Oedipus Rex

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Hello, Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex begins with a warning. The murderer of the old king of Thebes, Laius, has never been identified or caught and is still at large in the city. Oedipus is the current king of Thebes, and he sets out to solve the crime. His investigations lead to a devastating conclusion. Not only is Oedipus himself the killer, but Laius was his father, and Laius' wife Jocasta, who Oedipus has married, is his mother.

Oedipus Rex has composed during the golden age of Athens in the 5th century BC. It's unsettled audiences from the very start. It's the only one of Sophocles' surviving plays that we know missed out on the first prize at Athens' annual drama festival. A century later, Aristotle called it the greatest example of the dramatic arts. Freud believed it laid bare the deepest structures of human desire.

With me to discuss Edith Bistrex are Nick Lowe, Reader in Classical Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, Fiona McIntosh, Professor of Classical Reception and Fellow of St Hilda's College at the University of Oxford, and Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at Durham University. Who is Oedipus and what would he have meant to Sophocles' first Athenian audience?

Oedipus is the great king of Thebes in the Bronze Age, so that's five or six hundred years earlier than the audience, so it's a bit like us watching something set in the 14th or 15th century. king of one of the most important Bronze Age Greek settlements archaeologists have dug it up it had literacy it was unbelievably wealthy he comes out of his palace the ruins of which still

survive in the flat plain of Boeotia. Thebes is set in Boeotia, far from the sea. Now, this is incredibly important because almost all Greek tragedies and cities are set near the sea. So we have these airless... stifling atmosphere, but he's enormously powerful. He is hugely respected. He's married to the queen of one of the richest places in the world, but the heir...

is full of disease. So we've already got a crisis atmosphere of a very great person who's enormously successful facing a crisis. Is it possible in your brilliant... elliptical way to lay out the story, the basic story of Oedipus, Rex? I can indeed. The play...

covers a very few hours in one day of the life of Oedipus and his city when he's about 40 years old and at his absolute prime. In the course of that day, when he decides he's going to try and get to... the bottom of why there's a plague afflicting the city, he goes on a series of detective trails and conducts several interviews in which he discovers actually that the woman who he's married to is his own mother.

and that he had actually killed her husband, his father, and he falls from the highest estate in Greece to being the lowest of the low, a polluted person who's about to go into exile.

Okay, Fiona, what do we know about when Oedipus Rex was composed? Do we know much about the specific circumstances leading to Sophocles taking on this subject matter? Well, we don't know the precise date of the play, but consensus is that it was first produced sometime in the early 420s. just after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War that began in 431, a long war against Sparta and its allies.

The reasons for thinking that is that at the very beginning of the war, there were a series of plagues in Athens, terrible consequences. A quarter of the population was wiped out. Do we know anything about the nature of the plague? We know that it had such terrible consequences, not only to human life, but also civil unrest. And that, of course, is reflected in the opening scene of the play where...

We find the citizens of Thebes appealing to this great leader, Oedipus, and the priest in particular, appealing to Oedipus, and as he says, not as a god, but as the best. citizens the first of the citizen body and that is another reason why people are quite confident it's the 420s there are many echoes with Pericles, the great Athenian statesman who kind of led Athens in its expansion of power. And so...

It is possible, it has been said, that there are many points of comparison between Pericles and Oedipus and Athens at that particular moment of crisis. Was there anything particular that led to this story? It may well have been that, and other people have pointed out, that this is the moment when there seems to be one great actor. And Euripides had just, in 431, produced his Medea, which was a single...

character tragedy, which is quite unusual at the time, although today we tend to think of tragedy as being about single character who become what we understand today as tragic heroes. But Oedipus may well have been played. by the same actor. And so, in many ways, it's unusual in Sophocles' plays because it is about, again, a single tragic figure.

Sophocles, unusually for the great playwrights of the time, all of whom came from elite backgrounds, he was very involved in the civic life. Can you describe to people what that meant? In Sophocles' case, that meant that he had been a general. He was also involved in, as far as we know, in the religious life of the city. He was, from some accounts, the priest of... Asclepius and I think...

People have inferred from the tragedies, and this in particular, that the gods are of central concern to Sophocles, and even if they are conspicuous by their absence in this particular play. So I think that... It's always perhaps dangerous to try and read the life through the work. I think it's much easier to read the life of the city, and in this case, perhaps Pericles, but definitely the citizen body of Athens in some way being represented.

presented in the chorus and definitely some people have even suggested the fate of the city in Oedipus itself. So in other words, this is a city that is absolutely, as Edith said, on top of its... and Oedipus represents it, but it's just about to enter a period when its heady optimism, its belief in humanism, that the people are at the centre of this.

world, this Greek world, and very soon that's all going to come crashing down, as it does for Oedipus, on themselves. Can I go back to you for a moment, Edith, because we rushed through that, I think. I had thrown away the idea of the Golden Age.

