Scholars generally express dissatisfaction with the play’s ending. Dawe goes so far as to ridicule the passage as “demented bulbutience.” In his view, it is the work of “one aspiring if ill-starred versifier” (247). The summary it gives of Oidipous’s life fails to mention parricide, incest, or pollution. Rather, it remembers Oidipous the way he might want to be remembered, in terms of his successful solution to the Sphinx’s riddle and the position of power to which this led. It presents his miserable end as an act of nature. Whoever is meant to be speaking (a point of scholarly disagreement) seems not to have been impressed by the demonstration of Apollo’s power, the self-destructiveness and utter foolishness of attempting to counter his divine word, or the opportunity to benefit oneself and one’s city by allying oneself with him to face necessity together. The maxim is equally unsatisfying. That it may be true means only that the play does not contradict it; it is not one of the insights afforded the audience by this play. This failure is consistent, however, with Oidipous’s character. He has neither reached a useful understanding of the causes leading up to his demise nor revised his attitudes towards Apollo. This is disappointing because of the esteem in which the audience still holds him for his many admirable qualities. His only shortcoming has been his blind commitment to the autonomy of his own intellect, judgment, and action; he refuses to perform any act, even one that a god judges to be necessary, if it does not accord with his own assessment of what is better or what is necessary. Thus, if Oidipous were to speak these words, they would be in character. Kreon would not speak thus. That he is bent upon obtaining Delphi’s clarification acknowledges the presence of a mystery that he does not pretend to be capable of solving. Thebes might speak thus, but if it did, it would demonstrate the city’s failure to see the pollution exhibited by its own actions. It has not been purified by what it has witnessed. Its future sufferings are thus not only certain (as myth recounts) but justified. The citizenry’s shortcomings and ongoing punishment would stand then as an implicit warning to Athens to purge itself of its own pollution and thereby change its future for the better by sending to Delphi to inquire of the god, what it must do or say regarding the plague, the war, and those leaders by whose arguments it has been persuaded and by whose attitudes it has been contaminated. It could be argued, then, that the play ends fittingly, as it has proceeded throughout, with the audience alone understanding the full import of the words spoken on stage. If this is so, then the sentiment with which the play ends requires the audience’s correction, and with this intervention, the audience would complete its work. [Mpei] [Mpea] [P] [Mipd]
Works Cited
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Translations
Aeschylus. Seven Against Thebes. Trans. David Grene. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959.
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Sophocles. Jebb.
Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. Trans. Richard Crawley. In The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. Ed. Robert B. Strassler. New York: Touchstone, 1996.