organs of sense so that, for example, the principal character in Heracles thinks that his own children are those of his enemy Eurystheus, and Agave in Bacchae thinks that her son Pentheus is a lion. Still more invasive of the personality is Aphrodite's action in Hippolytus: she inspires Phaedra with a passion for her stepson, a passion against which the unaltered part of her fights to the death. The extreme case is when the gods inspire someone with a purpose he or she would ordinarily regard as impious, as when Eteocles in Seven against Thebes is seized with the conscious desire to meet his brother Polynices in battle and kill him. To regard as puppets all persons with whom the gods interfere is to ignore the fact that such interference is allowed by tragic practice and is compatible with our being emotionally engaged with them. In tragedy human beings are in fact exposed to divine manipulation: complete personal autonomy is not the default setting.
We thus cannot rule out on a priori grounds the idea that the gods or Apollo not only predicted Oedipus’ actions but also caused them. What positive reasons do we have for thinking that Apollo did so in our play? There are two kinds of reasons, specific passages in the play and general considerations of mythical intelligibility.
APOLLO AT WORK IN THE PLAY
The text of the play as a whole is consistent with the intervention of Apollo in the life of Oedipus. Tragedy has, as we have seen, no objection in principle to having the gods interfere rather invasively, as with Eteocles and Phaedra. In the case of Oedipus, there is no reason to think that his conscious purposes were supplanted by other, god-sent, ones, as those of Eteocles apparently were, or that his affective life was altered from without, as Phaedra's was. The play suggests, rather, that all of Oedipus’ actions, including the parricide and the incest with his mother, were perfectly free but that, in the case of those two actions, Apollo tricked him into a situation where he unwittingly carried out the god's designs. Though Apollo's intervention was less invasive than is sometimes the case in tragedy, it was nevertheless an intervention.
The clearest indication that Apollo directed the events that precede the play's action occurs in the middle of the play. In the scene following his quarrel with Creon, Oedipus gives Jocasta a summary of his life (774–827). He tells her that he was raised as the son of Polybus, king of Corinth, and was quite happy with his lot until a doubt was raised about his parentage: a man in his cups said he was not Polybus’ son. He resolved to go to Delphi and ask the god who his parents were. At Delphi he put his question to the god, but Apollo refused to answer it, most unusual behaviour for the oracle. Oedipus says: ‘He sent me away unhonoured in what I had come for, but to me in my misery he predicted other terrible things, that I was fated to lie with my mother and beget offspring none can bear to see and that I would be my own father's killer’ (788–93).
Notice what happens here: Apollo withholds information from Oedipus about his parents, refuses to answer his enquiry at all; then, gratuitously, he gives him a prediction that he will kill his father and marry his mother. He makes this prediction at the point where it contributes to its own fulfilment. For even though Oedipus is in doubt (based on the comment of the tipsy man) who his parents are, the foreseeable result of the oracle is what actually happens: Oedipus resolves to avoid the only parents he knows and never to return to Corinth. In consequence he takes the road out of Delphi leading in the other direction, a road on which, as Apollo knows, Laius is travelling with his entourage. The meeting at the crossroads is planned by Apollo. Laius, in an act of high-handed arrogance, tries to drive Oedipus from the road and aims a blow at his head with a goad designed for controlling animals,Footnote 6 and it is not in Oedipus’ nature to accept such an insult meekly.Footnote 7 The rest follows naturally. They fight, and he kills Laius. When he arrives at Thebes, he finds a city that has no king and is being terrorized by the Sphinx. Clever man that he is, he solves her riddle and thereby wins the throne, with which goes the hand of Jocasta in marriage. Oedipus’ narrative suggests that he was deliberately set up to kill his father and marry his mother.
Consider also the prediction made to Laius. This too serves a function in helping to bring about the parricide and the incest. Had Laius not received the warning he did and had his son been raised by him and Jocasta, knowing them as his parents, the likelihood of his killing his father would have been slight and the likelihood of his marrying his mother virtually nil. But because of the oracle his parents gave him to a servant to expose on Mount Cithaeron. The servant pitied the child and gave it to a Corinthian. This allowed Oedipus to grow up in ignorance of his parentage and set him up for two acts he never would have committed had he known his parents’ identity.
