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The Chorus in Oedipus Tyrannus1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Extract
I Recently saw a film of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus containing some fine performances and some sensitive direction. One scene I particularly remember because it made clear a point which has usually been either shirked or muddled through both in production and in scholarly comment. When Oedipus was listening to locasta's speech about the oracle given to Laius, he followed her with close attention as far as the phrase ‘a place where three roads meet’. Then he started, turned away from her, and walked past her towards the camera with a brooding face. Behind him we saw locasta continuing the speech which Oedipus obviously was not hearing. The two lines 718–19 which Oedipus did not hear contain some scope for emotion on locasta's part (ἔρριψεν, and the rare tribrach in the fifth foot), but Oedipus was unaware of it, thinking about the road to Daulia, and heard nothing to remind him of what he knew very well, that he was standing on two scarred feet.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 1967
References
page 111 note 1 Another ambiguity: does οὐ μενεῐ mean ‘he will not stay in hiding, but will give himself up’, or ‘he will not stay to be caught, but will flee the country’?
page 112 note 1 Professor Bernard Knox, in Oedipus at Thebes (Yale, 1957), ch. 3, par. 4, and especially p. 150, shows the importance of the constant recurrence in this play of such words as ⋯ξισο⋯ν, συμμετρεῑν. Measurement, calculation of time—these are of the essence of the plot, as of the imagery.
page 116 note 1 ‘Tragedy and Greek Archaic Thought’, in Classical Drama and Its Influence (London, 1965).
page 118 note 1 I cannot agree with Professor Winnington-Ingram's remarks on this Ode in the essay alluded to earlier. He says that in the second stanza the Chorus ‘appear to shoot off at a tangent’; whereas my present argument indicates an inevitable progression of thought. He speaks of the ‘conventional catalogue of sins’ in the third stanza, and later says: ‘Oedipus was not guilty of these offences.’ He takes the character of Oedipus as necessarily fixed by the closing lines of the First Stasimon, and does not allow that the revelations of the Second Episode can alter the judgement of the Chorus.