Oedipus at Kolonos

Sophocles

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062132116
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Teatro antico e classico

Among the most celebrated plays of ancient Athens, Oedipus at Kolonos is one of seven surviving dramas by the great Greek playwright, Sophocles, now available from Harper Perennial in a vivid and dynamic new translation by award-winning poet Robert Bagg. Oedipus at Kolonos continues the story of Thebes's tragic, now-blinded hero in the last days of his life, as he attempts to answer for his shocking crimes of incest and patricide, and seeks forgiveness before his impending death. This is Sophocles, vibrant and alive, for a new generation.

OEDIPUS AT KOLONOS

INTRODUCTION
“HIS DEATH WAS A CAUSE FOR WONDER”

The Oedipus we meet in Kolonos, a lush country village a mile north of Athens, where Sophocles was raised, has suffered through years of blindness, poverty, and exile. He is old and frail, but still recognizable as the fearless, vengeful, and quick-witted hero of Oedipus the King. Traits that characterized his youth (and contributed to his downfall) still energize the aged Oedipus as he repeatedly recalls, and forcefully defends, his earlier conduct. Only at the end of his journey, as he approaches the afterlife that Apollo promised would somehow distinguish him, does Oedipus become a gentler and more loving man.

The Greek word for the grace or favor extended by men and gods to the worthy, the needy, the damaged, and the miserable is charis. By setting Oedipus at Kolonos on the edge of a sacred grove blessed with flowers, grape vines, nightingales, shade trees, and clearings suitable for dancing, Sophocles creates a physical setting where men and gods converge, one that makes manifest the metaphysical space where the human and divine pay their respects and offer charis to each other. Charis becomes a palpable presence onstage, its promise growing more significant as the drama unfolds.

In the sacred grove of the Eumenides, Oedipus will find the mercy, and in a sense the rebirth, Apollo promised him at Delphi—almost as an afterthought—when as a troubled young man he received the worst news any Greek ever heard from a god: he was doomed to kill his father and his mother would bear his children. Now, within the grove’s precincts, the weakened Oedipus will be transformed from a reviled exile into a revered hero. As the classicist John Gould put it, “Nowhere else in Greek tragedy does the primitively mysterious power of boundaries and thresholds, the ‘extraterritoriality’ of the sacred, make itself felt with the fierce precision that Sophocles achieves” in the song the Old Men sing as they arrive on the scene (1973, 90). We sense immediately the primitive dread aroused by the grove’s divine inhabitants. Oedipus, guided by Antigone, hides in the trees as the chorus sweeps angrily onstage. The Old Men denounce the hidden intruder. They scour the grove for signs of him and sing their terror of the all-seeing Furies, whom they refer to circumspectly as the Kindly Ones. To escape the goddesses’ withering glances, the old men walk with their eyes lowered. As even the uttering of the Furies’ names is forbidden, the prayers they mouth are silent.

Oedipus responds to the Old Men’s warnings by emerging from his hiding place in the grove. He gives himself up to them. He won’t reenter the grove until a god’s voice calls to him in the play’s climactic moments. Meanwhile, by dramatizing Oedipus’ claims to deserve the gods’ charis, Sophocles explores a subject that fascinated him—heroes and their deaths as paradigms for the fully empowered human spirit.

Thus the final surviving work by Sophocles, the second of his two dramas about Oedipus, brings his hero’s story to a tantalizing but still satisfying conclusion, one we could not have predicted for the broken and abandoned man we saw at the end of Oedipus the King. In addition to chronicling Oedipus’ reversal of fortune, the Kolonos also conveys the wise old citizen-playw...