Apollo, then, engineered the parricide and the incest. And so when Jocasta says (720–2) ‘Apollo neither caused him [the child] to become his father's slayer nor caused Laius to suffer at his son's hands the terrible fate he feared’, she uses a form of speech that implies that, had the prediction come true, Apollo would have been the cause of the events he predicted. Her words suggest to the audience the view they are to take of what has actually happened: Jocasta says that Apollo did not bring these actions about because they never happened; but she is wrong about their never happening, and in denying that Apollo acted to cause them she is also mistaken.
The same tale is told by Oedipus’ accusation of Apollo (1329–33) at a point where all the facts are known and there are no more revelations to come: ‘It was Apollo, my friends, Apollo, who wrought these my terrible miseries, though the hand that struck the blow was none other than my own.’ (Oedipus’ statement is in response to the question what god caused him to blind himself, and he replies that it was Apollo, using his victim's own hands. But ‘these my terrible sufferings’ also have in view the parricide and the incest. Of these it is likewise true to say that Apollo caused them, using Oedipus to carry them out.) In view of what has preceded it is simplest to suppose that Oedipus means what he says and that Sophocles intends us to see that it is true.Footnote 8
Another passage, as printed by almost all editors, contains a conjecture, but the conjecture is virtually certain, and the passage is therefore relevant to the present question. At 376–7 editors print Brunck's οὐ γάρ ϲε μοῖρα πρόϲ γ’ ἐμοῦ πεϲεῖν, which gives the sense ‘It is not fated for you [Oedipus] to be overthrown by me, since Apollo, whose care it is to bring this about, is sufficient’. The reading of the manuscripts, οὐ γάρ με μοῖρα πρόϲ γε ϲοῦ πεσεῖν, gives ‘It is not fated for me to be overthrown by you’, irrelevant to the context, since Teiresias’ own fall is not the subject under discussion. If the judgement of most editors is right here, Teiresias is another witness for an Apollo who brings about what he predicts.
One other item in what precedes the opening of the play could also be explained as Apollo-caused on the basis of parallels from tragedy. When Oedipus recounts (774–86) how he came to Delphi, he says that it was because a chance event caused him to wonder who his parents were, the remark of the drunken man at a banquet. If someone in tragedy says that an event took place by chance or with no known cause, this is rarely, if ever, the whole truth: such words are often a palpable suggestion by the dramatist that the event was divinely caused.Footnote 9 Though more naturalistic explanations might be available (for example gossip in the palace at Corinth), Sophocles’ audience may have thought that drunkenness allowed this man to be the mouthpiece of a god (cf. Eur. Bacch. 298–301) and to say something that was unknown to himself or to anyone in Corinth except Polybus, Merope and the shepherd who gave Oedipus to them.
We may conclude that Apollo is behind Oedipus’ fate.Footnote 10 To be sure, his intervention is of a kind that leaves Oedipus’ actions free. Oedipus freely chooses to consult the oracle, freely chooses to leave Corinth for good. These free decisions are made, however, on the basis of information supplied—in the one case this is clearly marked in the text and in the other it is a reasonable conjecture—by Apollo, who is setting him up for the encounter at the crossroads. We may call Oedipus a puppet if we like, for Apollo has manipulated him.Footnote 11 But ‘Oedipus would in that case be a puppet’ is no argument against a view of the action that is strongly suggested by the text of the play and is congruent with tragic practice.Footnote 12
But it is not only in what precedes the opening of the play that we can see Apollo in action: he is still (I will argue) visibly at work in the play. The chief textual evidence for this is to be found in two phrases in a passage (1255–62) of the speech of the Exangelos, who describes how the entrance of Oedipus made it impossible for him and the other servants to see how Jocasta died:
The Exangelos, of course, is not an accredited spokesman for the divine. But his statements here differ in an important respect from a mere opinion with no evidentiary value for the interpretation of the action: what he says is not an unsupported conjecture but is based on the strong impression left by what he himself has seen. In the first of the phrases printed in bold type (1258–9) the servant says the same thing positively and negatively, namely that it was no human who showed Oedipus where to find Jocasta but some divine power. The second (1260) states the servant's impression that Oedipus was moving under the guidance of someone unseen as he made his way to the bedroom. Oedipus, of course, could have found Jocasta without supernatural guidance. But the fact that such guidance is unnecessary serves to underline the significance of the fact that this minor person says that Oedipus was so guided. No member of Sophocles’ original audience is likely to have dismissed this aspect of the Exangelos’ report as lacking in authority.Footnote 13 We have here what looks like a veridical pronouncement that a god guided Oedipus to Jocasta's body. And so, when Oedipus emerges from the palace blinded and says ‘It was Apollo, my friends, Apollo who accomplished these my terrible, terrible sufferings, though the hand that struck the blow was none other than my own’ (1329–32), we are entitled to suspect that in the play's terms this is is no more than the plain truth. Apollo in the past had led Oedipus by his subterfuges into committing parricide and incest. Here in similar fashion he has guided him to the result, blindness, that his spokesman Teiresias had predicted. We are not obliged to think (although it would not be inconceivable in a tragedy) that Apollo moved Oedipus’ hands: Oedipus later explains that he had his own reasons for putting out his eyes. But the passage is indefinite and mysterious enough that I am prepared to countenance the view, suggested by Taplin, that Oedipus is not fully the author of this action.Footnote 14
WHAT IS THE ALTERNATIVE TO APOLLO?
