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- [00:00]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Today on Ascend, the Great Books podcast, we dive into Oedipus the King by Sophocles, the best of the Greek tragedies according to Aristotle. As Thebes crumbles under divine plague, Oedipus, the revered hero who solved the Sphinx's riddle, vows to save his city by uncovering the murderer of the previous king of Thebes, only to unravel a horrific truth about his own identity. Guys, I was not completely sold on this play. At the beginning, I don't think I had an appreciation for some of its technical aspects. But over time I very much have come to appreciate this play, particularly the theme of self knowledge and self identity. And I'm also in debt to the two guests that we had on because when we recorded this episode I was a first time reader. So I'm in their debt for guiding us through it. Also, I just simply want to say thank you to all of you. Thank you for reading the replays with us. Thank you for your support of Ascend. Thank you for all the nice feedback that you've provided us. It means a lot. I want to have a grateful heart and it's very humbling as well. So thank you so much. So join us today as we explore the crushing weight of fate, human arrogance, the theme of prophecy, the role of self knowledge, and the backdrop of cosmic order all wrapped up in Oedipus the King by Sophocles. Welcome to Ascend, the Great Books Podcast. My name is Deacon Harrison Garlick. My husband, father and I serve as the Chancellor and General Counsel for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. You can check us out on Twitter or now x YouTube. We have a Facebook page and you can support us on Patreon. You can Visit us at thegreatbookspodcast.com we have multiple guides and articles to help you read the great books. And today we are discussing Oedipus the King or Oedipus Rex the second in Sophocles. Theban plays. Today we have some wonderful guests. So we have Mr. Eli Stone who used to work at the Chancery of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa with me as a co worker. He's also an on and off member of our Sunday Great Books and also discerned with the Western Dominicans for a while. Eli, how are you doing? Dominic?
- [02:19]
Eli Stone
Going all right. How are you? Deegan?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Good. It's good to have you back. And you're still over at the Honors College, the Great Books College at tu?
- [02:26]
Eli Stone
Yes, I'm still over there. We're just now wrapped up with A semester. And so it's all good. We're very excited for another. Another. Another one to come. So we're still doing some prep work for that, but, yeah. And then actually, I just got accepted into a master's program in classic education myself at Benedictine College. So I'm very excited to begin that. Hopefully, I'll be able to break into the teaching world. So that's kind of my new dream. It's exciting.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, that's really exciting. We're very happy to have you back. I think you helped us navigate the passages with Nausicaa in the Odyssey, which we greatly enjoyed.
- [03:05]
Eli Stone
Yeah, it's one of my favorite passages, and this has actually become one of my favorite plays for similar reasons, with some of the rhetorical and the sort of. The sophisticated sort of writing and in the dialogue. And that was really something I really enjoyed in the Odyssey, and that's something I'm finding here in this particular play written by Sophocles. So, yeah, I'm very excited to start talking about it.
- [03:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. No, very good. We also have a new guest, a guest that hasn't joined us before, Mr. Josiah Moser, who I think we first met in a Dante reading group, which in certain ways was like the preliminary to this podcast. We read Dante's Inferno over Lent, which I greatly enjoyed.
- [03:50]
Josiah Moser
Yes, that was a great time.
- [03:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So tell me a little bit about just, like, your great books, classical education exposure.
- [03:57]
Josiah Moser
Yeah. So I was homeschooled all my life. I was raised by Protestant parents, but very devout. They always wanted to educate and catechize me very well. And they really started homeschooling, I think, long before it became as common as it is now. And I always consider my mother as sort of like a connoisseur of different curricula and ways of teaching. And she didn't discover, really, classical education until I was in high school. And we have a group called Classical Conversations. It's actually a national program. There's a lot of people that are using it now, at least throughout the nation, if not the whole world, but there's a very large community of that in Tulsa. I was part of their first sort of the. The last stages of it. My last two years in high school. I got to be a part of that. So I missed all of the foundational stuff that is so important to a classical education, But I got to engage very much with the classics and the great books during that time. So my senior year of high school, I got to choose between do I want to start taking some college classes or Do I want to stick around and read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Agony, Oedipus Rex, and some other classics and talk about all of this stuff in Socratic circles? And I absolutely opted for that, and I'm very glad that I did. So that was, in many ways, an exposure to it. I'd always been very much interested in culture and the arts especially so. And literature. I was raised on a lot of really good literature as a child, and that kind of was always with me. But this was kind of a way of taking it to the next level.
- [05:42]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I recently read, my first time actually reading the Theogony was here on the podcast was actually when we read it earlier for, like, a year of great poetics. And I had always heard, like, you know, it's really boring. It's just like this litany of, like, this God came from this God. I loved it. Like, I thought it was so interesting to, like, parse that out.
- [06:04]
Josiah Moser
It really is. I found it fascinating, and it gives you a little bit of an insight into sort of the. In a certain sense, the chaos of the pagan way of understanding the deities, but in another sense also the way that they tried to order nature according to these sort of patronages. Almost. One of the projects we had was to draw a family tree. Most people sort of abridged it or made a selection, you know, and I tried to get the whole thing. I went, like, way above and beyond. I had almost every name in there. I was able to get in there somehow. But it's. It's pretty thorny and a little twisted.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
It is. But, yeah, that was a surprise for me is how much I enjoyed that text. And then you also are a convert to the Catholic faith, correct?
- [06:46]
Josiah Moser
That is correct. And it would be. It would be a great oversight to omit how. How important Catholic. The Catholic approach to culture is, I think. Or was in what conversion process? I think it was largely precipitated by just seeing a bunch of cultural things that are happening, waves, you know, things that are changing in the world. And how the little Presbyterian reform tradition that I was in and the small, you know, subsection of that was just not really able to engage a lot of these ideas because it's using a lot of the same grammar that they use. They're, you know, kind of bought into the world's paradigm in a large sense, and then sort of trying to fight on individual particulars and sort of cutting out the ground underneath them that they're standing on without a solid tradition or without a solid Teaching about what tradition even means, I think is a really important part of it. Seeing a lot of people that I was close to leave the faith also helped drive me toward the church. And I think, you know, it may seem superficial to some people, but thinking about the contributions that were made to the Western cultural canon by Catholics and by people who did believe in tradition or who studied the classics or who. Who had sort of these deep roots that I felt like I was so much lacking. The character of Tolkien in particular was like someone who kept coming back to my mind because he managed to engage the public imagination for, you know, not just his own generation, but he's set the dialogue that we're basically still having today in the creative sphere in a large sense. And he was a student of the classics. He studied so much of ancient and medieval literature, and he was also a very devout Catholic. I know his cause for canonization was open. It hasn't advanced very far. I think the optics of that are a little weird, but I actually think I'm very partial to that cause personally, because I think there are far too few artists, creators, writers in a literary form that isn't strictly, strictly spiritual, that have, you know, that have the patronage that, you know, when we look to the saints, we're looking for people to emulate. And I think that's something that, something that we really do need.
- [09:15]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, no, I agree. And I agree too, that my. Actually all three of us are converts on the podcast this evening. And so, yeah, my own conversion to the faith is very much intertwined with the great books. So as I was going through rcia, I had also entered a master's program in theology at Ave Maria, and part of that master's program had attacked on great book sequence. So as I'm kind of going through rca, I'm also being exposed to Plato's Republic for the first time. Right. And so I really enjoyed kicking off Ascend because actually one of the things that I wasn't able to do in that kind of great book sequence is we started with Plato. We didn't start with the Poetics. And so this has been kind of a real treasure for me. And it's probably a good segue into an admission I should probably make at the beginning of the podcast, which is I am a first time reader, so I get to play the role of the first time reader this evening. So I'm a first time reader of Oedipus Rex, of Oedipus the king. And I, I don't know, I might need to be sold on it a little bit. So if you have, you know, some gems, some. Some treasures that you can unearth and hand over, I would appreciate that. So maybe, like, in that vein, for either one of you, like, why is this great book worth reading? Because it's skipped over a lot of great books reading lists. So why. Why do we take the time to read this text?
- [10:25]
Eli Stone
I think. Go. Go ahead.
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Josiah Moser
Okay. Well, I was going to touch on it a little bit. Just in many ways, this is a tragedy of an almost archetypal form. It's not. It doesn't stand out to some people as much in a particular way. There's nothing that's extremely distinctive about this tragedy, but it is very much. I've heard Greek tragedy described as the consequences of overreaching or of impiety especially. And we see both of those in the case of Oedipus in this story, both of inflating himself too much and of trying to step beyond the fate that was allotted to him.
- [11:11]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
What do you think, Eli?
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Eli Stone
Yeah, I think so to speak a little bit about the lackluster impact, perhaps. I think part of it is because most of us are very familiar with the story already. Like, it is our culture, as much as it's saturated. Like, everyone knows Freud, right? Like the edifice complex. Like, everyone knows the general gist of the story, which I don't think is necessarily a problem, because obviously when this is first being performed, when Sophocles is first writing this, his. His audience obviously already knows the story. He's very similar to something like the Agamemnon plays, right? The. The Oresteia, where you have Aeschylus writing about all of the things that happened centuries ago with Agamemnon's family. Everyone knows the story. So I think the problem is that we, as modern readers tend to approach a book trying to figure out what the end is. Or like, you know, we. We tend to. Not like spoilers, I guess. But since, as you point out, we're reading, this is the second play in Sophocles cycle, the first one being Antigone, which is the very end of the story. We've now gone back in time and now we're reading about Oedipus, we all know what happens, and it's sort of. There's perhaps a. It's a very jarring sort of read for, I think, the modern reader. And so I think it's very easy for us to kind of get hung up and try to approach the text with a little bit too much of our. Too many of Our modern biases that would kind of. Well, what are we looking for in a text? We're looking for dramatic tension. Well, where is the dramatic tension if I already know where the story ends? So I think this text really is an exercise in looking beyond modern preconceptions of what literature should look like, what its purpose is, and what constitutes good writing. I do echo a lot of what Josiah said, though. I do believe that this is sort of an archetypal tragedy. And I think that's one of the reasons why for a time it was. And I think, Deacon, correct me if I'm wrong here, but like, Aristotle points to this as an example of the preeminent form of tragedy. Is that correct?
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
It is correct. Yeah. Aristotle likes it in some. Because he finds it, yeah, the tragedy par excellence. Particularly because the detective is looking for a criminal, and he finds out that he's the criminal. But Aristotle really liked it, particularly not only because that unfolding of tragedy, but because it's the character himself who reasons his way through the revelation. So. Because in some of the stories, because Oedipus, like you mentioned, is very old. Oedipus is even mentioned in Homer's Odyssey in the underworld. So this is. These, again, these are ancient tales. So Sophocles has received them. He's kind of weaving them into a new tale. Part of these things might be his invention. A lot of these narratives on the Oedipus side, we only have from him. So sometimes it's hard to tell how much, like, where's the line between what he received and what he's inventing? But, yeah, Aristotle likes it from a technical standpoint. He praises it as the tragedy par excellence. And I think that I might fall into that critique, Eli, which I thought was pretty apt that the modern reader. If you already know the ending, then what am I appreciating in this play? Because I did find it. It's funny that you mentioned the Orestaya and Agamemidmon, because as I was reading it, it reminded me of the Agamemidmon, where I'm like, okay, I know the end of this play, and we're kind of dragging out. And this one's. This play's a little longer than some of the others. And a lot of times I was like, okay, guys, you.
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Eli Stone
You.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
You should have already figured it out by now. Like, you know this. And then it's like, no, we have to have a witness. Which, if you remember, was actually a big deal when we read the Odyssey. Or it had to be like, if you witness something like that, you actually had the testimony. So I think my first read through, I was a little bit jaded, particularly coming off of Antigone, which I love. And I feel like it's exploring deep themes and there's. There's a deep pedagogy that Sophocles works into this. And so I think that Oedipus Rex. I think you're correct. I think it invites you to take a deeper read, because in certain ways it's very subtle. And then, particularly if you already know the ending, then I think you really kind of have to be disciplined to kind of watch the rhetoric back and forth.
- [15:25]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that. I would also slightly add part of the mastery in Sophocles is even the order in which he's decided to put these stories, because you mentioned that it opens with. You know, it opens with Antigone. And even though that happens chronologically last, in a certain sense, that's actually sort of setting the stage for the other two, because all three of these are about Oedipus. Antigone is basically showing what happens after him, but these two are showing his life. So in an. In another important sense, this one is important in particular because this is at the central moment of his life, the one that defines him as a character. And it's really the unfolding of the information, the unfolding of the revelation, basically. And revelation is a good word, because so much of this play has to do with the faculty of sight and all of the plays that they have on Sight and Light, which, you know, with Apollo being the primary God concerned here, being the God of light and of song and of. Even of happiness, in some senses, I think it's very key there. But, yeah, it is very central between showing basically what comes after him, showing what happens, or, like, the cause of his downfall, basically. And then the final one being actually, in many ways, sort of redemptive. If you trace the character arcs, too, through all three of them, you see some very interesting juxtapositions with the way that they bring them through. And there are some choices of wording. I actually think one of the brilliancies in this play play is ways that he's chosen to word some things that are either referencing what has come before or what would come after.
- [17:16]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I very much agree, and I. I think I like your mention of the character arcs. I think that's one thing we have to track because it's interesting to read Antigone, which comes last because it was published first to use that term. But then, like, we get these insights and statements from Creon, and it's amazing. Then when you read these, like, how it's informing. Then, like, wait, like, how you read Creon. And then I think, because, you know, maybe I'll play a card here, I actually think Creon might be at his best in this play. Like, I think he.
- [17:44]
Eli Stone
I think he absolutely is at his best.