Amplify that before I move on. Yes. So the Athenians had led the Greek alliances that beat the Persians. This is crucial in the two Persian invasions of 490 and 480. and in the wake of the victory had started to build up their own empire. And they had soon stopped calling it a panhellenic alliance and just said that we are the imperial power. And they got an awful lot of money off all the... other Greek states, islands and city states in their empire. That...

Money, explains the golden age. Pericles could not have built the Parthenon. He could not have paid the jurors. He could not have paid the navy. He could not have got the boats. built by the rich taxpayers without that revenue. So I would like to say, yes, it's an inexplicable mystery, but actually I think there was a very savvy guy, Pericles, who managed to get himself re-elected every year. for over three decades, because he did have to get re-elected every year.

And he also brought in, he was a great internationalist, by which I mean not non-Greeks, but he brought in experts to the city, encouraged a culture where all the best philosophers, all the best architects, all the best artists. came to Athens. So we're talking something much more like Elizabethan London under Elizabeth.

It's still the range of it. Sorry. No, you were brilliant. But we're talking about poetry. We're talking about drama. We're talking about music. We're talking about invention of sports. We've got a whole range. I think that the point is that Athens actually had an inferiority complex culturally.

right, before the Persian Wars and under the tyrants. In the old myths, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Athens hardly appears at all. It wasn't an important Bronze Age city. It just wasn't. So all the mythical cycles like those... of Oedipus, the Argos myths, Heracles, all these, the Trojan War, Athens is simply not significant. So it goes on a programme of inventing itself. The other cities have their own literary genres. So Sparta had choral lyrics. The East had epic. Athens invented theatre.

out of nowhere, actually before the Persian Wars, but it was after the Persian Wars at these great dramatic festivals. So you're talking about a conscious self-invention as cultural leader as well as economic leader of the Greek world.

play a big role in the story not just the riddle of the sphinx but also various oracles what are these riddles and what role do they play in the drama well you alluded to the backstory and of course this is a play which is all about its own backstory and part a big part of that backstory is why Oedipus is king of Thebes in the first place. And the reason is that he is the one who...

destroyed the monster who was terrorising Thebes, the Sphinx, by solving its riddle. The famous riddle of the Sphinx, which you referred to, runs what goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon. and three legs in the evening. And Oedipus is the one who figured out that it meant us. It meant human beings because we crawl when we're babies. When we're adults, we walk on two legs.

When we get to my age, we're hobbling around on a stick. And this was so brilliant. This display of riddle-solving was so brilliant that the sphinx threw herself off a cliff, and that was the end of her. And Oedipus then comes to the...

mysteriously vacant throne of thieves as a result. So he's the great solver of riddles and he owes his job to the fact that he is the world's greatest detective. But then in the course of the play he's subjected to a series of... pieces of partial information, a series of new riddles, which he has to use the skills that have propelled him to this point to unravel.

It gradually becomes apparent to the audience, if not to him, that all these riddles have a single author, the god Apollo. There are five... prophetic injections for oracles and the prophecy of the Apolline prophet Tiresias, all of which go back to the single god Apollo who never appears in the play and whose voice is never heard.

But Oedipus has the job of trying to assemble these individual riddling snippets into a single narrative. And he fails at every turn. But because his identity is so bound up with... his role as a problem solver, as a puzzle solver, that he can't let it go. And eventually that's what leads him to his destruction. You mentioned the word detective. What is he trying to solve? Initially, he's trying to solve a crime.

in the city of Thebes, the murder of the previous king, Laius, which he learns from the first oracle delivered in the course of the play, which is reported by his brother-in-law, Creon, that the reason there is this pandemic.

in Thebes is because Apollo is angry that the murderer of the previous King Laius is still at large. But as the quest unfolds, Oedipus finds it dovetailing with a much... deeper question that he's been carrying with him all his adult life about his own identity which he had previously consulted the Delphic Oracle about when he heard back in Corinth where he was raised that there was a story that he was not in fact...

the child of the king and queen of Corinth, that he was an outsider. And that set off a chain of events which led him to Thebes and actually to the events which he's going to discover.