In addition to the textual evidence cited above, there are more general reasons to favour an Apollo who tricks Oedipus into ruining himself and his parents. Let us consider the alternatives to this view. There are two, though arguably they come down to the same thing. (1) Oedipus’ fall into misery was determined by an impersonal fate.Footnote 15 Apollo happened to know about this and prophesied to both Laius and his son what would happen. But then (a) the two prophecies served no purpose (contrast the purposes served on my interpretation by both oracles in bringing about their fulfilment); and (b) to put a fate whose cause is utterly mysterious (as this would be) at the centre of a tragedy seems both unsatisfying and anomalous. Furthermore (c) in tragedy moira is not an independent agent but merely a way of talking about events retrospectively, emphasizing the divine control of them. There are two instances of moira in the play, 376–7 and 711–14. In both moira is merely a way of talking about what Apollo is going to bring about.
(2) Laius’ death and the misery of Oedipus and Jocasta have no real cause: they are happenstance or coincidence.Footnote 16 But to have something as momentous as parricide and incest be simply a causeless brute fact seems contrary to the way in which stories are handled in tragedy. Additionally, it is arguably not very satisfying. Just as important, what is purely a matter of chance is not subject to prediction (as Jocasta correctly notes at 977–8), and so Oedipus’ parricide and incest, if viewed as causeless events, could not have been predicted by Apollo.Footnote 17 The cost of ignoring or explaining away the indications in the text that Apollo is responsible is narrative incoherence.
HOW MUCH PURE COINCIDENCE IS THERE IN THE PLAY?
We have seen that the meeting at the crossroads was no coincidence but was engineered by Apollo. Can the other events that lead up to Oedipus’ ruin be similarly explained? As it turns out, Sophocles has not explicitly linked all of them to Apollo (as will be noted later, he is not as thorough as Euripides in this respect), but hints are offered for quite a few of them, and it is arguable that the poet expected his audience to see that those that are not explained are at least capable of explanation. My readers may find some of these connections speculative. If so, they should also remember that these further points do not undo the demonstration already made that Apollo's influence on some of Oedipus’ actions is rooted firmly in the text. I will first treat cases where parallels elsewhere in tragedy make it plausible to think that the audience was being invited to regard an event as divinely caused.
(1) The Theban shepherd who was to have exposed Oedipus gives him to a Corinthian shepherd out of pity (1178). We have seen a parallel at Ion 41–9 for pity deliberately inspired by Apollo. (2) The king of Corinth and his wife are childless. Ion 67–8 rather suggest that Apollo caused the marriage of Xuthus and Creusa to be unfruitful. (3) Oedipus says that he was happy in Corinth until a chance event occurred, the utterance of the drunken man. As a result of this he goes to Delphi. We have noted that, when someone in tragedy says that an event is mere happenstance or without discernible cause, this often signals to the audience that it has on the contrary a divine cause. (4) We are not told what caused Laius to go to Delphi on what proved to be his last journey. At Eur. Phoen. 35–7 Laius consults Apollo about whether the exposed child had died. We do not know why he went to Delphi in Aeschylus’ trilogy.Footnote 18 The exact means by which Apollo arranged that he was travelling from Thebes toward Delphi at the same time Oedipus was travelling in the other direction are thus left unspecified. That it was Apollo's doing would nevertheless seem plausible to the audience since the text shows the other participant in this meeting being sent to it by the god. (5) At the beginning of the play Creon returns from Delphi with Apollo's answer to their query: to cure the plague the Thebans need to find the killer of Laius. This sets the whole investigation in train and suggests that Apollo not only wished Oedipus to commit the acts he predicted but also wished them to be discovered. (6) The audience might have regarded the death of Polybus some days earlier than the day of the play as the work of Apollo. The Corinthian at 961 says that small things may bring about an old man's death, and Apollo might have supplied the ‘small downturn’ that caused his death. If it happened of its own, there was time to engineer the plague.
