Describe Oedipus as a Greek tragic hero. What are the qualities that make him a good or bad ruler? Second, ruminate on the relationship of heroism to politics, reflected in the Chorus’ statement:
Insolence breeds the tyrant, insolence
if it is glutted with a surfeit, unseasonable, unprofitable
climbs to the roof-top and plunges
sheer down to the ruin that must be,
and there its feet are no service.
But I pray that the God may never
abolish the eager ambition that profits the state.
For I shall never cease to hold the God as our protector. (874-883)
The notes given by the professor on this Greek writing are as follows.
Oedipus as tragic:
He’s known from the beginning that he’s star-chosen: “I count myself as a child of Fortune, beneficent Fortune.”
He has a notorious, excessive temper: see how he explodes in rage upon Teiresias the seer and Creon his brother-in-law, in the opening of the play. He killed five men with his own hands at the crossroads.
His hubris – excessive pride that clouds vision – has driven him to try to master all, to be all: King and citizen, son and husband, judge and criminal, benefactor of the city and its plague.
Creon admonishes him at the end of the play: “Do not seek to be master in everything, for the things you mastered did not follow you throughout your life” (1520).
By taking his own mother as his wife, he tries to become his own father, to be the source of his own self: “Begetter in the same seed that created my wretched self” (1360). He has a circular life, returning to his mother’s bed as an adult.
The riddle of the Sphinx:
What walks with four feet in the morning, two at mid-day, and three in the evening?
Answer: Man – children crawl using arms and legs, adults walk upright, and the elderly walk with a cane.
Oedipus embodies the riddle in reverse: His feet are bound right after birth, he is upright as an adult, and after the last scene in this play, he is blind and is led around by one of his daughters.
Why is Oedipus able to solve it? Like the Sphinx, he is an unnatural mix (man, bird, lion). Oedipus mixes up generations and roles.
The provenance of Oedipus’ name:
Oida – to know (He is determined to find his origin, in fact becomes his origin)
Oidos – swollen (His feet were pinned together during attempted infanticide)
Dipus – two-footed
He is the “Swollen two-footed one who seeks to know.”
Is blindness sometimes vision?