in the course of the play, have actually set him up for the ending that we all know. Thank you. Edith Hall, his wife, Jocasta. is a major character, although she doesn't have a big part. How is she depicted in the plot? Jocasta has got a... a surprising amount of authority. At one point, Oedipus actually says that he shares power with her and her brother. He implies it's actually a troika, but he doesn't act like it. But she has a very great deal of influence.

over him when he is having almost a fistfight with Creon, who he suspects because he's very paranoid because he's been in power for two years. Creon is Jocasta's brother. Yes. When he's having a fistfight, he accuses Creon. of trying to subvert his authority and get rid of him and perform a coup because he's extremely paranoid, as all people are who are in power for too long and not regularly re-elected. He calms down when she comes out. She has this...

very soothing effect on the menfolk. She takes charge. She's also deeply conservative about the need to press for information. Her philosophy is very much everything is good. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. That is Jocasta. I think that we have to also remember she's often played by really very elderly actresses. And this is unfortunate. She cannot be more than about 52. Oedipus is about 38 or 40, and her name, Eocasti, means excellent in violets. Now, Aphrodite, the goddess of sex...

was called Violet-Crowned Aphrodite. So Oedipus turns up at 20, this brilliant young buck, and gets off with this incredibly sexy woman who's around 31. and has four children in about four years. So we're very much given this idea that this is a very strong and happy sexual union. Now, this is a woman who in the previous marriage had to give up her baby. Right. Also, Laius was gay.

Now, that's not in the play, but everybody knew it from the myth. She had had an incredibly miserable 20s, finally got this gorgeous, brilliant young man on the throne with her, four beautiful children. She has everything to lose. And she does. Fiona, Creon...

has been mentioned. Can we develop him a little bit? Yes, Creon, I don't think it's possible to construct such an exciting backstory as we've just heard of Jocasta. I think it's important to remember that Creon was already known, especially through Sophocles' Antigone, a play that... Dates to about 442, so some 20 years before this play. And Creon in the Antigone, he is now the ruler of Thebes.

because as he has now become leader, we see that he's a man of principle, real principles at the beginning of the Antigone, but very soon... turns out to be a leader that finds it remarkably difficult to live up to his principles. And by the end of the play, if not a little earlier, and I think most... modern audiences feel definitely earlier, he is showing signs of being a tyrant. So when we come to...

The Creon in Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, it's a very different Creon. Creon, from the very beginning, he's returned from the Oracle because he was sent... before the beginning of the play to find out, as Nick said, what was the cause of the plague. And he acts as innocent messenger. And in the next scene, he's confronted by... Oedipus, his brother-in-law, and being accused of being a co-conspirator with Tiresias. And the suggestion on Oedipus' part is this is because... Creon.

resents the fact that he has not inherited his rightful succession. And he's suggesting a collusion between Tiresias... That's what Oedipus is suggesting. ...because Tiresias knows the whole plot, knows what happened. all the way back and has told the audience that and told Oedipus that. Absolutely. And Oedipus thinks it must have come from prodding from Creon. He absolutely believes that they are in cahoots together.

But Creon, in this confrontation with Oedipus, makes a brilliant defence. I mean, he says he has all the power he needs and none of the responsibility. As much influence as he like, why on earth would he want the pressures of being a leader? However, that's not the end of the story, because even if he is on the receiving end of something that's completely unwarranted in the middle of the play...

By the end of the play, when he has become the new leader of Thebes, I think we get a glimpse of the Creon, who's going to emerge as tyrant in the next sequence. And there's at least... The final line when he says, you are Oedipus no longer. ruler of this city, that in most productions and I think most commentators on the play will say this is a signal that Creon, who is either proto-tyrant elsewhere or indeed an actual tyrant, is immortal.

in the final moments of the play. I just want to say that there is huge doubt about the date of Antigone. The Iliad begins with the plague. There's absolutely no reason why we should put this around the plague. And we do not know when the Antigone was put on. It could quite easily be the other way round, that he's so inspired by watching the ascent of Creon in Oedipus that he then writes... the Antigone I mean that's just an academic controversy

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We'll go back to Nick. He's called Oedipus Tyrannus. in the play, Nick. Can you comment on that? Well, that's the title in the manuscripts. That's the Greek title. The show is called Oedipus Rex after the traditional Latin title, which has been carried over as the title of many of the modern adaptations. But the Latin word Rex...

doesn't quite mean the same as the Greek Tyrannos. It's important to realise that, of course, that is not Sophocles' title. Sophocles just called his play Oedipus. And the reason it's acquired this sur-title is that in later generations...

needed to distinguish between this and another play called Oedipus, which Sophocles wrote at the very end of his life. In fact, he left in manuscript at his death and it was put on five years after his death by his family, a play called Oedipus at Colonus, which also survived. his great late masterpiece, which in some ways bridges the gap between Oedipus Rex and Antigone. But the word tyrannous is not quite... just a king. The Greek has two words for, two main words for king.