- [17:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And you're just like. When I was reading it, I was like, well, this Creon sounds really grounded. He's very pious. He's like, I don't even want the throne. Like, I'll take care of you, your children. I was like, wow, this is great. And then I think. I think Creon might actually be at his worst in Oedipus at Colonis. So he's got this weird arc that you've got to track. And I think that overall, because I was talking to some people on X about this who are also reading these plays, and they were reading them in the narrative order, chronological order. And so one of the things I think that you have to see is that when you read them in the way that Sophocles wrote them, then you can kind of rest assured that you're tracking the way his own thoughts develop and how he's also unpacking the characters. And I think one of the themes that we have to look into. There's a couple themes. I think prophecy is a big one that we have to look into. And, you know, the relationship between prophecy and your free will, fate and free will comes back into this. But also this. You can see he's developing. And I think he really hits it perfectly in the third play. This idea of the blessing is also the curse that you have this person who has this curse, because the whole house is cursed. And that's something we'll have to talk about. In Antigone, you kind of see him playing this, and. Because when we talked about Antigone, you kind of see her in the latter part of the play, almost pull a 180. And it's really jarring, right? This strong character starts having doubts about what she's doing, doing, etc. You can tell he's, like, formulating this kind of character. And I. Man, I think he hits his stride with Oedipus, because I think in this one, I liked it for moving the narrative forward. And then when I read Epitis at Clonus and saw where the theme was going, it actually made me appreciate this middle play, Oedipus Rex, more. As I saw him like develop. Because I agree with your insight, Josiah, that we have to understand what's happening with Oedipus because he's the tent peg, right? He's the guidepost for the entire. This isn't really a triad, but what Sophocles was working out over his life. Because my understanding, just going to put this on a timeline, you know, my understanding is that he wrote this 12 years after Antigone and that it was first shown in 429 B.C. so we have a 12 year gap for Sophocles to come mature in his own thought before he wrote this play. So kind of on that, let's kind of dig into the text because I think there's a lot of things here that we are going to want to kind of parse through. So of course all of us have probably become habituated that we have to pay attention to the first lines. We learned this in Homer, we learned this very much with Aeschylus. So here he says, O my children, the new blood of ancient Thebes, why are you here huddling at my altar, praying before me, your branches wound in wool? So just a few kind of like raw high level takes on this one. Aeschylus and Oresteia opens up every single play with an appeal to the divine. So far, Sophocles is 2 for 2 on opening his plays with an appeal to flash and the family. Right. So Antigone kind of, if I remember right, Antigone opens up her play with an appeal to Ismini, of my own flesh and blood, also talking about her brother. So here too we have this kind of familial flesh and blood opening. It's not divine, it's very human. And then, I mean, as a first time reader, the two things that caught my attention are the possessives here. My children, right. He talks about his citizens as his children. That's more intimate that I've seen in other plays. And then also my altar praying before me. I didn't really know how to take either one of those. Anyone have any insights on parsing those out?
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Eli Stone
I think this is a wonderful like glimpse at what we're gonna see in Oedipus at Colonus. So for, for some of our listeners who may not be familiar, Greece at this time is very much still a pagan society. And one of the many elements of that is especially noble. Kings or noteworthy figures are often revered as ancestral spirits or guardian spirits of a particular place. And so there is a, in Sophocles time, right. Like he would have been drawing upon this tradition, right? Like Oedipus was not just some nobody king. There's a reason his name was remembered and it was probably because it was being revered in some local cult. And so we see in the events in Oedipus of Colonus, maybe some like, lead up to that. But this happened not only with Oedipus, as we know, but I think we can also look to Hercules as another big example. Like he's this man that attains something of a divine or quasi divine status and is then revered in mythology and worshiped or supplicated as a, as, as a protective spirit or a guardian spirit. And so I think in this case Sophocles is making something of a nod to that. And again, he's playing with time here. Right. But it's, I think it also speaks to, if you, if you fast forward a little bit, just look further down the page when the priest responds, his response is very warm as well. And they speak of him as he was a father. Right. Like, so there's a very great affection that the citizens of Thebes have for Oedipus and Oedipus shares that in turn with his citizens. It's a remarkable tenderness that I think is meant to really sharply juxtapose us to what we saw. Creon, the tyrant, kind of be. And when I say tyrant, obviously the Greeks, when they think of tyrant, they just mean king. But really like in the, in the pejorative sense, Creon's kind of an iron fisted tyrant in Antigone, whereas Oedipus is not that. He's almost like the good and generous king that we would have in some of our children's fairy tales. Right.
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Josiah Moser
I might push back on that just slightly. Perhaps. This is, this is rather tentative, if I understand correctly and I might be remembering this wrong. Sophocles himself is an Athenian and he's presenting these plays for Thebes, in Thebes. So they're basically created for Thebans, but he is an Athenian and Athens at this time is a democracy. They did not like tyrants. They weren't, they clearly weren't fond of them at all. I actually think in this opening here, it's setting out some things about that we'll see in the series as a whole, but especially in Oedipus at Colonus, which is where he approaches the closest to Athens and also in many ways the closest to perfection or the, the ideal that Sophocles would set out. I think that there are many cases in this play in particular where Oedipus has elevated himself beyond due measure. And while we do see his, like, kind patrimony and, like, the affection that his citizens have for him and the very high esteem they have for him, they revere his might, his strength, his, especially his wit. But I almost feel like a theme in this is, or possibly even in all three, is allowing the power to go to their heads, or allowing the esteem to go to their heads, which, coming from an Athenian, again, would make some sense.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right?
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Eli Stone
So you see the references to the altars not as foreshadowing what's to come necessarily. Or maybe it's both.
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Josiah Moser
It could be both. It could be equally both.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. I'm not sure, actually how much I think those two views preclude one another, because I do agree with you, Eli. That's my understanding, too, that they're starting to be a hero cult here. And so, like, Oedipus is drawn into this, this hero cult. Like you said, we'll see this more Oedipus and Clonus. But even reading that play and doing some research on it, because a few things that really caught my imagination is how often in Greek history the oracle would tell them, like, you have to go find the bones of so and so. Like, you have to go find the bones of Theseus. You have to go find the bones of even Orestes. And you, you're, you know, your city won't be blessed until you go find their bones and bring them back. And so there's like this hero cult that comes up. So I appreciate what you saying there, that Oedipus is being kind of portrayed in this way, but I agree with Josiah that at least on my. My read, there were times that I was like, there is no way he's not being disproportionate. There's no way that he hasn't got out in front of his skis here. Hero cult or not, you're still an ant in front of the gods. Right? Because, like, the point we'll get to where he's like, oh, don't pray to the gods, like, I'll fix this. And I'm like, ah, man, brother, I don't think you can say that. Like, I don't think that's going to work well. So let's push forward just a little bit here. The Sphinx. So maybe we should talk about why does Thebes have such a fondness for Oedipus? I, you know, I don't think he's been here terribly long in the grand scheme of things. Right. He does have some children, so I mean, he's been here for a few years, but maybe we can, like, parse out the history of, like, why. So let me give you, like, maybe give a sketch and then you guys can fill it in. So my understanding is that at least in the most proximate reason that they're so fond of him is that two things happened. Thebes was suffering under a sphinx. Think of Egypt, right? So this is a lion body, a woman's chest and head, and then lion, or excuse me, than eagle wings. And she's telling people a riddle. And if you get the riddle wrong, she eats you. And this, she's, you know, by thieves. And this is causing a lot of problems. The other problem they have is that their king goes off, if I remember right, actually, to consult the oracle, and is killed. So they have no king and they're suffering the Sphinx. And so here comes Oedipus, and he solves the riddle of the Sphinx and they make him king, and they give him the king's wife. Jocasta is like a dowry, right? She's like a gift of the city to Oedipus, is the way I read that. So that's. I mean, is that. Is that the basic sketch here? I mean, that's why they have a fondness for him, correct?
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Josiah Moser
I think so, yeah. And I think in giving him Jocasta, they were also legitimizing his rule of the city in a certain way.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, that's true.
- [28:11]
Eli Stone
And the riddle, which we will find is incredibly ironic.
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Josiah Moser
Oh, of course we're going to get there.
- [28:18]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But we're just, you know, right now. It sounds nice. You get to marry the. The old queen and we legitimate, you know, it's a legitimate move for the throne. Yeah. And then the riddle is like a famous one, if I remember right. It is, you know, what crawls, not crawls. Maybe, you know, what's on four legs in the morning, right? It's like, what, four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three legs in the evening. And Oedipus correctly guesses that it's man. So crawling on all fours is an infant and walking on two feet. And then the old man has two legs and a cane. And so, yeah, he solves this because. But because he solved it then I think, going back to your points, both of you, there's like this fine line between him having this, like, hero cult and then whether or not his pride, to use that word, has become somewhat inflated, particularly in front of the gods.
- [29:05]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, There's a specific line that happens later in this play, I might call attention to it then, where he mentions this with reference to prophecy in particular, that almost makes it an act of impiety, even on its own. I'm not really sure if that's the wrong reading of that, but that was something that caught my attention. That's actually quite a bit later in the play.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
And one thing too, I notice is that you immediately understand that obviously Thebes is in crisis, right? That's where they're all praying. Thebes is suffering from a plague. And the way I read this is like, we all immediately know that the plague is not natural, that it has to be some kind of supernatural punishment, because down at line 30, which, by the way, I'm using the Fagels translation, I didn't even ask you guys, what translations are you guys using? Fagl's.
- [29:50]
Josiah Moser
I got my hands on it today, but I have read through it now. So.
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Eli Stone
Yes, congratulations.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
What are you using?
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Eli Stone
I am using the Fitzgerald. Okay.
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Deacon Harrison Garlick
So the Pat. The line numbers are going to be a little bit off, but in Fagals, which I'll be referencing a line 30 or so when it says thieves is dying, then it says, you know, the plague has moved through. But then the plague is affecting crops, animals and people. So it's not natural. Like, again, we're. We're kind of. This reminds me of like the beginning of the Iliad, right? Like, the people are suffering under the plague. Apollo has showered his arrows down on the Achaeans. Something terrible is happening. So we see this is going to be some type of divine retribution against Thebes for some crime or some. Something that's happened. Right.
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Eli Stone
Well, which is interesting too. This is often not known. So obviously Apollo is the God of healing. He's also the God of prophecy. I say obviously most people don't know that. Most people know Apollo as the God of light, the God of prophecy, because of his temple at Delphi, which is often consulted for oracles. But he is also the God of healing, of medicine, but also of plague. And so Apollo is really a very complicated divine figure himself. And so it is fascinating that Sophocles chooses to use a plague. Right? Like, why? Okay, so this God is really, as Josiah mentioned, Apollo is central. Like, he is the divine figure even. I mean, I think Zeus is referenced, but this is not about. There is no reference to guest hospitality. There is no only passing references to Zeus. Apollo is really front and center here, which is a very interesting choice on Sophocles part.
- [31:38]
Josiah Moser
Yeah. And I would already call attention to even in line 14. So, once again, noting from the opening words of the play, you sometimes see things. That will be a theme further in. Even on line 14, Oedipus himself says, I would be blind to misery, not to pity my people kneeling at my feet. He's already referencing sight, with Apollo being the God of light, sight and light and darkness, especially in terms of truth. And I don't know what Apollo's role is in truth specifically. I know that there was. He's probably very close to that, but I believe there was another God for truth specifically. You know.
- [32:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, he's going to be. He's going to be the God of truth insofar as the oracle at Delphi.
- [32:25]
Josiah Moser
Yes.
- [32:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. He's the one that's always giving these. So, because to piggyback on what you've said, my understanding of one of the major themes that we see in this play is prophecy, but particularly kind of Josiah, like, as you gave, like, a historical background, my understanding is that Sophocles here is offering somewhat of a cultural critique, because we're already getting into the area in which the Hellenized world, at least the Aristocrats, are starting to give up on the pantheon. Right. We're not really sure if the Aristocrats actually still believe in, like, a Zeus in a prophecy. So it's really interesting about how he presents prophecy in this text because it's kind of a cultural critique to all the people that I think are, you know, starting to doubt this, if you will. You kind of saw this in Aeschylus, too, where Zeus is really kind of like, you know, there's a nameless divine. Do I call you Zeus? Right. So these playwrights are starting to kind of play with these ideas. But Sophocles here, I think, gives us a very strong understanding of prophecy.
- [33:26]
Josiah Moser
Yes, absolutely. And tying in, like, just light and revelation with, like, we can now see it. I read this. I'm not sure how true it is that the Greek term aletheia for truth isn't the same or doesn't translate exactly the same as Veritas would. So it's not about the truth itself as much as the truth being known. And I'm not a linguist, I'm not a language scholar. I just heard that somewhere. So take that with a grain of salt. But that would track a little bit closely with what we're seeing here, too, I think.
- [34:00]
Eli Stone
Yeah. Going back to that. You. You. I think maybe it's better to say Apollo is not necessarily the God of truth, as he is revelation or knowledge. Yes, there we go, and knowledge is a huge theme in this. Knowledge and ignorance, sight and blindness. There's often an inverse relationship there between physical sight and intuition or mental sight, right? And so we see this with the blind prophet. We see this with Oedipus being seeing throughout his. The whole time of his ignorance. Once he comes to know the truth, he blinds himself. And so, yeah, I think. I think revelation or. Or knowledge is probably the best way of putting that. Not truth qua truth per se.
- [34:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I like that. And also, I want to tether this to Antigone. So just as an example, in line, I don't know, a little bit before line 90, Oedipus has sent off Creon to receive the prophecy from Delphi. And he says, but once he returns, then I'll be a traitor if I do not do all the God makes clear. And this is a huge theme also in Antigone, right, where she actually says, if I don't bury my brother, I will be the traitor. How are you the traitor? The polis, Right. Carry on, just said, don't bury the body. So how are you gonna be a traitor if you do do it well or you don't do it well because you're a traitor to the gods, right? You're a traitor to this larger divine cosmic order. I think that's really one of the themes throughout all the Theban plays that Sophocles is trying to push through is that there really is this, like, cosmic order, right? There's a cosmic order that's greater than man. That man, even someone like Oedipus, right, who at the beginning can have this. You know, he's basically starting of a hero cult. I mean, he saves Thebes, he marries the queen, he's becoming king. Like, even you and all of your free will are still subject to the fate of this cosmic order. In Antigone, you see, Antigone aligns herself at her best. Antigone aligns herself with that cosmic order against Creon, who can really only look down from the polis downward. He can't really look up and see the order that he's subject to. So it's interesting here that I think that theme or that pedagogy gets kind of transliterated into this play in the theme of prophecy, which, then again, is catechetical to his audience, who's doubting whether prophecy is actually even real anymore. So, I mean, in certain ways, this is a warning, is it not?
- [36:31]
Josiah Moser
Yes. I think doubts are explicitly voiced by Jocasta.
