But the line of Thebes is not yet finally extinguished. The two sons of Oedipus dispute the kingship. One, Polyneices, leads an army against the city; the other, Eteocles, leads the defenders. In a battle before the city’s gates both Eteocles and Polyneices are slain. Creon, aged brother of Jocasta, inheriting the city’s rule, decrees that the patriot Eteocles shall receive a proper burial but that the body of the traitor Polyneices shall be left on the field to be devoured by dogs and vultures. Antigone refuses to heed the decree and buries her brother, whereupon Creon condemns her to death. So ends the line of King Laius.
Antigone is Sophocles’ earliest surviving play. It deals with the end of the great myth, with the disobedience of Antigone and her insistence before the tyrant Creon, the uncle whom she once loved, that there is a higher law than that of man, a law that all must obey whether or not temporal rules permit it. Antigone is condemned for her refusal to obey Creon; she will be immured and sealed up in a cave, there to starve to death. Her last speech before she disappears into the cave is inexpressibly moving. She is the beloved of Haemon, Creon’s son; they were to be married. Haemon pleads for her life, but his father is relentless; he has the mark of Oedipus upon him. Haemon therefore joins Antigone in the cave and dies with her. Creon learns too late what he has done—and what he should have done.
The critic George Steiner once told me that Antigone has been more often played on the stages of the world than any other play, ancient or modern. This judgment of the people cannot be denied. Antigone is the perfect tragedy, period. It defines tragedy. Read it first, even though it tells the end of the story.
Oedipus Rex is the most perfect Greek tragedy. Aristotle thought so and said so in the Poetics. Who are we to disagree?
The play was written during the middle of Sophocles’ career, when he was at the height of his powers. Oedipus has sent to Delphi for advice about the plague and when the answer arrives he begins his investigation. Relentlessly, implacably, he approaches the truth. All see the truth before he does. He alone is blind to what has really happened. And all warn him not to go on seeking. But he can’t stop, he won’t be shunted aside on this or any other road. Finally he too knows everything and tears out his eyes. At the end of the play, a poor, broken, blind old man, he is led off the stage by his faithful daughters, who must share his exile.
The power of Oedipus Rex to hold the imagination and, in fact, freeze the blood is undiminished after more than twenty centuries. Or after numerous readings, which is perhaps the more astonishing. You know as well as did the Athenian audience—some play about the Oedipus myth was presented every two or three years—what will happen. But the inexorable fate, the ananke or “necessity,” that slowly surrounds the king, a fate entirely of his own making although he doesn’t know that, sends shivers down the back again and again.
Aristotle said the play was the most tragic of all because it most effectively served to rid the soul of the two emotions of pity and fear—emotions that stand, he said, in the way of self-knowledge and understanding. Perhaps that’s still true. Certainly the penalty for Oedipus’s failure to know and understand himself is very clear and very terrible.
Oedipus at Colonus was Sophocles’ last play and, in a sense, the last play of Athens, for it was presented in the year of the final defeat by Sparta, after which Athens was never the same city.
Sophocles poured his soul into this play, his last creation. Old and blind, Oedipus arrives before Athens. Haughty as ever, he sends for the king to appear before him. The king sends messengers instead, who, upon hearing Oedipus’s demands, are shocked. What, allow this vile old man, this pollution of his city and his people who is even more filthy in his soul than in his body, to enter the city? Surely the gods would punish the city for so doing. Oedipus waits, angrily, for King Theseus himself to appear. Finally he does, and in a great colloquy the old man teaches the young one some things about life and the real meaning of the divine. He has been singled out by the gods, the old man says, as a force both for good and for ill. Good and ill are inseparable but now, after so many years of suffering, the good is predominate, and the Athenians should take him in. Theseus is convinced. But Oedipus, struck by a sudden vision, is led off by his daughters. They return to tell of how a god came down and took their father away—or something of the kind occurred; it was hard for them to see, and they didn’t understand it. The place, Theseus declares, shall be forever holy.
The place was Colonus, a suburb of Athens. Sophocles had lived there and knew it well. Once it had been beautiful, with its olive trees gray-green in the brilliant Mediterranean light. Now, in 406 BCE, as the play is being produced, Colonus is a wasteland. The Spartan armies have burned it to the ground, houses and olive trees and all. The beautiful choral lines describe another city in another world.
The story behind the play that Sophocles called Ajax must be known if the play, which is unlike any other surviving Greek tragedy, can be understood. After the death of Hector, which ends Homer’s Iliad, Achilles proceeds to decimate the Trojan troops. But he himself is killed by Paris, the abductor of Helen, who shoots an arrow into his most vulnerable spot. The Achaeans mourn the death of their champion, and after a suitable time there is a great funeral. A pyre is raised higher than that of any man who ever died. After the body is burned, a vote is taken to decide who shall receive the greatest honor the Achaeans can give, the bestowal of Achilles’ armor. Because he valiantly defended the ships when Hector in his last attack had set them aflame, Ajax assumes he will be honored by his peers. But Odysseus, by a trick, wins the election and gains the prize.
Grief-stricken and mortally insulted by this rebuff, Ajax goes mad. In the insane belief that he’s killing Odysseus and all his followers, he instead attacks the cattle of the army, killing every beast. He awakens from his madness surrounded by the bleeding bodies of cows and pigs, and in his remorse he falls on his sword.
The play is a kind of trial, not of a question of fact—the facts are not disputed—but of a question of honor and reputation. Should the memory of Ajax be black or white; should he be honored despite his crime or expunged from men’s minds because of it?
Sophocles’ answer is curious. What Ajax has actually done, in saving the ships on the one hand and in destroying the food supply of the army on the other, balances out. If it is a question of choosing between the good Ajax did and the bad he did, no choice can be made. But that’s not the question. The real question is whether Ajax was a hero. But what is a hero? He—or she—is a man or woman who is called by the gods to do great things. Good things or terrible things these may be, but they must be important and memorable and significant. Both of the things Ajax has done are great in this sense. It doesn’t matter, therefore, whether you are for him or against him, whether you like him or loathe him. He has been chosen by the gods, for reasons you can’t understand, and so he must be honored and loved with all the devotion due to the gods themselves.