Standard word is basileus, which is traditionally, although not exclusively, used of hereditary rulers with a dynastic. claim on kingship. But a tyrannos is actually a rather different kind of ruler. It's more akin to the English autocrat. It's someone who has emerged not necessarily from a privileged background. birth and has seized power through force or through political influence and is sustaining that position by his own strength.

And this word is used heavily in this play, particularly of Oedipus. It comes in a lot in that debate between Oedipus and Creon that Fiona was referring to. And at some point when it became... necessary to distinguish between these two plays. This was the word that was chosen to mark...

this Oedipus, rather than the one at the end of his life. But the word tyrannos is actually a very charged one in Athenian politics. And although it can be a perfectly neutral term, and some of the times it's used in this play, it's a perfectly neutral term. It's also a term that... carried a big charge in the Athenian democracy, which itself was established as a response to the ejection of their own tyrannical dynasty, which lasted for...

Two generations. And at the beginning of every meeting of the council and assembly, they would recite a curse against anyone who intended to set up a tyranny or to restore the old tyranny. So it's a word with... Would you say that Oedipus was a tyrant?

Yes, absolutely. He's called that repeatedly in the play and he displays increasingly tyrannical qualities. A very uncomfortable moment is when he orders the demon who has tried to bring him the good news that's turned his life around to be tortured. There's also technically, he thinks he's technically a tyrant because he's come into power, not for dynastic reasons, but on the wave of popular support. But the play shows he's actually the king. because he's the descendant of kings.

The most important line in the play, arguably, and possibly the most famous line in Sophocles, comes not from any of the characters, but from the chorus, where in the single most important note of the play, they sing hubris, arrogance and unaccountability. overreach breeds the tyrant or a tyrant and in that ode they're singing about two different kinds of overreach there's a kind of good overreach which benefits the city which

is for the public good, and that's what they seem to be assigning Oedipus to. But there's also the kind of person who goes around murdering kings, and that's the beginnings of tyranny. What they don't know at that point...

is that these are actually both the same person. Thank you, Edith. The chorus, things are known, asking what it would mean for humanity if the oracles were not after all messages from the gods. They do sing this extraordinary ode where they say, if it turns out that the Delphic Oracle is wrong, then our entire ritual structures collapse.

Why should I dance the chorus for the gods anymore? I think that's one of the most famous lines. If it is true that there is no providential justice and that there is no sense and there is no reliability of any of... the things we're used to consulting like the oracles, then why should I do religion anymore? But of course, by the end of the play, they're saying this was all predicted long ago.

It's absolutely true. And they do say to Oedipus I, earth did you blind yourself? And he says it was Apollo. The hand was mine, but it was Apollo. The play absolutely reaffirms the completely unquestionable veracity. And the power. And the power of the gods to destroy, especially, as we're told more than twice, he never had a chance because this was predicted not only before he was born, but before he was even conceived.

Thank you. Fiona, the end of the play has puzzled some audiences. Why do you think that is? In many ways, it's because it's unexpected. It's also, I think, often misremembered. So even by people who've seen the play, read the play, they often confuse the ending of the play. They either think... generally think that the very end of the play, in a way, gestures towards the next part of the story, Oedipus at Colonus, and they imagine that at the end of this play, Oedipus Rex...

Oedipus, now the embodiment of the third part of the riddle, the blind man with his staff, leaves the city. we misremember, together with his daughter Antigone in order to go into exile. And that's what Oedipus asked for. But that's what is denied by Creon to Oedipus. I think there's another reason. It's not just that we collapse the...

Oedipus Rex with the Oedipus at Colonus, I think we also, partly because of modern adaptations, we also confuse the ending of Sophocles' play with the ending of Seneca's play. Because at the end of Seneca's play... which is extremely different, not least because we see Jocasta on stage after the truth about her identity and Oedipus' identity is made. So incest is... apparent, it's palpable. We watched Jocasta kill herself with her sword, a deeply obviously phallic enactment of both her

and also an absolute statement about the need for her own punishment. And then we watch the blinded Oedipus with his staff. It's a hugely moving final. few moments of the play as he gropes his way into exile. But that doesn't happen. Why does he blind himself? Why does he choose that route? Why does he blind himself? He chooses to blind himself. Because he says he cannot bring himself to face his parents. So this is the only way he can live with...

the reality and the shame of what he's done. If he were to go to Hades and confront his parents, he could not endure that. OK, Nick.