- [36:35]
Eli Stone
Yeah, I think I like that idea. Of the cosmic order. I think we need to pin that because your question of fate, right, the theme of fate, like, can Oedipus change his fate? And if he can't, then, like, why is it worth. Why is. I mean, at the end of this play, it's quite despairing. I think we need to ask that question. So let's put a pin in that and kind of come back to that later. That fake question and. And how it relates to order, the kind of cosmic divine order.
- [37:06]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So Apollo, I mean, just like hitting some high points in the narrative. So around like 110, Creon comes back and says, hey, this is what we have to do. Like, drive the corruption from the land. Don't harbor it any longer past all cure. Don't nurse it in your soil. Root it out. Okay, well, what do we have to do? Well, you're harboring the murderer of the past king, right? Laius Lie. Is that what he said? Laius? Yeah, Laius, right. You're harboring the murderer of the past king of Thebes, right? So you have to like, root them out. And of course, like, as we already know by now, our tragic plays always have a lot of irony. So then we get this, like, wonderful response from Oedipus in which he's going to root this. He's going to find this criminal, he's going to exile him from the lands. Like, we have this kind of like over the top. You kind of tether that back to the hero cult, right? He is going to save the city. He will save the city from plague the. By finding the criminal and doing what the gods command. And this is just for us, you know, for the readers who know where this is going. It's just stacking irony upon irony as he just keeps talking.
- [38:12]
Eli Stone
I think part of this, like Oedipus makes a very rash vow here and a very dramatic vow. And I think this is his first mistake. So if we want to talk about Oedipus overstepping or perhaps losing his sense of reason or reasonableness, he has no facts in this case. All he's heard is that the old king was murdered. And he pronounces sentence even before he knows the facts of the case. And so I think, you know, maybe this goes back to what Josiah was saying. For a polis that prides itself on its judicial system, this seems very rash and unprincipled. What are you. What do you make of that, Deacon? Like, what do you think of this sort of rash vow or pronouncing sentence before the facts? Of the case are even made out like, did this strike you as unusual? Did you think that it's like blustery like that kind of.
- [39:18]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, I mean, one of the ways that the tragic plays always get everyone to be ironic is, is they always act disproportionate. Right. They tend to have these kind of imploded personalities and they don't think things through. Right? Think. I mean, think of Creon. Think of Antigone in the first play. Right? They're all very headstrong on their perception. I read this as, you know, he's the hero. These are his children, right? I mean, my children. Like he sees himself in. Intertwined with Thebes in a very intimate way earlier. Not only are they children, when he talks about like, oh, you guys are suffering. Well, I'm suffering more than anyone because, you know, I am thieves, basically, right. I suffer along with my children. So I found it, yes, disproportionate. I found it almost like he. He needs to retain the savior role. Like he has like a savior mentality and he has to retain that right. He has to keep it. And so he kind of leads him into, I think, speaking before thinking. And so I just. I tether it more to that hero cult, if you will. I don't disagree with anything you said. I guess that was like my first time read of it, is that I just think he's being disproportionate because he wants to be the hero. He wants to save thieves.
- [40:34]
Josiah Moser
Yeah. And I think that the valid question here, though, is why does he have to be the hero? He has earned that place. But we'll see very soon that that has become non negotiable for him. Regardless of what the gods or anyone else has to say, this is where he belongs. He's found a home here and he's unwilling to give it up for anything.
- [40:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. He almost plays, you know, Eli, one thing to think about is a line. I don't know. This is in Fagols155. He plays almost like a blood avenger role, but for the city, because that's when I like. And he actually kind of makes this reference in like 154. He says, I in the land's avenger, by all rights, and Apollo's champion too, but not to assist some distant kinsman. No, for my own sake, I'll rid us of this corruption. So he.
- [41:26]
Eli Stone
Well, well, go on, go on. Further, though, this is an interesting bit.
- [41:30]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Whoever killed the king may decide to kill me too. With the same violent Hand. By avenging Elias, I defend myself. So of course, again, like I said, the irony is just thick. It's very thick. But if you're trying to say what's his motivation for speaking like this? I do think he wants to be the hero. I do think he wants to save Thebes. Also, we should mention because, I mean, what we don't know at this part in the play, is it not just that he saved Thebes, but Thebes became his home. He also, in a certain way needed to be saved. Right. He also was an exile. And so I think he just has something here that's very precious to him, that is threatened. And like any father, something threatens your family, you're gonna step up. And maybe even a disproportionate way say, no, I'm gonna take care of this. And he takes on this like blood avenger level of justice to root this out.
- [42:26]
Josiah Moser
Yeah. It's like if you swear, you swear a punishment upon whoever murdered your father, and then you find it's your brother, you know, what are you going to do in that case? Like you have to be so cruel to your brother.
- [42:37]
Eli Stone
That sounds like another tragedy rating to be written.
- [42:39]
Josiah Moser
It does. I mean, but that's the case we're seeing here.
- [42:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
What was that guy in the Old Testament that was so happy with God, he was like, I'll. I'll give you the first thing that walks out of my door.
- [42:48]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, that was.
- [42:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And his daughter walks out.
- [42:50]
Josiah Moser
Classic rash vow.
- [42:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I know. Also, I was like, brother, why did you pick your door? Why don't you pick like your barn or something? Why. Why'd you pick your door? And then it's like really vague about whether he does it or not, but. Yeah. So just thinking of Rush vows.
- [43:05]
Josiah Moser
But he does claim, he clearly claims sort of a familial relationship to the city. And part of this is because he's married, Jocasta. So he really has married into the family of the city. Creon is his brother in law, and he says that he will fight for laius vengeance as if he were his own father. He uses those words again.
- [43:29]
Eli Stone
More irony. But how do you read?
- [43:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I mean, Eli, maybe once you take this one about the disproportionality and whether he extends even past the bounds of the hero cult. This is in Fagles. It's after the chorus. His opening line. After the chorus and fagles, it's 245. He says, you pray to the gods. Let me grant your prayers. Come listen to me. Do what the plague demands. You'll find relief and lift your head from the depths. I didn't. I mean, particularly coming off of like the Oresteia and things like this. I just underlined that it's like you can't talk like that. Like that's, that's impious. Like you can't say that you're at. Some God, some capricious Greek God is going to crush you.
- [44:11]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, absolutely.
- [44:12]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [44:13]
Eli Stone
Well now this is the interesting thing, right? Like he says, until now, I mean, this is my translation after that. Until now I was a stranger to this tale as I had been a stranger to the crime. Of course, just more irony. Like, we can probably just assume that anything that we say is going to be some. There's going to be some layer of irony in it because it's just very, very thick and very present through all of this. But it is interesting that he mentioned. He. He seems to suggest how could I, like, how could I have known about this? Like. And so it's like this is only a problem because I didn't know about it. And he seems to imply that if he had known this prior to everything else, he would have like already dealt with this problem. Like, he, he seems very self assured. Like he, he sees, he seems to see himself as the solution to all of Thebes problems, which he was the solution for one of Thebes's very big problems. And given the fact that his citizens seem to laud him, it sounds like he's a competent ruler. Like it, it doesn't seem like that's unearned necessarily. But I do, I do think that there is. I think we see a weakness in Oedipus's character here. I think we saw a glimmer of it just before the chorus, which is where I mentioned, like he pronounces sentence before he knows all the facts of the case. I think to, I think to us it should. It is interesting another way of perhaps. Yeah. You know, when we're talking about this in a literary sense, right, the tragic fault. What's the tragic fault of Odysseus? Right. Like this is sort of the. A literary trope. You could say that like in every great tragedy there's like the hero or the, the main character has one flaw that kind of sets the whole tragedy in motion. And I think you could probably say there's a couple things. But I do think in Oedipus's case it's hubris. It's his tendency to overstep and not. And so. Oh, I think so. Fun fact, Josiah and I Go back a little ways. And we actually have a reading group together. So we've actually read these texts together and the Delphic maxims. So in the temple of Apollo, this is something that came up in our reading group, and I think it's a really interesting read on Oedipus and exactly what he does wrong. The Delphic maxims. There's three of them that are kind of well known. They would have been inscribed over the doorway into. Into the. The oracle there, or into the temple of Apollo there to consult the oracle. The first one is know yourself, or a better translation is probably know your place, like, recognize that you are human. The second one is also known pretty well. It's everything in moderation. Sounds pretty good. The third one is something to the effect of. And Josiah, maybe you have this better off the top of your head than I do, but something to the effect of he who makes a pledge rashly will regret it, or something like that. And so I think all three of those Delphic maxims we will see Oedipus violate in some dramatic fashion. Obviously, we've seen the rash vow. I think we will see that Oedipus does not moderate his reaction to Tiresias and Creon. And I think we will also see that at a one point in the play, he very clearly forgets his place as a human being and blasphemes against the gods. And so, really, I think what we see is that Oedipus actually violates all three of these Delphic maxims, which, ironically, he should have, like, known about, because considering he's gone to the temple before and he's sent messengers to the temple before, Apollo is all over this play. Apollo's three rules, he's broken all of them.
- [48:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
He actually calls himself Apollo's champion.
- [48:41]
Josiah Moser
Oh, man.
- [48:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Also, I mean, the know yourself maxim is ironic here, right? I mean, he does not know himself on any level. That's the whole problem with the entire play. But I. Okay, so let's just push into this at the moment. But what does that mean? Like, what. What does it actually. What's. What's the causality of that? So he violates all three maxims at, you know, the oracle at Delphi. He's a terrible human. He's. Lodge whatever complaint you want to against him. What's it matter? Like what. What does it actually matter? Everything about him was already faded before he had any instrumentality in it whatsoever. So, I mean, let's. I mean, because what. What does that mean, Eli? Like, what's that afford us? Like so let's say he does violate all those. Does that actually cause any of the things that happened to him to come about? It seems like all the things are faded regardless. I mean, this is. This is a. This is an actual real thing that he defends in the third play. But even in this one, like, I'm looking at my notes down there at the bottom, because at the bottom of this is around 310 and fagels, he talks about justice. And one of my notes there was, can Oedipus save himself through Arete, through excellence? Can he save himself through virtue? And I think the answer is no, I don't think he can. He can't save himself from the fate. You could argue, like, to what is his character embracing the fate? But the things that happen to him are faded. They're not actually a result from his own actions. Correct.
- [50:07]
Josiah Moser
I would say. Well, I guess a little bit of my. A little bit of my former time as a Presbyterian might show here, but, I mean, we can. We can.
- [50:14]
Eli Stone
Calvinist predestination.
- [50:16]
Josiah Moser
Sorry. No, no, no, I'm not going to. I'm not going to take it in that direction, really. I'm just in terms of. In terms of like, looking at the fate and looking at what has been said clearly to him. We can take two different directions here. One of them is the prophecy is vague. The prophecy is dark and murky and hard to understand. Who are the figures that it's referring to? How is this supposed to come about? And, you know, it even comes out in the play. At one point he's like, oh, I mean, you know, the. The thing that was foretold about me, like, maybe it happened, but, like, it was just really not that bad at all. There. There is always, like, a lighter version of this that could happen. I've heard of a case. Isn't there a Greek play where it was foretold that someone would kill his father and, like, he ended up, like, not running away from his fate? He lived with his father, they were happy together. And one day they were out cutting wood or something and his axe slipped and his father died or something like that. I don't remember exactly what the case was, but it could have been in this case, escaping his fate was what made it worse, or trying to escape his fate is what made it worse. The other way we could look at it is perhaps they faded it because they knew the character that he already had. Something like that. You know, who knows why the gods do what they do, especially in the context of this play. The Purpose that we see here, especially in line 245, when where he's basically saying, I'm the master of my fate, forget about the gods. I'm gonna make my own way, is that as long as you're fighting against the gods, things will not get easier for you and things will not get better for you.
- [51:58]
Eli Stone
I mean, I think it's interesting to note, to lean into what Josiah was just saying there. Laius tried to avoid his fate by sending his son away, and Oedipus tried to avoid his fate by running away from Corinth and came back to Thebes. If either one of them had just accepted their fate, nothing would have happened. Right? Because you know, you've got. It takes two to tango, right? Like Laius trying to avoid the prophecy that came against him, sends his son away and Oedipus growing up and being virtuous, tries to like, not do that and runs away from Corinth. But if either one of them had chosen to just accept what the gods had given, there wouldn't have been the problem. Even if Oedipus had killed his father in Corinth and slept with his mother in Corinth, that wouldn't have actually been his father or his mother. And so it would have been fine.
- [52:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Wait, hold on.
- [52:53]
Eli Stone
I say would have been fine with very loose. Right, right.
- [52:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Setting us at that point. But I think to Josiah's point, the way I read these is like, these things are going to happen no matter what. So I'm. I'm open to the idea that, like your personal arete, that virtue, your human excellence kicks in on how you embrace the fate. Like, do you lean into it, like, et cetera. But they're going to happen. So I don't think, at least the way I read this, I don't think Oedipus can escape anything. He's going to murder his father and he will sleep with his mother no matter what he does. It's like Josiah's axe head example, right? So you can live in peace and you can be virtuous. It's still going to happen. I have no idea. That happens when you sleep with your mom. But the gods could figure out some way to make that happen, right? I'm pretty sure if I got that prophecy, I just would not sleep with any women whatsoever. I don't know what I would do, but I certainly would not go to Thebes and marry an older woman. But anyway, that's beside the point, so. But I do think they're. Because part of the thing is what is. To what degree on a large landscape level is Oedipus culpable here? And I think on the grand architectonic scale, he's not. These things are going to happen to him no matter what, and he. He's going to suffer. And by the way, when they call him like the person that the gods hate the most and he suffers more than anyone alive, those are phrases that are also used for Odysseus. And I just want to point out here that after reading the Oedipus play, Oedipus has it far worse than Odysseus did for many reasons. And so I. It's really kind of changed my contextualization of what it means to suffer from the gods. But I do agree, though, that within that architecture that these things will happen to you. It seems that your personal virtue can contextualize how they happen. Because, for instance, like, even when he. Because even when he murders his father, he does so out of like a rashness. It seems like he. He. I mean, that's how I read it. Like, I don't think it really had to come to killing blows. He basically gets pushed off the road and gets angry and then beats everyone to death with a stick. His staff. It sounds like very flippant. Like he was just like, oh, this happened to me and he was going to hit me and so I killed him.
