Before the play, the myth: The first Thebans sprang from the teeth of a dragon, offspring of the war-god. Hera, goddess of (often outraged) wifehood, motherhood, generativity, hated the city. She sent the sphinx to torment the Thebans. The monster with the face of a woman, the body of a lion, and the wings of a raptor asked the Thebans riddles, destroying those who couldn’t guess the right answers. Riddles or secrets are one means by which gods punish, or torment, men. Gods know things men don’t know, particularly those things pertaining to the origin of man.
The famous riddle—What animal walks on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, three feet at night?—has a curious answer: Man. Man walks on hands and feet in infancy, feet in adulthood, feet and staff in old age. The answer is curious because the sphinx errs about infancy. Infants ‘walk on six feet: two hands, two feet, and two knees. The sphinx conceives of infants as if they were lion cubs—as if they were her own offspring. She leaves out the ‘middle’ form of locomotion of the ‘middling’ creature, the one between gods and beasts.
Oedipus solves the riddle because he is a man who thinks like a sphinx. He is ‘leonine’ or thumotic, and therefore a true Theban, a true descendent of the god of war. The Thebans themselves cannot answer the question that might be rephrased, ‘What is man?’ They are not only thumotic but autochthonous, sprung from seeds sown in their own territory. They do not abstract from ‘their own.’ Oedipus is a Theban exposed by ‘his own,’ effectually exiled at birth. If man is an animal that always has at least two feet on the ground, Oedipus is a man ‘unfooted’—first hobbled, then cast out and reared in a foreign city. ‘Swollen-foot’ fits nowhere. He is therefore the only Theban who can—because compelled—’abstract’ from the city. He can think of man, not only of Thebans and Corinthians. But he does not understand the origin of man, the earliest ‘age’ of man, the age in which man is most dependent upon his mother, his city, the earth, most rooted or ‘footed.’ To misunderstand genetic nature, to alienate Hera, may lead to a mistaken concentration on maturity, self-sufficiency. The thumotic quest for self-sufficiency yields self-destruction, prefigured by the sphinx, the thumotic, victory-loving suicide who can’t stand to lose.
King Oedipus is the ‘footing’ or foundation of Thebes, the city he saved from the sphinx. The plague-stricken Thebans beg him to save them once more. The plague stops generativity; crops nd livestock die, women cannot bear children. Thebans blame the war-god, no friend of generativity. Oedipus hears from his brother-in-law, Creon—who says he heard it from the oracle at Delphi—that Thebes is polluted by the presence of the murderer of Creon’s father, King Laius.
A murdered king: Surely, a political motive? The suspicion arises from a probabilistic calculation; one suspects such a crime because that’s the way things so often go. To find the presumptive political murderer, Oedipus and the Thebans reason, commonsensically, cui bono? The answer will likely solve the secret of the plotters.
Creon, the initial beneficiary of the crime, and Oedipus, the eventual beneficiary, are the obvious prime suspects. To reassure the people of his innocence, the (suspiciously) foreign king begins his investigation by announcing that he acts in his own interest in trying to find the murderer(s). To further establish his bona fides, Oedipus calls upon any Theban to tell the truth, offering a (limited) guarantee of clemency. Surely such a king does not deceive his people.
The prophet Teiresias (recommended by Creon) tells Oedipus: You blame my thumos for my stubborn silence in refusing to answer all your questions, but you do not see your own thumos that lives within you. Under threat of death, Teiresias finally admits that Oedipus has lived thumotically, committing parricide and incest. Parricide destroys one source of his own life, the rightful paternal authority; it is an act of supreme self-sufficiency. Incest is mating with the other source of his life; it is the supreme act of loving one’s own.
In so informing Oedipus, Teiresias speaks not ‘politically’ but oracularly, as a slave of no man but of the god, Apollo, who, like all the gods, transcends any one city. Nor does Teiresias seek to rule other men by invoking the word of the god; he comes at Oedipus’ request, and essays no commands. Oedipus denies Teiresias’ divine enslavement. He suspects a plot, a deception spun by Creon. The man of thumos who rejects the gods and their ‘plotting’ sees human plots everywhere, all of them directed against him and his own, except those plots that he, god-like, ordains. Oedipus denies the gods, generally. He recurs to his source of political authority, his solution of the sphingian riddle, which, he boasts, he solved by his unassisted human intelligence, not by heeding some god’s revelation. Oedipus is ‘nobody’s fool’ when it comes to oracles. Natural intelligence is his ‘footing,’ not the ground of the city, sown divinely. To rely on one’s own intelligence means that one can be self-instructed. But it can also mean self-deception. Oedipus falsely suspects a human plot where there is a divine ‘plot’ or fatality at work. His very self-deception furthers the divine plot.
Teiresias says: You will soon be footloose, exiled. You do not know your own parents, your own origin. You know the answer to the abstract question, ‘What is man?’ but cannot answer the concrete question, ‘Who am I?’ Teiresias’ riddle is not the sphinx’s riddle; it is a riddle of origins, which are always cloaked from man, a matter of hearsay not sight, prophecy not reasoning. Thumotically, Oedipus replies: I do not care who I am, so long as my discovery of the murderer saves the city. He is a political man to the core, not a man of the gods. He is a man of this city more than he knows. He is the son of its murdered king and he is the city’s unwitting, salvific sacrifice to the gods.
Oedipus’ atheism (shared by his mother-wife Iocasta) threatens the city’s foundations. “The worship of the gods is perishing,” the Chorus laments. If atheism is true, chance rules the world, because chance cannot be foreknown with certainty, only probabilistically. If atheism is true, the priests who teach the certitudes underlying moral restraints lack real authority, and men are beasts with divine ambitions, properly thumotic. Oedipus calls himself a child of chance, a moon-child whose fortunes start small, end big, like the growth of a strange infant who can stand on four legs, without ever crawling. Fortune, ruled with a combination of rational calculation and thumotic daring, replaces the gods as well as real human nature’s generativity and growth. The very thumos that rebels against the gods in the name of self-sufficiency eliminates the only potential source of certainty, prophetic hearsay, while at the same time demanding certainty from the human, probabilistic calculation that is realistically incapable of delivering it. (Add to that, that Greek prophecies are typically ambiguous or double-edged, and it cannot be said that traditional Greeks were optimists.)
Iocasta undeceived remains within the circle of the self by destroying herself, like a defeated sphinx. Oedipus undeceived stands self-cursed and self-blinded. He destroys deceptive sight, which he unwisely trusted more than prophetic hearsay. “What can I see to love?” Deprived of victory and honor, he cannot even love ‘his own’—the other love-objects of the thumotic man. he tells his daughters, “a father seeing nothing, knowing nothing, [begot] you from his own source of life.” They will know their origin, as he did not, but they will be ashamed of it. ‘His own’ are now a sign of shame, as he is for them: the worst punishment for the thumotic or honor-loving man.
Sophocles teaches that the man of unrestrained thumos dreams of self-sufficiency conceived not as liberty but as tyranny, as contempt for the laws given by gods, promulgated by prophets, supplemented by oracles, guarded by priests. Such self-deceptive dreaming destroys the authority of fathers, thus destroying fathers themselves. Tyrants destroy the origin of authority, contradicting themselves in their deluded rationalism. Tyrants are “realists who know nothing of the realities.”
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