What do we know about how the play, do we know anything about how it was originally staged? Well, we know quite a lot about how the plays were staged in general and there's quite a lot of information in the text about what's going on. So you've got to remember that these plays are all staged in real time in a single location. There's a standard set that's set outside the palace and everything...

that happens happens in the space of basically an hour and a half the time that the play takes to be performed and it's in many ways a very spectacular play it opens with this phenomenal display of Oedipus's kingship in action as he's being supplicated by his people, including children. The priest says we're here men of all age groups. But Edith just calls them all.

My children, not my citizens, in this very paternalistic way. So it's a big spectacular demonstration of his status at the beginning of the play. And by the end of it, he's gone through one of the very few mask changes in surviving a tragedy. He's a literally different face and he's got a completely visualised realisation of the depth to which he's fallen. And all of that has happened in real time. on a single set. The audience would also...

be particularly aware of the codes of where the offstage spaces are. So there's a side route that leads into Thebes and there's a side route that leads out of Thebes. And gradually we're going to learn that that's where Oedipus... has come from where he's trying to sentence himself to return, but he doesn't. He goes back.

into the palace at the end and we never find out what the last oracle says about him. He's kept there in a limbo that the play keeps as the final mystery. Do we know what the first audience made of it? Well, it didn't come first. It didn't come first in the competition. It didn't come first in the competition, sorry. Three tragedians competed against each other every year at the competition, and Sophocles almost always came first. He came second. Who was first?

don't know because we don't know what year it was performed. It was a play by Aeschylus' nephew Philocles, or a group of plays, but we don't know what the plays were. So let's pass quickly over and continue with this. He was second. He was second. The way that the judges were randomly selected by lot to avoid corruption, but if they went...

away from the noise made from the audience in terms of approbation, they got into trouble. So it was a bit like a sort of clapometer. So that is very interesting. But there again, Madea came last.

the fact that they didn't do well at the first production I think can often mean because they were so shocking. What do you think there was about it which caused Aristotle to give it such a... paying such high regard. Aristotle is writing at least 100 years later than this. There's already now a performance repertoire and he's also got a huge library of the books. He develops a theory of tragedy that it is...

all about a certain kind of action, representation of a certain kind of action, which involves massive change in fortune, which produces pity and fear, which he says are the appropriate tragic emotions. And in all of the ancient repertoire... This is the tragedy which he thinks does this most efficiently. And he says that is so because even if you just read it or just hear the story, you get a shiver down your spine. You wanted to pop in. Yes, come in.

Aristotle's great dramatic value is plot. Aristotle thinks slightly controversially in his day that plot is more important than character. And one of the things that he responds to very strongly about this play, I think partly on a personal level because he's also... a great theorist of causality and logic, is the way the steps in the plot follow on from one another and the way the pieces of information slot together to present a sense of...

overall inevitability, which is random to the characters, but is actually deeply purposeful to the spectators. And Aristotle loves that kind of plotting, and he thinks there's something about the satisfaction that it delivers, which is... particularly effective. It's also, of course, a play about thinking, about intellectual activity. And Aristotle, as the greatest mind of his age possibly ever, is deeply interested in intellectual... Well, that's debated too. But...

The idea that the whole play is about deduction and what happens if you're the smartest man in history and it still doesn't save you, it destroys you, arguably the story of Aristotle's life as well. Can I just add to Aristotle's observations? about the connection between the reversal, the change in fortune and the recognition. And he says that this play is so special because they are coincident and it happens in a central, pivotal moment.

which then provides the dynamism for the second part of the play. And I think if we look at a lot of modern adaptations, we can appreciate just how correct Aristotle was, because where that... connection is not there between the reversal and the recognition. There's often, and especially I'm thinking in French neoclassical plays, when there is long periods when we know the outcome of the play, but unfortunately we have to endure the action.

Whereas the great thing about Sophocles was that he kept us, as you say Nick, on the edge of our seats. even as readers, but particularly as spectators, as we watched the twists and turns in the plot. How was this play?