- [54:57]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, it basically is a case of ancient road rage. It's just escalated way beyond control. And who knows if blows went around both ways, but he ended up getting the best of the situation because he's this heroic figure who would get the rest of that situation.
- [55:11]
Eli Stone
I do think. I agree, Deacon, that, yes, I don't think Oedipus can escape his fate. I don't think he's culpable, perhaps. I don't know that culpability matters in the Greek world, though, because what matters is that the act has been done. And Oedipus feels just as much shame for being the God's plaything as he would if he had kind of intentionally done those things.
- [55:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There might be a lot of truth to that. I think that one thing, it's hard to see in this play, but when we get to Oedipus at Colonus, his, I think, is why Sophocles stresses it in the third play, that his lack of culpability on the large scale, I think is what allows Sophocles to tether his curse to a blessing that he can be simultaneously both things. Because this isn't just some idiot that went off and got himself into trouble. Right. This is someone who in a certain way suffered through no merits of their own. Right. They did not actually deserve this. Oedipus does not deserve the large scale fates that were placed against him to kill his father and to murder his. Or no. Yeah, to kill his father and to sleep with his mother. Right. He didn't, he didn't earn those through his own actions. So I think that in certain ways, Sophocles removing that large scale culpability from Oedipus is what allows him then to have this intertwining of the curse and the blessing. And I have to tell you, I'm looking forward to discussing that play because I really liked that. And it really made me think about Odysseus. It made me think about Job. And the way that Sophocles takes this is in a different way than both of those characters. Right. About how the retribution and the redemption is a better word there actually comes about. So I think that his lack of culpability paves the way for him to become slightly more complicated.
- [57:02]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, absolutely.
- [57:03]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Let's look at Tiresias. So Tiresias shows up. I love when Tiresias shows up in a play. Right. It's like, it's like Gandalf showing up. Like someone is good about to get it. The prophet Nathan reminds me of Nathan showing up before David. Like, and again, like you've already mentioned, I mean, Sophocles plays off this tremendously. I loved what you said earlier about there being an inverse relationship. So if you can physically see, you're spiritually blind. And if you're physically blind. Right. You can spiritually see. I mean, he loves playing off of this.
- [57:32]
Eli Stone
There's also the blind bard. Right. Like in Homer. Right. Like there's also a poet, the poets, the prophets.
- [57:38]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And it's really interesting in my mind to read Tiresias here that he comes in and how similar this is then to his discussion with Creon from Antigone. And also that Creon somewhat witnessed all this to a certain degree. And still you think that like when Tiresia shows up to him in Antigone, he'd be more sensitive because he knows that Tiresia showed up to Oedipus and Oedipus didn't listen to him and it turned out terribly for him.
- [58:03]
Josiah Moser
Yeah.
- [58:04]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And one of the things that I, I find interesting about the prophets here that I don't think we get in like the Old Testament prophets is this like withholding. And so like in Antigone it was like, hey, you know, you need you need to change. You need to have that metanoia. You need to do something. And Creon's like, no, no, no. And he's like, oh, you're going to make me, you know, tell the secrets of my heart if you don't do this. He's like, well, I'm not doing it. And so then he tells like the second shoe to drop. And so it leaves you hanging, like, wait, could Creon have saved Antigone? Like, if he would have acted earlier on the first part, like, was that his window of opportunity? And here you get something similar, they're not the same. Where Tiresias, like, wants to tell him a little bit, but doesn't actually want to tell him the whole thing. I found that odd. And it's like he, Oedipus solicits the whole truth out of Tiresias by basically making him angry.
- [58:54]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, he really questions his. Not just making him angry, but. But tries to discredit him as a seer completely. Tells him that his gift of prophecy is nothing whatsoever.
- [59:05]
Eli Stone
Well, he actually accuses him of accepting a bribe from Creon. He's like, that's the first thing he jumps to. Which, if you remember from Antigone, is the first thing that Creon accuses Tiresias of.
- [59:15]
Josiah Moser
Well, pick up a pin. Something I dropped earlier. He also, he says, when the Sphinx, the chanting fury, kept her death watch here, why silent then? Not a word to set our people free. There was a riddle, not for some passerby to solve. It cried out for a prophet. Where were you? So here, in challenging him as a prophet, he's also sort of undermining his own achievement. If it cried out for a prophet, you know, who are you to step up and impose yourself upon that situation? Which is why I was saying earlier, it almost seems like even his most heroic act was one of impiety. Or that could be a bad way of reading it. I might be wrong about that.
- [59:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I actually really liked that little barb. I thought that was a good barb from Oedipus. I mean, just as a first time reader, like, oh, you're a wonderful prophet. You know everything. Why did you come solve the riddle? Why did you let our people suffer? I actually thought that was good. Now obviously the retort to that, at least in my head is, is that the prophets don't know everything, right? They're not the gods. That's the whole problem. The prophet's not the God. The prophet only knows what the gods tell him. So it's not like Tiresias can just go around solving everyone's problems. What did we take? So kind of towards the end of their back and forth in Fagals, this is 499, when Oedipus is starting to kind of clue in maybe just a little bit. Right. Because Oedipus is like, parents who. Wait, who is my father? Right. We're starting to have a little bit of, you know, a little bit daylight here. Oedipus is starting to get some questions. Tiresias responds, this day will bring your birth and your destruction. And the way I read that was, again, Sophocles playing out this theme of the Blessing and the Curse. The blessing side, I think, is really hard to see in this play because. So I'll. I'll be honest with you. I think I see the blessing side in this only because I've read Oedipus at Clonus. And so you're looking for it because when I've read this the first time, just like a raw take, this was just a downward spiral. Like, there's no. There's no.
- [61:09]
Eli Stone
Oh, yeah. There's no hope.
- [61:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
There's no hope. There's no redemption. Like, because the problem is. And why. I think why Aerosol likes this and why it's magnificent, even if, you know, the ending is that, like, once he realizes who he is and, like, all of a sudden, he's entrapped. It doesn't matter. Like, you did all these things a long time ago. Like, there's literally nothing you can do. Like, the trap has already sprung. You're all. You're just realizing that you're in the trap. Yeah.
- [61:34]
Josiah Moser
And my perspective on this is a little bit different. As someone who read this all the way back in high school and then didn't ever read Oedipus at Colonus until, you know, within the last year. The first time I read that, it was so redemptive to me, and it brought the story around full circle in a way that I did not know that the story came full circle. I was kind of uninformed on that front, but it does say a little bit about.
- [62:00]
Eli Stone
Everyone needs to look forward to Oedipus at Colonus.
- [62:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah.
- [62:03]
Josiah Moser
It is my favorite of the three by far.
- [62:05]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, let's look at. Let's jump to Creon, because as I mentioned earlier, like, I. So in Fagos is like, 575. I think this is Creon at his best. Out of all three plays. I think this is Creon at his best, because what happened.
- [62:21]
Eli Stone
Yeah, I think this is really, really telling. So actually, I. I Think I was. I wasn't here for the conversation on Antigone, but other. We've had our Sunday great books, we talked about Antigone. One of the things that I point out in Antigone is that there is a. An increase in stature amongst Creon's interlocutors. First Antigone, right? Like she's a woman. She's like a subordinate to him. Like in the sense that she's a lower family member. She's a woman in a society. She's a subject. He's the king, right? So there's all of these relationships. Creon should not be taking advice from this woman. But then his son, the prince comes, who's a man, kind of an equal stature, also royal. So there's like inequality there that they have. And then Tiresias comes to him and Creon should be subordinate to what Tiresia says, because Tiresias represents the gods, but he doesn't in any of those cases. Here we actually getting the same sorts of relationships, but in their inverse order. So Tiresias comes first to Oedipus and tells him what, you know, what he needs to say. And now we have Creon. And Creon is acting much as Creon's son, Heyman. He, in that play, in Antigone is. Is acting like a voice of reason throughout. And here Creon is the voice of reason, right? So there is this. This sort of inverse. And then later, of course, we have Jocasta, who Oedipus, you know, this is his wife. Maybe he shouldn't be listening to her in. In. In that sense because she's like excluded from the normal social purview of like, who would be a good person to listen to in these circumstances? Whose advice should you be taking? But I think in another way, if you think that Yocasta is his mother, he really should be listening to like his mother. Right. Like. So there's this sort of. There's really. I don't. I can't tell if. If the. There's an inverse relationship in the people that Oedipus should be listening to and he's choosing not to, or if it's actually the correct one. But I digress either way. I do think it is interesting that the. That the series of conversations is exactly mirrored from what we saw in the last play.
- [64:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, that's a good. That's a good structural parallel. I like that a lot. Do you think though that. So this has got a Creon at his best in a certain way, like, he's very docile. Oedipus throws a lot at him, and he just seems to let it slide and comes back. He seems very loyal, particularly since we read it in publication order. This is surprising, right? I mean, Creon's personality, his character, his arete in this place. Surprising. Do you think, though, that it also is simultaneously Oedipus at his worst? Because this is where I think he just implodes. And let me. Let me give you maybe a textual thing to point at in a little bit before 705 and Fagles. This is on page 195 in that edition. Creon says, what if you're wholly wrong, like Oedipus? Like, what if you're wrong? Like, what are you wrong about all this? Oedipus responds, no matter. I must rule. Creon responds, not if you rule unjustly. So a few things here. One like this, Oedipus seems to. Whatever order Oedipus was trying to work within, he. He seems to become the tyrant, right in the. In the r sense of the word, in which he is putting his particular good above the common good of the. Of the polis. Here too. Like, it's almost painful to see Creon handle this conversation so well and see Oedipus slip into tyranny when then he himself slips into tyranny when he becomes king in Antigone. In certain ways, he might forewarn about this that he actually doesn't want the power of the throne and things like this. So I think there's. There's some context that Sophocles gives us, but in that kind of relationship, Creon seems to be at his best. Oedipus here seems to be at his worst.
- [66:18]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, it's interesting. It's almost like the authority makes them paranoid a little bit. It's a different kind of paranoid because you see tyranny in both cases, but for kind of different reasons as well.
- [66:32]
Eli Stone
I was about to say, I think it's. It's like, this is the curse of kingship, right? Like. And Creon points to it, right, Like, I have all of the power of the king, but I. I sleep at night, like. And I think maybe going back to Josiah's point, like, is this a critique of.
- [66:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Of.
- [66:55]
Eli Stone
You know, a tyranny or a. Or a monarchy, right? Like that this, the one person who's in charge also is constantly afraid for his life that he's going to be assassinated because the next person to do that gets to be made king. Right. I think maybe this. Maybe this is a partial critique, but it does seem to be a curse analogous to the curse that Oedipus's family has, which is that, like, you know, there's this, you know, sort of incestuous relationship going on and like, fathers killing or sons killing their fathers and all of these things much like we see in Agamemnon's family. Right. But yeah, in this particular instance, I think it is interesting that there. There seems to be. This seems to be the curse of the kingship of Thebes, that whoever takes power is going to lose it by violence because of their fear of it.
- [67:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I agree. Because even Creon talks about down at. Let's see, a little after 745, like, Creon can tell that, like Oedipus, like, your personality is its own punishment. Like this. This you're imploding on yourself, brother. Like, you can't see this. But it also, like, there's just a thick irony to it because it's the exact same critique that you can make of Creon. Because I would say, and for those of us, you know, who were for the listeners when we worked through Antigone, you know, I think Creon actually, I gave a strong defense of Creon throughout Antigone, that he's trying to hold a polis together that's just gone through a civil war. Sophocles really likes this analogy that the polis is like a ship. Actually used multiple times in this play. And it's also used in Antigone. Right. He has a wonderful line when he first opens here. And just the Creon, Right.
- [68:35]
Eli Stone
The.
- [68:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The ship of state has been rocked, but the gods have kept it safe. Which, again, irony. But Creon, I think, at the beginning really presents himself as like, a common good character. Like we. We have to hold the polis together. And even like, his understanding of justice, you know, you hate your enemies and you love your friends, and for him, the polis is the judge of that. Right. You can't be a traitor to the city and we bury you. We hate our enemies. You just go out there and rot with all the other generals that attacked Thebes. So here again, Creon's character is, like, somewhat jarring because he seems to be just so long suffering and docile. And again, yeah. What is it about Thebes and that throne that just seems to make people implode. Yeah.
- [69:16]
Josiah Moser
And I was making the observation. I feel like Oedipus reason for being paranoid is very different from Creon's reason. Oedipus is actually seems more selfish because rather than seeking the common good, he's trying to preserve this relationship that he has, not just with Jocasta, but with the city as a whole that has come to revere him. He doesn't want them to lose the leader that he thinks is so worthy, but he himself does not want to lose the city that supports him either.
- [69:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right, so let's look at the. The entrance of Jocasta. So in Fagals, we're on page 200. This is line a little bit before 770. So Jocasta comes in, right? Queen of Thebes, wife at the moment to Oedipus. And so she comes in when Creon and Oedipus are, you know, arguing with each other. And so she then tells us of an oracle. And so this is at line 785. And so they basically say, well, an oracle came to Laius one fine day, which was her husband. I won't say from Apollo himself, but his underlings, his priests. And it declared that doom would strike him down at the hands of a son, our son to be born of our own flesh and blood. And so we find out that she has also received this prophecy. And so they had a boy. And so what they did is they bound him. He's an infant. So he's a. He's a baby. They bind him and they're going to expose him, right? They're going to leave him out on the mountainside. So one of the things though that I think is maybe worth mentioning here is that you already made, Eli, a good comparison between this play and this kind of lineage of Oedipus to the house of Atreus with the Iliad and the Oresteia and things like this. And this one too, just a little bit of backstory. From my quick understanding, this one too has a multi generational curse. The whole house is cursed. And just like with Agamemnon, we kind of enter like in Media res, like we don't get the first generation that's cursed. We're here on the second or third generation. And so my understanding from Laius is that he was cursed by Apollo. So why does he even get this terrible oracle, Right? I mean, that's actually the play doesn't answer this question. Like why does he get a terrible oracle? Like, why is this justice? And so my understanding is that Laius, when he was younger, served in the house of a king, and that he raped the king's son. I don't remember his name, but he raped the king's son. And then the son kills himself. And so Apollo, one of his patronages which according to everything we've had today, he has a lot right, is young men. And so it's Apollo then like there's a punishment that's put on him that his own son will kill him. And so this is what Jocasta is trying to play out as she discusses this oracle.