That leaves the Sphinx and the plague. Nothing explicitly ties the Sphinx to Apollo. As for the plague, the timing of its arrival, years after the death that supposedly caused it, does not suggest the automatic operation of some kind of taint but the deliberate action of a divinity. And anyone familiar with the first book of the Iliad knows that Apollo can cause plague. In view of the number of events where Apollo is plausibly seen to be at work, any audience member who thought about it might have concluded that the god was either sole or joint cause of these two supernatural events. Euripides, who was known in antiquity for his ϲαφήνεια, usually spells out any divine causation.Footnote 19 Sophocles is often less explicit.
It would not be overly daring to conclude that none of the apparent coincidences on which the plot of the play hinges is really a matter of chance. It will be recalled that when she learns of Polybus’ death Jocasta concludes (977–8) that human life is ruled by chance and no foreknowledge is possible. Her being proved wrong in thinking that Polybus’ death refutes the idea of oracular truth does not prove that there is no coincidence in the play. But it does suggest it.
Thomas Hardy wrote a sonnet called ‘Hap’, whose burden is that, while it is terrible to suffer at the hands of a malignant divinity, it is in some ways worse to be the victim of blind chance. I have the feeling that Sophocles would have agreed.
IF APOLLO RUINED OEDIPUS, WHY DID HE DO SO? AND WHY DOES NO ONE EXPLAIN?
I have argued that the words of Teiresias (376–7), Jocasta (721–3), the Palace Servant (1258–62) and Oedipus (787–97, 1329–33) are evidence that the audience are meant to see Apollo as an active agent in the destruction of Oedipus both before the play began and during its course. But we may still be puzzled when we consider that, when the truth is known, Oedipus does not ask, nor does anyone venture to answer, the question why the god ruined him. ParkerFootnote 20 notes that ‘the stricken Oedipus barely complains against the gods, much though moderns have complained on his behalf’. But the whole thrust of Parker's article is that Sophocles is much less forthcoming about the gods (whose workings the audience see ‘through a glass darkly’) than we might expect him to be. The gods, when they appear, are ‘economical as to what they can or will reveal’, and even when we take manteis and other authoritative figures into account, our attempts to trace the gods’ justice are frustrated by the spareness of what we are told.
Parker devotes several pages (19–25) to the topic of theodicy in Sophocles. He notes that the appearance of Heracles at the end of Philoctetes effaces ‘the impression of divine indifference to human deserts’. In discussing the painful death of Heracles in Trachiniae and the accusations it calls forth of Zeus's indifference to the fate of his son, he notes that Hyllus’ oblique hint at 1270 that the future may hold something different for Heracles holds out hope that the justice of Zeus may be vindicated.Footnote 21 He indicates that the fate of Antigone has been regarded as posing ‘the acutest problem of theodicy in all Sophocles’, but he lays more emphasis on the just punishment of Creon than on the unjust death of Antigone.
As regards our play he says that the topic of theodicy would be ‘much more urgent’ (24) if Oedipus had made at 1329–32 (the ‘It was Apollo’ passage) the complaint he utters (before the truth is known) at 813–29. But he does not explain why he thinks that the question of divine justice is meant to have less urgency in this play. Possibly it is no less urgent than in Trachiniae, but the poet is content, here as there, to remind his audience, by means of slight hints, of what they know from elsewhere, leaving this knowledge to do the work of explicit explanation by gods or their accredited spokesmen.
In fact, there are two hints that explain why Apollo acts as he does. Both connect what befalls Oedipus with Apollo's attempt to bring the line of Laius to an end. The first is at 711–14, where Jocasta reports the oracle given to Laius.