Preserved after classical antiquity. Seven of Sophocles' nearly 100 plays got chosen basically for the school curriculum, which meant that little boys in the ancient world studied them. And the plays that weren't chosen for the curriculum weren't copied out enough times to make it basically to the libraries of Byzantium.

seven that made it to the libraries of Byzantium, where they were regularly recopied out and stayed, even on the Christian curriculum, up to a point. The ones that stayed there managed to get out in manuscript form before the Ottomans burnt down Constantine. and into print in Italy. Could I offer another explanation as to why Sophocles' play survived, not in the manuscript tradition, but in the public imaginary? And that was the figure of Oedipus.

was of real interest to the Christian imaginary. And so very early on, Oedipus as regicide and as incestuous. albeit unintentional, was very easily assimilated to, in the first instance, Judas. and subsequently to the play, even in its Senecan-inflected form, but actually people indeed believe that there was at least an awareness of the Sophoclean version before the...

the first edition. And I think we need to... know all the time that a story where regicide is at the centre of the story and also familial confusion. is going to be compelling. And for Christians, it became a way of reading, especially those who had in many ways transgressed, but always ultimately repented.

Oedipus, I think, has a story outside of the textual tradition as well. The play was banned from the English stage for a long time. Why was that and why was the ban lifted? It was never staged. Nobody staged actual Greek tragedies. A version until about 1880. A version by John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee. which was a restoration tragedy, was actually quite popular and did rather well. But despite the fact that it staged...

incest, an incestuous couple and so on. Everybody died. Oedipus gets punished. This is the crucial thing. It is not left open at the end, what we're doing with this sort of polluted character indoors. So Dryden and Lee's Oedipus until about... 1770 did get the occasional outing.

But we know from something that was said in the Romantic period that audiences had suddenly turned against it and found it really revolting and upsetting. So it was implicitly banned. Was this because of the incest? The lack of punishment for it. In Restoration Tragedy...

can be as naughty as you like, provided you die at the end. That's the basic rule. You can have brother-sister incessant, just pity she's a whore, right? But everybody's got to die. The problem with this Oedipus... as it is actually with Madea, is this... getting off with it apparently with some impunity. So when people started getting interested in putting on Greek tragedies, the authentic texts, which is not until the end of the 19th century, at that point it was refused.

And for about 25 years, it was quite impossible. A particular man called Courtney, who was a sort of dramatist, who was the drama critic of the Daily Telegraph, submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, who... had had since Walpole's day the right to put plays under the blue pencil for political reasons, it was refused a license because of the sex element. This is Edwardian morality.

And that went on for about 15 years. It was not possible. But when Max Reinhardt, who's a very unbelievably important German director, let it be known that he wanted to put his version on in London. Finally, the translation by the Regis Professor of Greek at Oxford, Gilbert Murray, who had a lot of clout, got a licence and it was finally staged, I think, in 1912.

We're getting near the end of the program but we can't go without talking about Freud. So who's going to start? Fiona.

I'm going to suggest that not only, and I would not be the first to say that not only Freud's interesting and quite complicated own... family background may well have led at least to some intuition about the complexity of at least a desire for the mother because in Freud's family his Father had had a previous marriage and he, with Freud's own mother, was considerably younger and therefore not very different in age from Freud's half-brother. That's been suggested by a number of psychoanalysts.

Thinking and developing something that is going to become the Oedipus complex is beginning in the 1880s to be central to Freud's understanding. And when he's in Paris, he... goes, according to Ernest Jones, to see a very, very important production of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex from 1880. Oedipus has been played by perhaps the greatest 19th century French actor called Jean Mounet-Sully. And seeing Mounet-Sully in the role seems to confirm a lot of...

what Freud himself had thought about the play. And he had a German... gymnasium, education when he grew up in Vienna and he had been told that this was an important play about fate. He never believed that and he... absolutely argues in the interpretation on dreams that, of course, it is not that we respond to the fate, but that we respond to something, all of us. including people of my gender, in theory we respond to Oedipus's dilemma because it could have been indeed our own. And...

Mune Sully, as he describes playing, taking the part of Oedipus, talks about stripping off the layers of self as he reads the text. And in many ways, that mirrors... Freud's own account of watching the play and, of course, in the end, psychoanalytical practice. Do you have anything to add? We're near the end now, but do you have anything to add? Freud was particularly attracted to that moment in the play where Jocasta dismissed...

This is dreams of incest. She says lots of people have slept with their mother in dreams. It means nothing. Freud could not believe his luck at that moment because this, of course, is exactly what he wants to show the dreams are trying to tell us, that actually they're anything but meaningless and the fact that Jocasta is shown to be completely wrong is the entire point.

And that took him off to read the only extant ancient dream interpretation manual, which is called The Interpretation of Dreams, by Artemidorus of... Doubled this, it's actually from the High Roman Empire. But in book one of that, it's actually organised by index. There are no fewer than 17 different positions in which Artemid Dvorus' clients have dreamt about having sex with their mother.