- [72:02]
Eli Stone
Yeah, and I think obviously too right, there's this suicide, right, like that in, in Lius Laius's case, right? Like this, this boy that he had this relationship with. And obviously we've seen that Antigone kills herself at the end of Antigone Yocasta. We're not at that point in the play yet, but that's what ends up happening at the end of this play. Spoiler alert for a 2000 year old book. But yeah, so I think that that does serve to provide a lot of context to like what's going on here and why is this curse playing out? Like, why is everyone doing this? Like, what's going on here?
- [72:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
To Josiah's point though, earlier into our discussion, this also then brings in the question of the relationship between what is fated to happen to you and your excellence in embracing that fate. And I will tell you, Jocasta here is not an empathetic character for me. Like I just, I in, in Laius too. So it's like you guys get this prophecy. You also get this prophecy because you did a heinous act and so then you turn to another brutality, right? So you're going to expose this infant, which you know, obviously might have been more normative for them than it is for us, but at least there's this thing there. Like he's not deformed, he's not going to be something contrary to the Polish common good just because of who he is, you know, outside the prophecy. This is because you're trying to avert it, right? So you've received your fate and so it seems like they can be critiqued because instead of like, okay, well then I'm just going to be virtuous towards my son. And yeah, maybe the axe head hits me or you know, he accidentally tripped down the stairs or something and I die. No, I'm going to have this. I'm going to try and expose him, which is very clearly trying to get out of fate. And I think that's the irony, right, of all these tragedies is that as soon as some character is like, I know what I can do to escape my fate, you're like, this is gonna be awful. Like, I don't know what you're Playing whatever your plan is, it's going to be terrible.
- [74:00]
Eli Stone
10 times worse makes it 10 times worse.
- [74:03]
Josiah Moser
Yeah. And I think as you said before, Oedipus isn't culpable for the essential facts of killing his father and sleeping with his mother. But I think we could consider this prophecy as something of a culpability, you know, multiplier almost, that those few acts that he did in his life that were reprehensible, you know, his rage on the road, his rash vows, you know, and any impiety that he's committed makes him so much more odious to the gods that are already going to take any chance they can, apparently to make his life more miserable. So any opportunity he gives them is just going to seal his fate. So much worse.
- [74:47]
Eli Stone
I think too, perhaps, really. And I mean in this instance, right, Yocasta's like kind of conclusion to this whole thing is like, see, profits are worthless because that kid's dead. Right?
- [75:01]
Josiah Moser
Just the worst take ever.
- [75:04]
Eli Stone
I mean. But yeah, I mean this is just a tremendous impiety, like just almost as close to blasphemy as you can get. And I think obviously Oedipus slips into this. Maybe there's some like Adam and Eve imagery here, right, of like the woman leading the man, you know, into this bad sort of way of thinking about got the gods or prophecy or what have you, which obviously sort of mirrors what we saw in Antigone, where Antigone seems to have the right and kind of upright sort of way of going about it. But really I think it's Oedipus's impiety. So again, like, if we're talking about those three. Those three vows or the three Delphic maxims rather, that Odysseus is kind of breaking like he's made a rash vow. He's immoderate in his conversation with Creon and lets his temper sort of drive the conversation here. He's forgotten himself. He has ceased to. I mean, like, like kind of like you pointed out, Deacon, he's never known himself actually. But even in the capacity that he has known himself, he has forgotten his place and chosen to speak ill of prophets and the gods.
- [76:19]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I mean, outside of having, like, outside of having amnesia, Oedipus might not know himself the most of any human being that's ever walked in a Greek play. Right. I mean, that's part of the irony of the play and why it makes it fun to watch him find the criminal and discover that it's himself. So I do have like one esoteric Take here that I was just going to throw out, which is the three crossroads. Right. So we get this, we get this story and we meet at the three crossroads and we, you know, we find out obviously, like, this is his father, right. So they, they, they had this narrative and so they play this out. But I really caught my attention that they kept stressing that this happened at the, at the three crossroads. And I was really curious and I failed to find confirmation of this, of whether or not this is an esoteric reference to Hecate. Right. H E C A T E Hecate. She's, she's praised in Theogony, she's not really mentioned in Homer, but she's the goddess of crossroads. But also, and like a half a dozen other things that are somewhat esoteric of like, you know, moonlight and witchcraft and necromancy and et cetera. But she's a goddess of crossroads. And not just any crossroads. Three crossroads, Right. Because she's three bodied. So a lot of times you'll see her like kind of around a pillar where she has three faces, you know, facing out. Right. So she's in the middle of crossroads, she sees them all. And this is because she's also tied to fortune, fate, etc. So I was really curious here of like the stressing of the three crossroads, whether this is like an esoteric reference to Hecate.
- [77:54]
Eli Stone
It may be. I'm not super familiar with Hecate. I do know. So the. What is it? It's the three. It's the road to Thebes, it's the road to Delphi, and it's the road to Dalia. I don't know this, these regions in Greek, in Greece. It might be interesting. Like, I wonder if that's a region that's nearby Corinth or kind of in that same region where, where Oedipus would have been coming from. I mean, I think it's implied that he was coming from Delphi. Right. Like, and that's how he came to Thebes, is by way of the same crossroad.
- [78:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It just seems like that it's referenced too many times to not be an analog for something, in my opinion. Right. And maybe I'm, I'm getting too esoteric here. But like it's mentioned, it's not just one time. They mentioned over and over time and the fate of the three crossroads, et cetera. So whether it's Hecate or like, it's actually locations then kind of serve as some kind of microcosm for the tension of the play as a whole. There's Something going on with the crossroads.
- [79:00]
Josiah Moser
I'm curious about it. She said there's a place called Focus. I just looked it up. I don't know if that's pronounced right at all. Focus. Focus. Apparently there was a temple of Apollo there. So there's one more thing.
- [79:12]
Eli Stone
Okay, nice.
- [79:13]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So there you go.
- [79:14]
Eli Stone
And then there's the Thebes, the armpit of Greece. Everything bad happens in Thebes, the armpit of Greece.
- [79:21]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's terrible. Okay, well, let's, let's.
- [79:23]
Eli Stone
Okay, I do have something else here that I want to add. So obviously, like, Oedipus starts to piece this together. Like, he starts to figure out, like, oh, I actually killed the king. Like, he doesn't now, obviously that's bad. He's like, that's no, that's really no mojo. Like, he. He's like using all this language, like, oh, wow, that's like, really bad. Like, I'm gonna be exiled, like, I'm gonna be cursed by the gods. All of these things. Like, how could I do this? He does not, like, obviously understand the full gravity of what that means, but he's smart enough to, like, latch onto that and realize, oh, yeah, like, this was probably me. Like, as you told that story, I just realized, shoot, like, there was a guy I killed a long time ago at a triple crossroad. And so it is interesting. Like, we see Oedipus's wit in some way, like, going, and he gets it. There's other times where it doesn't. It feels like Oedipus isn't connecting dots that he should. And I think it's interesting that it's interesting to pay attention to when that is and when that isn't the case.
- [80:31]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
See, I read that as he's a very clever man. I think he's already connected the dots. Because some of the questions there I have is when is it that these characters actually realize it as opposed to when they actually express it? Because Jocasta figures it out, right? She's the most explicit where you realize, like, all sudden she's just like, stop asking questions. Don't ask any more questions, right? You're like, what are you on about? And then she just leaves and goes and kills herself. And so I took it as I think Oedipus knows way earlier. But then he has this like, knee jerk reaction to like, I have to find the witnesses. Like, I have to confirm these things, like, from the witnesses. But I took it as that it's not that he's not clicking, but rather like he's trying to grasp for, like, one last. Like, even the killing the father. Well, we gotta find this witness, because, you know, one of the stories said there were thieves, there were plural. So maybe I just happened to kill the guy that looked just like the king at the location, but it was two different events. So we're gonna ask the witness. So I. I felt like he's, like, kind of squirming here to get out, but I think. I think he already knows that fate is crushing him.
- [81:37]
Eli Stone
Well, even there, that's interesting, because what is that witness? He's an eyewitness. He's, like, trying to find someone who can rely on that physical sight and, like, hoping that that can redeem him. And so maybe back to what Josiah was saying earlier. There's this. He's, like, latching on to the physical. Like, oh, well, maybe, like, if I just dig into the facts more, it will somehow, like, what? Exonerate me, right? Like, it will somehow come out that this. This isn't as bad as I thought it was.
- [82:10]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, so as we push kind of into the. What would be like, the second half of the play here, despite, like, the line numbers, we get that Oedipus tells us that he also has an oracle, right? So we're piecing together all of these oracles together. And it's interesting to me. This is kind of where you think, like, brother, haven't these dots connected at some point? Or haven't Weren't you, like, a little bit more worried about this? So he's like, oh, yeah, by the way, some guy at a banquet yelled out that I wasn't really, you know, the child of my mother and father. So I went to Delphi to figure out, and Delphi tells him, you are fated the couple with your mother. You will bring a breed of children into light no man can bear to see. You will kill your father and the one who gave you life. I. I feel like my response to that would have been like, I'm just gonna go live in a cave. Like, I'm like, what am I gonna do here? Like, what do I do? Like, I'll just go and become whatever the Greek equivalent of ancient Greece is, a monk. And I'm just gonna live in a cave. And if it's my fate, it's my fate, but I don't know what to do about it. He seems, like, very nonchalant about this horrific prophecy also because the guy, literally, someone just told you that you might not actually be their kid, and he just kind of, like, waves this off, and it's like, no, I'll just leave. What is it? Corinth, right? He's like, I'll just leave. Corinth. To escape the prophecy. I found this. Like, that's sometimes. Honestly, as a first reader, when I was reading this, I was like, I feel like Sophocles is stretching this too much. Like. Like, the domino should have fallen a little faster here. And maybe that's my own malformation. Like, I'm not appreciating the nuance of the play, but sometimes it was hard for me to track how this was, like, the normal human response.
- [83:46]
Josiah Moser
I don't think it's supposed to be a normal human response, actually. I think part of it is knowing that the Theban audience who's coming to see this play already knows this story thoroughly because it's the story of their ancestry. You know, it's this. It's the mythical story of, you know, one of their great rulers of old. The whole artistry in this is not what happens, but the way that it unfolds and the way that it comes to light. And again, with it being Apollo and revelation, the way things are brought to light, what he's doing himself is bringing all of these different aspects to light one at a time. And he actually belabors the process of the final confirmation of the facts, in a sense, that really just increases the dramatic tension, even though everyone knows it's a foregone conclusion, just because it gives time for him to feel basically the weight of what's happened.
- [84:37]
Eli Stone
I think, too, maybe there's something to be said that obviously, for all of his vices, we have to also recognize Oedipus is lauded here as he will be lauded in the next play for his wisdom. And I think there is maybe something to be said about the dedication of the mind or the intellect to seeing something through to its conclusion, even if it's a very uncomfortable conclusion.
- [85:06]
Josiah Moser
I'm curious. Sorry.
- [85:08]
Eli Stone
No, I mean, that's really all I had to say is I think maybe there is a sense in which Oedipus is trying to. He is. I mean, this is. It's. It's interesting, Deacon, because obviously you mentioned he does not know himself at all. He knows himself, like, least well of all of these characters. Right? Because at least. Right. Like, even his own children, they don't know that Oedipus is their father, but they know that Jocast is their mother. So even there, they have more self knowledge than Oedipus does. This is the process of Oedipus coming to know himself And I think as tragic as that is in his particular circumstances, I think there is a nobility in the fact that Oedipus doggedly seeks to completely and thoroughly know himself. Even when he starts seeing all of these signs that this is. This is probably not good. It would have been very easy, I think, for him to just say, you know what? Maybe in order to preserve my rule, I should sweep this under the rug. Maybe I should blame this on Creon and throw him under the butt. He never does that. I mean, he almost does that with Creon. But that's because he's mad, not because he is unwilling to see the truth.
- [86:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I like that. I like that a lot. He does push. I mean, that's true. I think part of Oedipus here that he does deserve credit for is that once he kind of sees his life unraveling, his pursuit of the truth will not stop pulling on those threads. Right? And Sophocles makes this very clear because he's given several opportunities to stop. Jocasta, once she kind of realizes, says, please stop the old shepherd. Right? The old shepherd says to stop as well. And I agree with you that Oedipus seems to be quite good then about pushing into this for the sake of truth. I need to know who I am for the sake of truth. I wonder. As you speak, Eli, it just occurs to me to what degree Oedipus is the analog to the moral life of know thyself. Because knowing thyself is hard. Like anyone listening to this says, well, I know myself. That's probably not true, right? Like knowing yourself. Truly, to be able to step back and see yourself and. And see your own interior life is incredibly difficult. And you have to face a lot of hardship if you're actually going to try and in work and move your soul into arete. Into a certain human excellence, even from, like, a natural standpoint. So it occurs to me how much here, Oedipus, with these tremendous difficulties, can be read maybe as an analog to the moral life overall of how hard it is to face our own shortcomings and our own ugliness of our soul.
- [87:57]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, I actually think that's a really good observation. I was curious, Eli. You said that he was lauded for his wisdom, but I. I only ever saw him in this play lauded for his wit, which I always think of as something of very, very different. Because I think one of the important things in this play is that we see a transition of his character, especially from this play to the next one. This play, he's Built everything that he is upon his wit. And in many ways, I like Deacon that you drew a connection between him and Odysseus, who is also, you know, the. The most hated of all the gods because he's using his wit to try to wriggle out of his situation in so many cases. And we're also seeing sort of a bridge character between the mythic, legendary characters of old and the way that the Greeks have come to be. You know, people who use their mind to think and analyze and come up with these things. And I actually think there may be something that's been on my mind lately is just thinking about the difference between analysis and contemplation, where analysis is where we're taking thoughts and breaking them down logically and trying to come up to some. Come up with some sort of solution or whatever. Whereas contemplation, we're simply, like, trying to purge the bad thoughts and like, wait for the truth and being willing to accept it as it comes to us without, you know, without engaging it necessarily on our own terms, but on the terms that it comes to us with. And it's almost like those who have physical sight are using their eyes to change the image, whereas those who are blind are able to receive the truth in its unadulterated form. And that actually, you know, has a lot of connections to some writings of the Carmelite mystics and things like that, which are very, very interesting to me.
