One of my staple classes at Manhattan College is LLRN
102, Classical Origins of Western Culture. This is a core Liberal Arts course
intended to introduce students to ancient Greek and Roman literature and to
make connections to the present. In my class, we read famous works, such as the
Iliad, the Aeneid, the Frogs, the Carmen Saeculare, and Oedipus Rex. The latter
is actually quite relevant today, April 2020.
Everyone knows the story of poor Oedipus. He was destined to
kill his father and marry his mother; therefore, his parents, the king and queen
of the Greek city Thebes, decided to abandon the days-old Oedipus in a forest
to be devoured by wolves. A servant felt badly for the newborn and brought him
to Corinth, where he grew up in the household of the king and queen. As a young
adult, he learned about the prophesy and fled Corinth, because he did not know
he had been adopted. During one of his journeys, somewhere near Thebes, he
killed a man, solved a riddle that spared Thebes, married the recently widowed
queen, and the rest is history and psychotherapy…
Sophocles, the author of Oedipus Rex and two companion plays,
composed this famous work (that many of us begrudgingly had to read in high
school or college) in 425 BC, just a few years after a plague devastated Athens
and other neighboring cities. Oedipus is a mythological character who is much
older than Sophocles, yet Sophocles developed his version of the tale around a
plague that his audience was all too familiar with.
The play opens with Oedipus, the king of Thebes, concerned
about his people: “Oh my children, the new blood of ancient Thebes, why are you
here? Huddling at my altar, praying before me, your branches wound in wool…. I
am ready to help, I’ll do anything. I would be blind to misery not to pity my
people kneeling at my feet.”*
A priest tells Oedipus to open his eyes to the plague that
was consuming the population and describes the horrors occurring in the city: “…the
red waves of death. Thebes is dying. A blight on the fresh crops and the rich
pastures, cattle sicken and die, and the women die in labor, children stillborn,
and the plague, the fiery god of fever hurls down on the city, his lightning
slashing through us…” The priest begs Oedipus, the great king he is, to rid
Thebes of the disease.
Creon, the brother-in-law/uncle of Oedipus, enters the
scene. He had been sent to an important sanctuary, Delphi, where an oracle of Apollo
informed him of the cause of the plague: a man. Creon reported that “Apollo
commanded us to ‘drive the corruption from the land, don’t harbor it any
longer, past all cure, don’t nurse it out in your soil – root it out!’” It seems
that the person who murdered the previous king, Laius, was still in Thebes and
needed to be banished or killed in order for the plague to vanish.
The play is like the old TV show Columbo. The audience knows
from the outset who the killer is,
but it takes 91% of the play for Oedipus, both the murderer
and ancient version of Columbo, to realize and accept that he was, in fact, the
one who killed Laius (his biological father).
The real plague upon which the setting of Sophocles’ play is
based is described by the 5th century BC historian, Thucydides. While
the plague supposedly had origins in the eastern Africa, Thucydides recounts
that when the disease entered central Greece, Athens was stuck particularly
hard. We are told of the symptoms: “People in perfect health suddenly began to
have burning feelings in the head; their eyes became read and inflamed…the next
symptoms were sneezing and hoarseness of voice, and before long the pain
settled in the chest and was accompanied by coughing.”** Thousands of people
perished over the course of a year, including the famous Athenian leader,
Pericles. There are many descriptions in Thucydides that could be from a
newspaper article today: “at the beginning, the doctors were quite incapable of
treating the disease because of their ignorance of the right methods. In fact,
mortality among the doctors was the highest of all.” And, “all the funeral
ceremonies which used to be observed were now disorganized and they buried
their dead as best they could.”
Naturally, the Athenians sought to understand the underlying
causes of the plague and how to escape from its torments. While doctors used
their knowledge of science, many Athenians were guided by priests to make
sacrifice to the Olympian gods. Even if people knew it was best to isolate
themselves, and many did, many sacrificed themselves to comfort the sick. Hence,
the Athenians, despite a laundry-list of faults that Thucydides discusses in
some detail, united to do what they thought was best for their fellow citizens.
The situation, as we are experiencing, was horrific. Yet, the
surviving citizens of Athens were resilient. Their democracy and system of
justice thrived and serves as the basis of our modern political concepts. Athenian
artists created spectacular works of art, poets and philosophers wrote prolifically,
architects constructed wonderous temples and public buildings. And as Athens
picked up the pieces, Sophocles wrote the second of his famous Theban plays.
* all excerpts of Oedipus Rex from the translation by Robert
Fagles (1982)
** all excerpts from Thucydides’ History of the
Peloponnesian War (book 2, sections 47-55) are from the translation by Rex Warner
(1954)
Red figured Attic pottery with Oedipus and the Sphinx (in the Gregorian Etruscan section of the Vatican Museum) (photo from Encyclopedia Brittanica)
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