So Freud just said, not only is it in a myth, which means it's deep in the human psychic structures, but I can actually prove that everybody's always had this dream. And can I just add that in 1885, not only did Jean Monnet Sully take the part of Oedipus, he also... played Hamlet. And I think one needs to feel quite confident that the linking of the two plays by...

Freud, is in some ways a response to Mune Suli's performances. Well, that's been a fair old gallop round the course. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Edith Hall, Fiona McIntosh, and Nick Lowe, and our studio engineer, Jackie Mindsroom. Next week, Thomas Mann's most famous novella, Death in Venice. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

What did we not say that you regret not having time to say, Fiona? I think it's really important to think about Oedipus in more recent times, especially since the Second World War, where I think the... Freudian baggage has been quite problematic. And I think it's quite difficult after a very... very famous production of Oedipus by Laurence Olivier immediately after the war in 1945.

which apparently was quite extraordinary because he also took the part of Puff in The Critic as a part of a double bill. After that, and maybe in some ways because of that, I think... there was a shift, not least towards the tragic hero generally. who now, thanks maybe to Arthur Miller and others, had become problematic. And definitely someone who's called Oedipus the King in the Anglosphere is potentially problematic. And I think it...

becomes then quite difficult. Once the star system gets kind of, to some extent, dethroned, the star is no longer someone we're going to the theatre particularly to watch. people rethink Oedipus. And I think they rethought Oedipus in quite interesting ways. I'd suggest one way was... to put Jocasta centre stage. And Martha Graham did that in her extraordinary night journey in 1947, her dance drama. And the other ways would be maybe rather more controversially would be...

Stephen Berkhoff's Greek, slightly later, in 1980, where Oedipus, now called Eddie, is absolutely an anti-hero and resides somewhere in the East End, so you de-centre, dethrone the hero, absolutely. Or, and this is not, of course, unique to Sophocles' play, you re... frame Oedipus from a post-colonial perspective and from the 1960s, particularly Ola Rotimi's extraordinary The Gods Are Not to Blame set against the backdrop of the Biafran War is one I think really exciting. example of that.

I would simply add that because there is no war, most Greek tragedies are set against a background of war, because there is nothing about imperialism or colonialism in it and because there isn't a female chorus and because it's not about women's rights. The plays in the 1970s that came to prominence and still are, are the plays with war, women, ethnicity, colonialism, like Trojan women, Madea.

The Oresteia, all of those kinds of plays. So it's not been of the zeitgeist. That doesn't stop stars like Ralph Fiennes wanting to do it at the National Theatre or... Al Pacino organising for himself. You know, if you are a male star, you still want to do the Oedipus, but you're not...

absolutely the centre of what people want in the repertoire. Can I say the one thing I would like to add? I would have liked us to talk more about the dialectic between voluntary action and fate. The extraordinary conception of Sophocles, it is so brave. This is the play of all Greek tragedy, which is at its most extreme. that nothing any human ever did could have ever stopped this. This was just going to happen. It's the nearest to Cocteau's infernal machine that you can get.

And yet the only reason Oedipus finds out about it and we can have a tragedy is because of the kind of person he is. If he had not been... restless, intellectual, with a drive to be the saviour of his people, then he would never have found out and he and Jocasta could have lived happily ever after in blissful ignorance, which is what she actually is trying.

to do. He only goes on the detective trail to find... it all out and for it to come out because of his personality and I do think the tyranny thing is really interesting because even in the beginning of the play he still seems to be a fairly reasonable monarch who is done all the sensible things he insists on talking in public to people not behind doors, no secrets. I've sent to the Delphic Oracle. As soon as there's any opposition...

He starts threatening people. He threatens Creon. He threatens, well, Tiresias first, then Creon. He even threatens the chorus with death and exile. And then in the extraordinary scene when he finally happens, his treatment of slaves is deplorable. He actually threatens to torture the very man who has completed the puzzle for him and who intended nothing but the best for him all along. Could we talk a little bit, Nick?

about Pericles' citizenship law and biological identity and why that might be so central. Sorry, that's me asking you. No, I'll do that, yeah. Like Edith, I think this is probably a play of the 430s or thereabouts. And it's in the early years of a notorious law, which in other ways is also the root of Euripides Madea. that restricted Athenian citizenship to those of...

full citizen parentage on both sides of their heritage. And amongst other things, this kept lawyers in business for the next century because everyone was suing one another. trying to prove that they were, particularly their political opponents, trying to prove that they were not fully entitled to be voting Athenian citizens because, of course, the democracy is not a full democracy. It's only a democracy.

of all adult male citizens on both sides of the family. And one of the things that this play is responding to is the law court culture that is beginning to emerge, the earliest law... court speeches, another of the roots of detective fiction, are starting to appear. The first murder mystery within perhaps 20 years of this play's performance in a law court speech.