- [89:52]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I agree. I think. Is there a huge distinction between wit and wisdom? I'm not sure. Like, the question that Eli poses about Oedipus himself here, I think is a good one, and one that I'm not sure I have a knee jerk answer to. But overall, like, when we look at Odysseus, like, Odysseus has a lot of wit. I don't think he has a ton of wisdom. Right. He's not like a philosopher. But I think you do see here, one of the things on the podcast we've been discussing is that these Greek plays really do serve as an intellectual bridge between Homer and Plato. And I think you can really see them tilling the soil. I mean, after reading these plays, it is not surprising to me that someone like Socrates pops up. It's not surprising that someone like Plato pops up. Someone who then takes these and wants to discuss these concepts, qua concepts. Actually still does it, though, in a poetic artistry, right through the dialogues, if you will, on Plato's side. But it's really showing me that they were really ripe for someone to come in and contemplate these things, right? And like you said, show a real contemplation, which it's not surprising that you know that it would be in the Carmelite mystics or all these things. Because, you know, Christian spirituality, I mean, just, just Plato Symposium sets a tone for Christian spirituality for about over a thousand years, particularly through how it affected Plotinus and then Neoplatonics and then Augustine, who also then plays heavily off site in light, in all of these metaphors. Think of the cave, think of the twice bisected line, think of the analogy of the sun. So no, I, I think I just love, I've really grown as someone, like I said earlier, who was first exposed to the great books starting at Plato and didn't really have these, this poetic tilling of the soil. I've really come to appreciate seeing these concepts because another huge one like when we talked about Escalis is justice. I mean, you just see them just discussing justice as much as they can, as much as their grammar allows. And you can tell they're just ripe for someone to come along and really take up this issue directly.
- [91:47]
Eli Stone
Well, I think. And on that note you mentioned one of the other themes in this play is suffering. And in the next one it's the redemption of that suffering. That's not something that the Greeks had. That's not something you see in the Iliad, right? Like good deeds and virtue and strength are rewarded in this life. Like there is nothing beyond sort of your immediate material gain, your chaos, your glory, right, like that. That is what in the Iliad is going to give you eternal life in the sense that people remember you after you die. And in the Odyssey, it's, that's the thing that's going to get you home. You rely on your chaos to get the things that you need. But all of that is towards sort of this very material or self serving end. Whereas we see Oedipus dealing with a very different form of suffering. And the question is, what could the absolute misfortune of Oedipus's life possibly be good for? Where is the blessing in this curse? And very much this is something we see, as you mentioned in the book of Job, there's sort of these suffering, suffering figures, a myth, a mythic suffering figure, I guess is what Oedipus is. And really this is like, as you mentioned, the low point in this whole tragedy, right? Or this whole tragic cycle. We start with Antigone, which doesn't really. It kind of ends on a pretty haunting note, I think. And then you get Just dumped into the slump of this. This text, but obviously with an eye to what happens in the next book. Oedipus at Colonus. There's. There is a chance of redemption, but in the meantime, Oedipus does have to work out who he is. I do like what you said, Josiah, too, about Oedipus being praised, maybe more for his wit, I think, when I was suggesting wisdom, there's sort of the riddle of the Sphinx, right? Like someone who can see and parse out mysteries and the riddles of the universe. Like, this is sort of the. The foundations of science, you can say, right? Like Aristotle, like when he's looking at water and rocks and, like, why do rocks sink in water? And, like, trying to parse out how does the physical world work. That sort of analysis that you're talking about, I think is. Is a form of wisdom. But I think you're correct that what we're seeing is Oedipus is. Oedipus is abusing that power in a way. But even in its abuse, he's. His intellect is not. Like, he's not abusing his intellect in a way that's entirely devoid of some service to the truth. Obviously, he's being led to the ultimate revelation. Whether or not that revelation happens independent of his analytical exercises, I think is an interesting question. But at the end of it, I think, as we'll see in Colonus, I do believe we see that Oedipus does gain wisdom, and he begins to exercise that very powerfully in the next text. But maybe. Maybe you're correct. Maybe it's more apt to say that right now he's just in this analytic or witting, trying to parse out and see what he can do to get out of his fate situation here.
- [95:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You know, one of the things, too, that I think is really fascinating even as you, like, judge our own conversation, is how much we're relying on Oedipus at Colonis to give us hope and interpret this play. When they're not written as a triad.
- [95:27]
Eli Stone
They'Re not written that way, right?
- [95:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
And so you have to realize that, you know, you said this was actually given at Thebes. So you have to realize, like, this play is done, and then, like, I. I haven't even looked. I don't know how long they had to wait for the other one. But also, I don't even know if they had anticipation that there would be another one. So, like, you have. So I guess my point here to push in and maybe even critique myself is we have to show what is the pedagogy and purpose of this play without reference to Oedipus at Colonus? And I think just to throw out a thesis, I think it has to be that man is not in charge of his own destiny, that there is a fate that is part of a larger structured cosmos that man does not control. He's not the measure of all things. Because here's a man who literally didn't do anything to merit this curse upon himself. Now, how he embraced it, we could critique, but he didn't do anything to do this. There's no culpability on his side for the larger architecture of this curse. And he just has to bear it. That's what he does. Like there's no redemption at the end. Like, he has to bear it. So, like, what is the pedagogical suffering of Oedipus for Sophocles? And we saw that for Aeschylus, man gains wisdom under suffering. And we even saw that to a certain degree in Homer with Odysseus's journey home. Right. I mean, he. It's not true wisdom, but he does have some level of maturation on his. On his journey home through his suffering. Right. He does change. And so in here, though, it's not Oedipus that seems to change per se. I mean, I guess he does have a certain humility at the end. So maybe he is a catechetical figure. But it seems really aimed at the audience that, like, you have to understand that we are subject to destiny and fate and, you know, that sub theme of prophecy, and you're not really actually a free agent the way you think you are. And you also should not doubt the efficacy of the prophecies. So, I mean, if I have to try and isolate the purpose of the play outside of Oedipus at Colonis, I think it rests somewhere in there.
- [97:42]
Josiah Moser
Yeah. Bringing back a theme from Antigone which would have preceded this. I'm thinking about how the appeal was made to the. The law of the gods being superior to the law of the state. And I think that there's sort of an application here as well, that the decrees of the gods are not only superior to the laws of the state, but also of the individual ruler. And all of us as people like that, we very much, as you said, like, we're not just totally free agents. We have to submit to the law of the gods for our own happiness, you know, for the. For the best possible outcome of our lives. We have to see our place underneath them.
- [98:23]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. So let's Anchor this to the text a bit. So we get in the next kind of section. The messenger comes in. This is the messenger from Corinth. That's like, hey, by the way, you know, your. Your supposed father in Corinth? What's his name? Polybus. Polybus, yeah. Polybus has died. And look at the response to this, right? So look at Oedipus. Oedipus's response to this, because remember, if he's died, Oedipus didn't kill him. And so Oedipus thinks that he has skirted half of the prophecy against him, right? That he would kill his father. And so he says, but now all those prophecies I feared, Polybius packs them off to sleep with him in hell. And then even Jocasta, I. I think Jocasta here honestly gives the epitome of what Sophocles is trying to kick out against. She says, this is line, I don't know. 170. What should a man fear? It's all chance. Chance rules our lives. Not a man on earth can see a day ahead groping through the dark. Better to live at random, best we can. And as for this marriage with your mother, have no fear. Many a man before you and his dreams has shared his mother's bed. Take such things for shadows, nothing at all. Live Oedipus as if there's no tomorrow. So let's sidestep the whole, like, normalization of men wanting to sleep with their moms. Let's just table that for a second. To. I think that this is. Is this not the contrary to living inside the ordered whole?
- [99:53]
Eli Stone
No, there's, like, there's no tomorrow.
- [99:55]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You just look like it's all chance. And I think so in certain ways, if I had to pinpoint and say, where. Where is the false teaching here? Who. Who does Sophocles put the antithesis in the mouth of. I think it's here. I think it's Jocasta, right? She gives the exact opposite of the pedagogical lesson of the text.
- [100:12]
Josiah Moser
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more.
- [100:14]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Okay, well, then can we talk about the whole, like, normalization of sleeping with your mom? Because, I mean, this was a little on the nose, and I can see why Freud has a heyday with this, because she makes it way more explicit. I was not anticipating a line like this where she, like, tries to, like, soften it, like, oh, don't worry. Everyone's had that dream. I'm like, no, they have not. What is this? So anyway, because one of the questions Here for me is, when does Jocasta actually know? Or when. When does she start getting a bad feeling? I'm not entirely sure it's this early or, you know, because before people have. This is the. If this is the. Know yourself. And all of a sudden we're going to. I like this read. So maybe let's say all these characters are going to be analogs to how different souls come to know themselves or fight against it. Way before a soul will accept truth. That's negative to it. Even before, I would say the soul accepts that there is a truth that it doesn't like, it already starts building up walls for why this truth cannot actually be true. Right. Even the concept that this could be true has to be protected against. And I really feel like that's where Jocasta's soul is right now. It's like, we're just. I'm just throwing stuff here up against this that there's no way this is true, but I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't a possibility.
- [101:31]
Josiah Moser
And I feel that that inkling might already be there because she was trying to dismiss prophecy in general when he was like, wait, hold on, hold on. You said that he died at a crossroads. The guy I killed was at a crossroads. You don't think there's any chance. And she's like, but it was supposed to be my son, and clearly you're not my son, so we're good. Because the horror.
- [101:52]
Eli Stone
I mean, but that's. That's. That's the. That's the fault, right? Like, and this is the. The fault that Oedipus doesn't have. Right? Like, his intellect is able to sniff out that, like, and. And Jocasta is just, like, very easily, like, willing to dismiss it. Like, we're not going to think about this. We're not going to go down that road. And so I think Oedipus is the one that, like, is honest enough to recognize. No, there's. That's not necessarily true. I have to dig deeper. And I think as converts, maybe we all have this experience, right, where it's like, there's someone else who's like, ah, you know, that's a. That's an interesting question, but, you know, I just don't think about it. And we're all just like, I can't not think about it. And so, yeah, yeah, that journey, it's an excellent, excellent.
- [102:40]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's an excellent tethering because, I mean, it's just what the soul does, right? I mean, we just don't want to accept truth, particularly our modern age gives us so many distractions, right. And no, I think it is part of the conversion process. I mean, part of the conversion process is very ugly of having to accept a lot of deficiencies in your own thoughts and the way that you've lived your life prior and then also not listening to the jocastas in your life who constantly are telling you to push it away, which I think I feel like everyone has. Because the thing too that should occur to us is that know yourself is also central to the Christian ethic. Right. So this is one of the reasons we talk about on the podcast is like, why are we reading the Greeks? Why do we do all these things? Well, you know, our broad maxim we keep going back to is like, well, Greek reason coupled together with Hebrew faith under a Roman order prepared the world to receive Jesus Christ. And I don't think people understand how much of this know yourself out of the oracle Adelphi, which then very much then becomes the almost the first principle of the moral teaching of Socrates, particularly if you've read the dialogue Alcibiades. This is the whole point, like step one on the, on the road to being a philosopher is to know yourself. And it's very difficult. But knowing yourself and that self knowledge and honestly, which is a self love as well, right. Coming to love yourself in a real way, which wants to be transformative. This is also central to the Christian ethic and people forget this. So, you know, we're supposed to, you know, number one, we love the Lord our God with our heart, soul and mind. But two, we love our neighbor as ourselves. And if you don't know yourself, right. If you don't actually have an ordered self love, it's actually very difficult to love your neighbor. I actually think a lot of people struggle to love their neighbor because they don't love themselves. They haven't come to actually understand themselves because knowledge comes before love.
- [104:34]
Josiah Moser
Right.
- [104:34]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
We're called to know love and serve. So I, I just think that you could really start to unpack this and we're going to see this on the podcast as we kind of finish out some of the, the Greek plays we have left on the roster. Then we're going to enter into basically a year of Plato. And Plato is going to predicate a lot of his moral maxims on this exact principle.
- [104:55]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, I think that self knowledge really does touch on some of that, like interior contemplation, something that, you know, just going back to the distinction between analysis and contemplation, analysis is everywhere in our current day and age, in our cultural society, Contemplation is kind of a hard thing to find in general, like, which is the way that we're supposed to approach literature, the way we're supposed to approach the arts and so many other things. You see a lot of criticism, you see a lot of people that will break it down and talk about its historical context and things like that, but how many people are willing to sit before it and to be transformed interiorly? I think, even. Even before the love of a neighbor. How can we love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength if we don't even know what our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength are? Or how do you them?
- [105:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree. Yeah. Because the reason our Lord puts them in order is because in coming to love God, we come to know and love ourselves, right? So one of the things that's unique about the Christian tradition, as. As you ascend and, you know, have that mystical union with the divine, you don't become less yourself, you become more yourself, right? You actually become more human. You become more Eli Stone. Right? And so the more you come to be yourself, then the more you love yourself in a properly ordered way, the more you can actually love those around you. So, no, I think that this is just going to dovetail really well into Plato. And then Christian spirituality pulls heavily from some of the antecedents in Plato. And so, I mean, this is why we read the great books, right? There's these perennial truths and these observations that I think we have to take quite seriously. So let's push forward, though. In the narrative, the messenger basically tells him that, oh, yeah, by the way, I just have this random tidbit to give you. Polybus was not actually your father. You were a gift. And so. And this is. And then this also we are revealed. This is the etymology of his name, right? So he had his. His legs bound and they unbound the legs when he became a gift to the king in Corinth. And so his name is Injured, swollen legs. Right? I mean, this is. This is part of the etymology of his legs, which really reminded me, by the way, because he actually still has marks on his legs. And again, this is back that eyewitness and like, physical things that serve as, like, these guideposts. This is very much like Odysseus's scar, right? So Odysseus's scar, remember at the end of the Odyssey, plays a central role. And everyone's like, you kind of look like the king, et cetera. Oh, but the boar, you know, stuck into your thigh or whatever, and you have the scar. And it's by the scar the identity is known. Oedipus has the exact same mechanic here, even though it's not as dramatic because it's not his identity per se. That I think is like, great question. But also for the record, this also mechanic goes into our Lord with doubting Thomas. Right. Unless I put my fingers in his side. So this whole thing, though, this goes back to what Isaiah was saying about the importance of eyewitnesses and testimony. And then the broader thing about seeing and the inverse relationship between physical sight and spiritual sight. It really does play that same mechanic as Odysseus Scar and Odyssey.