These lines mean that Laius was warned not to have a child with Jocasta. The inclusion of his wife in the oracle means that what is envisaged is a legitimate heir: it is only having such an heir to carry on his line that will have terrible consequences. A similar version of the myth is visible in the oracle reported in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. There Apollo wants the Theban royal line to come to an end and so threatens Laius with terrible consequences if he has an heir. We also have the claim of Eteocles (690–1), as he goes off to meet his brother, that Apollo hates the race of Laius. We may conclude that the consequences with which Laius is threatened are an inducement for him to bring his dynasty to an end. Thus in both Aeschylus and Sophocles Apollo's animus is directed against Laius, not against Oedipus,Footnote 23 who is hated only because he is Laius’ son and whose destruction is merely the result of Apollo's making good on his threat.Footnote 24
If this hint is to be evaluated as above, however, it is necessary to clear out of the way an error that began at the end of the nineteenth century and is still being perpetuated into the twenty-first. In an 1899 article Wilamowitz makes the claim that in Aeschylus and Euripides the oracle to Laius is conditional and Laius can avoid the result if he simply declines to have a child; whereas in Sophocles it is unconditional.Footnote 25 If this were true, it would mean that the oracle does not serve the purpose of encouraging Laius to die without an heir: he could not be deterred from propagating his line by a prediction that something bad would happen to him whatever he did. But Wilamowitz is mistaken: his interpretation misconstrues the Greek of the only relevant passage, 711–14, quoted above. The lines predict that any son born of Laius and Jocasta will commit parricide, not that such a child will in fact be born. The optative γένοιτο is aorist, part of a generalizing relative clause, not future, which a categorical prediction would require.Footnote 26 ‘Any child born (ὅϲτιϲ γένοιτ’) of Laius and Jocasta will kill his father, etc.’ is merely another way of saying ‘If a child is born to Laius and Jocasta, he will kill his father, etc.’.Footnote 27 The Sophoclean version, like the versions of Aeschylus and Euripides, leaves Laius the option of having no heir.Footnote 28
Once this mistake is corrected, it becomes clear that in all three tragic poets the motive for the oracle is the same. There are in fact two motives. First, as already noted, the prediction means that any child so born will be exposed and grow up in ignorance of his parents and thus capable of being tricked into committing these two crimes. But a prior motive is hostility to Laius. In Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes Eteocles says that Apollo hates the race of Laius, that he wants to bring his dynasty to an end. And so, if Laius because of the oracle had voluntarily had no children by Jocasta, Apollo's purpose would have been fulfilled. But in fact he does father a son, and the son too begets children, so it is only in the third generation that the wiping out of Laius’ line is accomplished in the mutual slaughter of Eteocles and Polynices.
The second hint is to be found near the end of the play at 1455–7:
Oedipus has asked to be sent to Cithaeron, the place where his parents intended that he should die, so that at long last their purpose might be fulfilled. ‘And yet’, he says, ‘this much I know, that no sickness or any other thing will kill me. For I would not have been preserved from death when I was perishing [that is, when I was to be exposed] if not for some dreadful trouble (μὴ ’πί τωι δεινῶι κακῶι).’ We must regard it as certain that ἂν … πέρϲαι (1455–6) refers to the future, since the surrounding lines refer to what will happen to Oedipus; and that ἐπί τωι δεινῶι κακῶι also refers to something in the future. It is, however, extremely unlikely that he is referring to sufferings of his own in the future, for in that case he would be implying that his past sufferings were not a δεινὸν κακόν. And indeed the man who has already suffered the utmost in woes (1204–6, 1282–5, 1340–6, 1365–6) has no reason to think that another woe (and this time a dreadful one!) still lies in his future. What is most likely is that ἐπί τωι δεινῶι κακῶι means ‘for some terrible mischief’, that is, to cause it.Footnote 29 This would be of a piece with numerous other uses of ἐπί in this causative sense (see Ellendt's Lexicon Sophocleum, rev. H. Genthe [Berlin, 18722], 260 col. 2). What lies in the future for Oedipus is precisely such an effect on others. He will curse his sons to divide their inheritance with the sword, and the result will be the War of the Seven, one of the two cataclysmic events that, according to Hesiod (Op. 161–5), brought to an end the age of heroes (the other was the war at Troy). This will indeed be a δεινὸν κακόν.Footnote 30 The hint here is borne out by what immediately follows: he tells Creon not to worry about his sons, who will find a living wherever they are, which looks like an unconscious adumbration of Polynices’ living in Argos (his departure for Argos is mentioned at the end of Stesichorus, fr. 97 F.). Then he mentions the pleasant table fellowship he enjoys with his daughters. This would remind the audience of the unpleasant table fellowship he had with his sons, who in the epic tradition angered their father by serving him an inferior cut of meat and by using a table and a goblet he had forbidden them to use.Footnote 31
In Aeschylus this cursing of the sons is the final act in the extermination of Laius’ offspring. So this hint, like the hint implicit in the oracle, is about the destruction of Laius’ line. Given Sophocles’ general reticence about the gods and their purposes, this is perhaps enough to explain what Apollo is trying to do. The inexplicit way in which it is handled is quite in Sophocles’ manner.