It speaks to a deep anxiety about citizenship, birth, who I actually am, that is linked to the underpinnings of democracy itself as the only alternative that the Athenians have ever come up with to archaic tyranny. Well, I always find it very interesting that Pericles, of course, lost his last legitimate son in the early years of the plague and the Athenians exceptionally allowed. or waived the legislation to allow his son with Aspasia, the non-Athenian citizen.

to become an Athenian citizen. And one might say that just as Pericles was hoisted by his own petard with the legislation, so perhaps was Oedipus as he...

pronounces the curse at the beginning of the play. I always find that really interesting and also why the obsession with biological identity. which is usually absent in other versions as well. And I'd just like to say we should have mentioned the name...

Oedipus, although it actually means, there's a Greek verb foot to be swollen. It means swollen foot. So it's explained because he had his ankles pinned as a child. There's something wrong with his feet. But it sounds in Greek also like... the verb i know oida and that's there's play on that in the tragedy so the guy who's supposed to be no foot know it all foot is actually the guy who never knew um and that there's

a very strong interest actually in, to use the philosophical term, epistemology. How do we know what we know? And the fact that the memories of the things that happened both 40 years ago when he was exposed and 20 years ago when he killed his father. No two versions are ever identical. So there's this epistemological anxiety about the veracity of memory. Does it matter that he seems to have killed his father inadvertently?

We didn't talk about that. It wasn't inadvertent. It was a massive, massive incident of what we would now call road rage. Just a second. I'm sure you're right now, but I just want to clarify because you're not running... He didn't say, that is my father, that's what I'm saying. There was a fracker, and in the fracker, one of the people he killed turned out to be his father. Yes, but he overreacted. Okay, I just want to say that the earliest, the evidence from...

earliest in the past that we're given that he has a problematic personality is not from his childhood. He's perfectly fine if somebody's told you a rumour that you're not biologically... your father's child to go off and ask the God. But the fact that when he is just a pedestrian at the...

place where three roads meet, and a king comes past in his carriage, and he's in the way. He doesn't just quietly get out of the way, but ends up killing, as he said, all of them. Now, that is not the mark of a well-balanced personality. I agree with that. So he knew he was killing the king? Yeah, he knew he was killing the king. He didn't know he was killing his father. And he made the mistake of leaving one witness alive. Who is the slave he ends up?

commanding to be tortured in order to get the vital information that that was the same baby that was... handed over to the Corinthians I can sense the response of all of you to this discussion but the sort of truth he wanted do you think that wasn't it wasn't permissible for him to twist the Champ's arm up his back, I think. He shouldn't have done that. No, he's allowed to in ancient Athens, but there's no play where...

There's only one other instance where a slave is threatened with torture. That's in a play by Euripides. And the fact that he says, get his arms behind his back, let's do it now, right now, in the middle of the sacred theatre of Dionysus at the moment.

when he discovers who he is, sums up his whole very violent and cruel and distorted personality. So you think that Oedipus was violent and cruel and distorted? Yes, I think he had become like that. I think he started out... with a restless personality, was worried about who he was, which any teenager is going to do their head in, if you like.

But I do genuinely think Sophocles, who had to be, when he was general, elected back in every year and you were completely accountable for your actions. Oedipus has been in power for 20 years and we all know what happens to people. who've been in supreme power for 20 years. Actually, that is really helpful as well, because I'm thinking the other really violent scene is in Oedipus at Colonus. It's when we absolutely know that Creon is a tyrant. And as he grabs...

He does. And therefore, I'm absolutely thinking that we read that scene, I mean, not only as an ugly scene, but an absolute sign that Oedipus is now. tyrannical however much we don't want him to be he is because Creon at the end seems to be the more tyrannical he definitely is

potentially an even worse tyrant in the making. And I think we're all to see that. And it's very difficult to forget the other crayons. And where are the boys? Where are the boys? There are two, he says, young men, my sons. Eticles and Polynices, they are not there at the end of Oedipus. Where are they while all these terrible things are going on with the plague in Athens? Don't ask me. But that's left very strange. Why is Creon in charge, not Oedipus' sons?

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