- [108:07]
Eli Stone
If you want to talk about some fun typology, it's his ankles are pierced, right? And you know, so we're talking about a man of sorrows, heavily afflicted by the gods, who has his ankles pierced. I don't know. There's something there, maybe. No, if I, if I am not so. If I, if I won't get struck down or have to do more time in Purgatory for suggesting something like that.
- [108:33]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
But no, it stirs. It stirs the imagination. It's the same thing too. Some of the translations of Prometheus Bound literally talk about Prometheus being crucified to the rock. Right. Because he's actually nailed to it and so obviously there. And he's a mediator between man and the gods and he's an advocate for humanity. When we. We've done that play on the podcast, and one of the things I shared on that was I've never read a play in which half the time I thought the protagonist was a Christ like character, and the other half I thought he was a Luciferian character. Like, it oscillated back and forth constantly throughout the entire play, which I found fascinating. So kind of pushing forward here a few things to note. Jocasta. So somewhere in this is when Jocasta, it clicks. I mean, very clearly. She probably has some antecedents here, but she really clicks. It's around like, I don't know, 163, 4. Stop in the name of God. If you love your own life, call off the search. My suffering is enough. And you know, oh, no, listen to me. I beg you, you know, don't do this. And Oedipus, to his credit, right? Listen to you no more. I must know it all. I must see the truth at last.
- [109:39]
Eli Stone
Yeah, I think there's obviously. I think there's a lot there we can talk about. I mean, yocasta, obviously already knows. And so, like, in a sense, like, her fate is sealed. Like, I don't think that it's.
- [109:54]
Josiah Moser
It's at this point, she goes off and.
- [109:57]
Eli Stone
Right. Like, this is happening. Regardless of what Oedipus does at this point, it's interesting to me that Oedipus, like, is either. Again, right. Like, there's a question here. Is Oedipus still oblivious and not putting two and two together? Or is. Is it. Is he, like, trying one last thing? Like, you know, I was born of a slave, and she just doesn't want me to. She doesn't want to know that I'm born of a slave. Right. Like, you know, that. That kind of a thing.
- [110:30]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, I thought at 11 lines, 1186 through 1189 is just in context of what she just said about all being chance. There's some very interesting, again, clever wordplay with the way Sophocles uses words in a way that's both foreshadowing and referential to things that have passed before. He says, she, perhaps with her woman's pride, may well be mortified by my birth, but I. I count myself the son of chance, which is almost a direct reference to who she is. Anyway.
- [111:09]
Eli Stone
Well, okay, so my. My translation here. I am a child of luck. I cannot be dishonored. Luck is my mother. The passing months, my brothers have seen me rich and poor. If this is so, how could I wish that I were someone else? How could I not be glad to know my birth? Which is, honestly, I think, a beautiful sentiment like that. Like, Oedipus is speaking the absolute truth. Like, if you want to. Like, maybe this is something that Aristotle really likes, and this is why he likes this play so much. It's like, that's exactly it. You should know yourself, right? Like, be a good philosopher. How could you not be glad to know? Oedipus obviously, will not be very glad to know. But it is interesting, right? Like, I am a child of luck. I cannot be dishonored. I think, obviously, Oedipus is wrong there in one sense, but it's also interesting to compare him to Tiresias, because Tiresias says the same thing. No, no. Like, no man who can see the sun can harm me, right? Like, there's. There's this. There's sort of this interesting. Like, maybe. Maybe kind of appalling, like, I have learned the secret to be content.
- [112:28]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Well, is this. Is this not maybe an antecedent to Plato, again, in which the famous line in. In Socrates is apology, you know, that no One can actually harm a good man because no one else, no one can actually do a true harm to your soul, right? If you actually are living virtuous, if you're actually an excellent person, you know, the worst they can do is harm your body. So, you know, maybe there's an antecedent here, because. I agree, the most positive read here, I think, of this passage is that Oedipus is willing to pursue truth even if he thinks he's going to suffer. And I think that plays into this themesophocles and Aeschylus that we've been discussing. And he does this too, to push the narrative forward a bit. He does it exactly with a shepherd, right? So they bring in the old shepherd, which is the one that basically brought him out and. Etc. And the shepherd plays kind of coy at the beginning, is like, oh, I don't know, I have bad memory. I don't understand these things. And then he's like, shut. You know, shut your mouth. Right? Damn you, shut your mouth. Quiet. Like he actually pushes back and again, Oedipus comes over top, actually kind of tortures the old guy, which I felt a little bit bad about. But there's probably, you know, we could read that in a morally analogous way, right? Of he's. He's getting the truth out of him and there's going to be this suffering. And so he. Again, he's going to pursue truth, even knowing. And we could debate to what degree does he know right now? But he does know it's gonna be bad. He knows it's gonna be bad for him. And that's more than a lot of other people would do. A lot of people, as soon as they realized, you know, if I open this door, whatever is behind this door for me is going to be bad for me. A lot of people just keep that door closed.
- [114:00]
Eli Stone
It's very true. Now, okay, so we haven't. We've kind of glossed over many of the choruses. I think there's a couple that are worth noting. I think we might have already skipped over the one that I really, really thought was worth talking about. But even here, right, like, there's sort of this. This is the last sort of ode. An ode sort of to Odysseus, right? Like it starts, right, like in praise of, like his. His acumen, right? Like it kind of sings of his ability. Like your mind was a strong.
- [114:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You meant Oedipus, right?
- [114:38]
Eli Stone
Yeah, Oedipus today. Did I say.
- [114:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You said Odysseus.
- [114:42]
Eli Stone
Odysseus.
- [114:43]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Oh, so I Was like, man, I really miss that entire chorus because I have no idea where you are. I know I'm a first time reader here, but I am bad because I have no idea what we're talking about.
- [114:52]
Josiah Moser
Okay.
- [114:53]
Eli Stone
Yeah.
- [114:53]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
What line number is that for you, Eli?
- [114:55]
Eli Stone
I don't have the numbers in my text. It doesn't. It doesn't show.
- [114:58]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
It doesn't number them at all.
- [115:00]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, I think it's around 1320 ish. I think that vicinity. Or it starts like 1307.
- [115:09]
Eli Stone
Yeah. But I'm thinking the antistrophe, right. Like his mind was a strong bow deep. How deep he drew hard archer at a fearful dim range and brought glory down. And he's talking about the Sphinx, right. And sort of how his like penetrating mind was just able to see right through and. And yeah, right. Like it's. It's interesting. So it like kind of like crescendo's, but then it just completely like falls flat. And now of all man ever known, most pitiful is the man's story, his fortunes most changed his state fallen to a low slave's ground under bitter fate. Oedipus, most royal one, that great door that expelled you to the light, gave at night, gave night to your glory as to the father, to the fathering son. All understood too late. Say what you want about the Fitzgerald translation, he does some really fun stuff with the English.
- [116:09]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, reading two translations, you definitely get like. It was a very different read this time through going with the Fagels. It carries. It carries a lot of meter, which is great. And. But yeah, the translation is very different.
- [116:24]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So.
- [116:25]
Eli Stone
Deacon, I particularly want you to read from Fagels that like last antistrophe in my lines. It's like all eyes fail before time's eyes.
- [116:35]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I don't know what it says. But now for all your power, time, all seeing time has dragged you to the light. Judged your marriage monstrous from the start. The son and the father tangling both 1. O child of Laius. Would to God I'd never seen you. Never, never. Now I weep like a man who wails the dead and the dirge comes pouring forth. With all my heart I tell you the truth. You gave me life. My breath leapt up in you, and now you bring down night upon my eyes.
- [117:14]
Eli Stone
That is a very different translation from mine.
- [117:17]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Fagls tends to be more on the poetic side, so I do. I typically recommend Fagels for kind of first time reads because I think he poetically emphasizes a lot of the themes in the text. And then someone Like Fitzgerald or Latimer, I think is. Is really good for maybe a more word for word. Literal translation.
- [117:39]
Eli Stone
Yeah. So that last line here is, I was blind or in mind.
- [117:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [117:45]
Eli Stone
That last few. Few lines, I was blind and now I see why asleep for you had given ease of breath to Thebes while false years went by. And so there's sort of this. Right. Ignorance is bliss idea. And. Yeah, the connection between sleep, darkness, light. Like a lot of these motifs that Josiah kind of like, mentioned from the outset, they're all very present, especially like in this last. In this last chorus and as we get into the end of the play, which is, as in true tragic fashion, mediated to us through a messenger who tells us of Yocasta's Yocasta suicide. What do you think of this account of everything that happens here, Josiah Deacon? Do you have.
- [118:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, I mean, let's look at it. So in Fagals, this is. It kicks off a little bit before 1355, like you already mentioned. We get the indirect. It's always the action happens offstage. The messenger comes and tells us, like, what has happened and kind of sets the stage for us, if you will. You know, she killing herself wasn't terribly surprising to me because, you know, there's other. There's so many relationships here. I mean, I don't mean that, like, to be comedic, but there's so many relationships here. It's hard sometimes to keep track. So Oedipus, you have to realize that Oedipus is finding out multiple things. We focus at the primary. Right. Okay, so I find out that I married and slept with my own mother and had children by her. That's horrific. That's monstrous. Obviously, that's like the lion's share of the problem here. He also, however, finds out that his mom slash wife tried to kill him as a child. And that's also something that we kind of overlook because we see it as like a signpost to understanding the greater monstrosity. But he's also taking that in as well. Also, the thing that occurred to me with Polybus is he also was robbed of the time with his foster father, the person that he thought was his father. So he. Him running away from Corinth didn't actually do anything to stop the prophecy. And the time he could have spent with, you know, who he thought was his mom and dad, he could have spent time with them and stayed in Corinth, and so he's robbed of the time there. So there's so many tragedies that are stacking on top of each other, if that makes sense. And so Jocasta killing herself, because I found her to be a very conflicted character, if you will. And how, in what, excuse me, what Oedipus is finding out about her in that moment is also multifaceted. What I really. Obviously the. The kind of zenith of the play here is he comes in and one thing that I found interesting is that he eased her down in a slow embrace. He laid her down, the poor thing. And so there I still felt like he had some care for her, right? Even in the. Even in the midst of this revelation. And this. This terror, that he still has care for her, this is his wife, this is also his mother, that he has this care for her, which somewhat surprised me, that he doesn't just go into a rage, which is kind of where I thought the narrative was going, kind of, given how it was setting up. But then that kind of duality really plays out. He rips off her brooches, the long gold pins holding on her robes. So. Stop. So that has both. Again, the mother wife imagery here is being mixed, right? So the take off the brooch in a certain way, exposing the breasts in a certain way, that's sexual, like a wife, but it's also maternal, like you're being nursed. And so I think Sophocles does a really excellent job of bringing in this terror in very simple ways, because in a lot of ways, my understanding is. And we're not. It's not always clear, but the Oedipus myth has a lot of different variations. And he doesn't always blind himself, and he also doesn't always leave Thebes. In some places, he just suffers this and stays as king. And also in other ones, he doesn't blind himself. So a lot of this is like, how much of this is Sophocles own invention, either on a. On a larger level or on a more granular level. And so for him to blind himself with the brooches, I found to be incredibly apt. Anyway, he digs them down the sockets of his eyes, crying, you'll never see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused Too long you looked on the ones you never should have seen blind to the ones you long to see to know blind from this hour on blind in the darkness blind. And so that ties into all the things that we've talked about already. Josiah talked about that too, about just the whole theme of sight and blindness in this. I mean, obviously the. The one that's most telling here is that he then becomes a Tiresias figure, right? So he's led out, like, by a boy like Tiresias, is he. He becomes almost this. Like, if Antigone is the dark sign of the gods, that's what Fagles calls her in his translation. He's the. She's the dark sign of the gods. She's the sign of contradiction that the gods toss into Thebes. In a lot of ways, Oedipus here becomes a sign too, right? He becomes the sign, this, like, Tiresias figure. And I can't remember, I think it was Fagles was saying that at this point in the play, the actor changes his mask, and so then he has this mask of terror that has blood streaming from the eye sockets, right? And so he just. We kind of forget that they're wearing masks. And so this takes on a very surreal moment.
- [123:32]
Eli Stone
Yeah, It's. It's a. It's a moment of transformation, right. I think, yeah, there is something interesting, right? Like, in that, obviously the instrument of his. Of his blinding, right, like, is. Are the. They're the pins that hold up his mother's, like, hold his mother's bosoms together, right? There's. So one of the ancient traditions, like, we see this in, like, the Iliad, right, Is like, the mother would. Would bear her chest to her children, right? Like, if she was. Plead with a man, like her husband or her children, she would plead with her husband by. By exposing her breasts. Like, these are the breasts that have nursed your children or for a mother and her son, right? Like, these are. These are the breasts that nursed you. Like, have piety. Like. Like, this is like I am asking you as your mother.
- [124:26]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, Hector. And Hector's mother does this, right? Hector's mother does this when he won't return to Troy. She pulls out her breast and makes the exact same line.
- [124:33]
Eli Stone
And it's interesting, right? Like, we don't see Yocasta make the same gesture, which, you know, that'd be a weird sort of. The story would have gone in a very different direction perhaps, right? But. But it is interesting, like, that this is like Oedipus. This is the last thing he sees, right? Like, are the breasts that nurse him, the breasts that nursed his own children. And. And like, that. There. There's something, I mean, just very visceral about that. And. And I think. I mean, this is. I think, you know, if we're talking about his audience, like, this is something that would really, like, at once revolt, like, repulse sort of his audience, but also, like, just fill them with Pity, right? Like that. This is. This is sort of one of the most intimate gestures a mother can make to her children. And it's. And it's kind of like this is the. The culmination of Edifice's tragedy, right?
