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...