- [125:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You know, what's, you know, what's missing here that Sophocles did in Antigone is Sophocles in the middle of Antigone, which is somewhat jarring. All on the choruses is. Is dedicated to erotic love. And you're like reading it and you're like, what? Why did he just throw this in here? Like, we think we'd get a chorus dedicated to justice or, you know, some kind of cosmic order. And he gives a chorus that praises Eros. And part of that is. Is that, you know, Eros always brings a mania with it, right? It always brings, you know, C.S. lewis talks about the Eros. Eros always. You know, falling in love is a type of insanity, right? Erotic love just always brings with it a certain type of mania. And this helped us, I think, in Antigone, unlock what Haman does in the cave where. Haman who earlier on, I mean, I don't know your all's take, but Haman, I really liked him in the play. I mean, he very much played like a Creon. Like what Creon is in this one. He's very docile. He has good rhetoric. He tries to turn his father the right way. You know, he does a lot of things that I think are very excellent. And then his father shows up in the cave and he tries to kill him, and then he kills himself. And so the question is, like, is that consistent with his character? And I think that Sophocles gave us the answer earlier in the chorus that erotic love causes a mania. And you. You do crazy things. We don't have that type of foreshadowing here. Unless I. I missed it. But it. Because it shares the same authority, it kind of makes sense. I really, I did not contemplate. And I really like what you said, Eli, that the last thing he sees, at least broadly speaking, is Jocasta, right? And so does that misplaced or horrific erotic love, right? Erotic love that was given, that should have never been given, right. A binding that really should have never been bound, then give him a mania to do this violent act, right? That he actually enters into a form of insanity. I mean, obviously love always has a reason, but for those observing it, the reason doesn't make sense, right? Like, I don't care what. I don't care how upset I was. I'm not gouging out my own eyes, but for him. And there is this erotic mania. And it does make sense. And Eros, in a certain way, maybe more nascent in the plays than what it will be in Plato, Eros really is actually a servant of the cosmic order, right? Eros, we saw this in Theogony, to go back to that reference, right? Eros and the theogony is one of the four primordial gods and is basically the generative force of the entire cosmos. And so I, you know, Eros, you know, the symposium will take it up, but I wouldn't maybe propose here that this is an erotic mania and that's the context in which we would see it. So we get kind of moving on again.
- [128:29]
Eli Stone
Yeah, I. I like what you said there. I guess to add to that, the only thing I would say is this goes back to what you were saying about knowing himself. Like, this is. This is like Oedipus has found the place of his birth, right? Like his mother, like, and that she represents his origin. And if you think about, like, knowing yourself is in principle, in some sense, like knowing where you came from, I think that's like a huge thing in Greek tragedy and really just Greek literature in general. And I think it plays an important part in later Christian literature as well. But knowledge of self requires knowledge of your origin. And in this moment, like, Oedipus sees his origin, right. Yocasta. And yeah, it's the last thing he chooses to see.
- [129:20]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I think another layer to that, too. Not to belabor this point too much, the grammar is not necessarily here, but the mental imagery is that Eros is as a self love. A love that has to be satiated is also the love that leads us into our identity. Right? What we love actually reveals our identity to us. It's how we come to know ourselves. This is why earlier in the Christian ethic, you need to satiate that Eros, that natural love in God, because you need to find yourself in God, because you can find yourself and truly who you really are. And so it's interesting that then in this whole play, which is about know thyself, it's zenith here, is in an erotic context in which he comes to understand his identity. And I think, as you said, Eli, I mean, that's actually more akin and more aligned with the role of erotic love than I think sometimes we give it credit for, because that Eros, really, we just, as humans, we find our identity in that which we love.
- [130:20]
Josiah Moser
Yeah, that's absolutely true. I think A lot of the time, erotic love in particular, is when we come to see something that transforms us internally especially. It makes us realize what we are and more so what we are not.
- [130:37]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I agree. Let's look at kind of pushing forward the narrative the. Around 1425, I think. I don't think the play is necessarily in a chiastic structure, but this is where I think it really pulls from the beginning of the play, in which, if you remember all those things that Oedipus said should happened to the criminal that they find that killed the king, a lot of the messenger's words here are repeating, then what Oedipus said should happen. Right. What Oedipus is saying now. So this is where I actually found Oedipus to kind of shift back into some of his best. In which, now that he comes to understand himself, he's not pushing out against it. Right? He's not. At least not. That wasn't my read of it. He's not trying to fight out against it or now to mitigate it or whatever he's saying now I should be exiled. I should be kicked out. Right. Show me to all of Thebes, I am the plague. Which is what Tiresias, you know, told him. And so I think this is a great contrast to his earlier attitude with Creon, which we all kind of noted was maybe him at his worst in a lot of different ways.
- [131:35]
Eli Stone
It's interesting to see Creon try to, like, persuade Odysseus. Well, actually, you should stay. Well, actually, like, maybe we. Maybe we can let you off easy. Right. Creon's the one that's trying to, like.
- [131:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right. You keep saying Odysseus.
- [131:51]
Eli Stone
Oh. Oh, my goodness. It is hard. Okay. But, yeah. Yeah, so he's. He's. Yeah, he's trying to bring Oedipus back into the fold, so to speak.
- [132:02]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. And I. Well, actually, part of the question I had with Creon, too, is that again, he's so deferential to the gods here. So, like, you know, Oedipus is like, you already know what you have to do. The oracle at Delphi already told you, like, you've got to cast me out of the city. And Creon's like, no, maybe not yet. Like, we need to go consult the oracle again because I want to know exactly what I need to do with you. I mean, he's so. He seems. I mean, the best read of this, right, is that he's very pious, which, again, is such a stark contrast to basically Creon in every other play we have, it's true.
- [132:36]
Josiah Moser
And it goes to show a little bit of, you know, what, at least in Sophocles view, that position of power, like, ultimately does to a person, perhaps, or. Or something about Creon's own disposition towards it, which might be a different matter.
- [132:51]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Right.
- [132:53]
Eli Stone
I think this scene with Oedipus and his daughters is really moving. Right. I mean, he's. He's like, he's accepted, like, obviously this burden is his to bear. Like, he feels that very much. But obviously, like his daughters now he is like, who will ever marry them? Like, no one's going to. Which, again, is an interesting, like, contrast. That's. That's not exactly true. We see that Creon was. Well, I guess no one ever does marry them, as we learned back in Antigone. But Creon was going to allow this. And so there's. And really even there, right. Like, Creon as this noble figure, like, Creon's a very complicated man, as we see that he was willing to allow his own sons to marry the daughters of Oedipus.
- [133:41]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. Because Jocasta is his sister.
- [133:44]
Eli Stone
Right, Right.
- [133:45]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
So I mean, it just, it just keeps getting a little bit murky here. But the other thing too, about this.
- [133:50]
Eli Stone
Is this would violate all kinds of canon law.
- [133:54]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah. This is not allowed. So the thing that I found interesting here, which is almost a little bit on the nose because we know Antigone came first, are all these promises of Creon to take care of the girls. And so that really, again, this is where you start informing. So even, like when I read Antigone after reading this one, it's really hard not to start blending those in your head. And, you know, the million dollar question is, how much did Sophocles know of where he wanted to take this narrative as he was writing them? Right. Like, right now we'd ask, like, how much does he know where he wants to take Oedipus at Colonis while he's writing this? Like, how much does it actually inform it? And so, you know, because one of my questions when we, when we read Antigone is that I think Antigone is waiting for a sign. She's waiting either to be saved by the gods, she's waiting for a sign, she's waiting for something. And things aren't working the way that she thinks. Right. She's not going to get the glorified death in the public square, she's going to get locked away in a tomb, and she starts to have these doubts. And so you can ask, does she think the gods are going to come save her. But it's a more particular question to say, well, does she think that the gods are going to show up the same way they did at the death of Oedipus because she was there and what the gods do for him? And so, like, is she waiting for the gods to validate her? Like they validated him? But then the question with that is, well, then how much does Sophocles know where he's taking the narrative this early? Which of course, like, we kind of just get lost into that. But I, you know, Eli, I do agree with you this. When they bring out the young girls, Antigone and its meanie, that personally, that was the part of the play that solicited the most emotion from me. And maybe I might say any emotion at all. I didn't really find a lot of. I don't know. I didn't. The first time I read through this, my raw take, it didn't move me.
- [135:45]
Eli Stone
You're. You're not, you're not crying over Jocasta, right? Like, I'm not.
- [135:48]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
I don't find her sympathetic. And like Oedipus, like kind of watching the spiral, you know, where it's going, going. But when it's. When Creon takes the daughters away, that's. That is when. That's the only time in the play that actually, like, pricked me right down at, oh, what is that, a little bit before 1675? No, don't take them away from me. Not now. No, no, no, because he shares. I mean, the thing is though, there's a true love there, but they're the only people that have a true relation to him. All the words here are kind of murky because of obvious reasons, but they're the only ones that really share in the curse. So there's a real, for lack of better word, fraternity between them. And Oedipus will play off this. He'll talk about them, as, you know, I'm your father, brother. But in reality, they share something of the curse that really can't be known outside the three of them. And so there's a certain intimacy there. And when we get to Oedipus at Clonus, it's not surprising to me that that intimacy is. Is then kind of shown particularly. And I actually think that goes into reading Antigone too, because I think one of the best reads of Antigone is that she sees an opportunity to redeem herself. She sees an opportunity for someone in this house that has been cursed up and down to die for Something glorious and good. And I think that's when Creon starts to take that away from her. She kind of squirms a bit.
- [137:24]
Eli Stone
No, that's good. And I mean, also is meaning, right? Like, she. When Antigone is sentenced to death, she wants to in on it too, because, like, of all the people that, like, she doesn't have Oedipus anymore. Right. Like, Oedipus is gone at this point, so Antigone is all she has left. And if Antigone is gone, then there is no one else to share. That's. That. That companionship with. Or share that suffering with.
- [137:49]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, because they're.
- [137:50]
Eli Stone
Yeah. So this whole thing is moving, right? Like. Yeah, very. Like Oedipus. Oedipus having Creon. Like Creon taking the daughters back is like. Yeah, yeah.
- [138:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Because I mean, they're just. They're all. There's all something now unnatural about them. Right. They just don't fit in the order anymore. They're just walking signs of repulsion. And so they share something. And I think this kind of goes back to that cursing and blessing aspect here. Much more on the cursing side, but they. Yeah, they just share a trait that cannot be expressed or even really have empathy outside of it. And so I'm. Well, I don't want to jump ahead, but I was. There's a loneliness then that I think really grips Oedipus here because he's blind. I mean, obviously he did that to himself. But when he can't touch the girls and they take the girls away from him, I think there's just a crushing loneliness that happens to him because of the fate that's been given to him. Yeah, let's.
- [138:53]
Eli Stone
Yeah. One of you guys read the last lines. Like, I think that's.
- [138:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
That's just a whole play or.
- [138:59]
Eli Stone
Yeah. I mean, unless there's something else you want to.
- [139:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
No, I actually, I. Let me. If you wouldn't mind. I'm just gonna read that whole chorus because I think it. Just Because I think that I. We didn't play. We didn't spend a ton of time on the choruses in this play. I don't think they're as clear in Antigone. I think every single chorus has a really clear teaching. Like Sophocles. The teacher plays out very strongly in the choruses in Antigone. And this last chorus is where I felt like Sophocles, the teacher was most explicit.
- [139:28]
Josiah Moser
There was. Sorry, there was one. 209 to 210. We skipped over completely. But I actually Thought that one was the most.
- [139:36]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
You did?
- [139:37]
Josiah Moser
Yeah.
- [139:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Quickly. What was the theme of that one?
- [139:42]
Josiah Moser
Basically, those who are in a position of power and what that does to them, making them, you know.
- [139:48]
Eli Stone
I see. Yeah. Okay. That was probably the one I was thinking of.
- [139:51]
Josiah Moser
I think it was Eli. That's why I wanted to call attention to it. But.
- [139:54]
Eli Stone
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, but. So this last one.
- [139:56]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Yeah, the final chorus, it says, people of Thebes, my countrymen, look on Oedipus. He solved the famous riddle with his brilliance he rose the power, A man beyond all power who could behold his greatness without envy. Now what? A black sea of terror has overwhelmed him now as we keep our watch and wait that final. Or wait the final day count. No man happy till he dies, free of pain at last. So in my notes, maybe just as a sketch going from top to bottom, I wrote out this first opens up with human agency. Right. Look at. Look at these good things he's done. Then it comes into a fate. Yeah, but look, what was his fate? Right? And his fate totally overrules all this. And the last one, again is this line about happiness, which we also saw in Aeschylus. And I can't remember, off the top of my head, when we had that episode, we did the whole Oresteia with Thomas Lackey and Dr. Frank Grabowski, and I can't remember, Dr. Grabowski told us this line is ancient. The count, no man happy until his death. Aristotle picks it up, too, but it's. It's a much more ancient proverbial. I can't recall, I apologize, who actually gave it to the Athenians. But that. It's interesting that the last line there is then happiness. It's a commentary on. On happiness. And so, again, I just felt like maybe feel is the right word, because I just feel like it has to be intuited, but without. If you don't allow Oedipus at Colonus to instruct how you read this play in its totality, then I really feel like Sophocles is critiquing those who believe their human agency is actually primary within the cosmos.
- [141:50]
Eli Stone
Yeah. Or that it can thwart the will of the gods. Right. No, I certainly. I certainly think that that's the case.
- [142:01]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Is this not the same lesson with Job? To a certain degree. Right. So, I mean, the whole reason that Job. Not the whole reason, but one of the reasons that Job, obviously, catechetically is in the Old Testament is because it completely turns on its head that if you do all the right things, God will bless you and Everything's great and it completely turns that thing on its head that actually that's not how you merit these things. It's that Providence has these things that we don't control. Even if you do everything Providence asks you to do and are a virtuous man, that does not merit you certain things under Providence. Right. And so I do feel like there's strong parallels here with a job like character.
- [142:39]
Eli Stone
What were you going to say, Josiah?
- [142:41]
Josiah Moser
I was also thinking that it might pertain to those who basically had no piety for the gods or no respect for their will at all, or acted as if they didn't have any say in matters that human agency is the only thing we can really rely on. Again, the voice of Jocasta specifically articulates this viewpoint that maybe they have a plan for us, maybe they don't. It doesn't really matter. Just try to enjoy your life as well as you can. Almost the impulse not to know yourself, not to know the will of the gods, not to seek the order of nature.
- [143:12]
Eli Stone
Again, go back to the Delphic maxims, right?
- [143:14]
Josiah Moser
Yeah.
- [143:15]
Eli Stone
Know thyself, everything in moderation. Don't make rash pledges. And so, yeah, I do. It is so obviously like, as we come up to the end, though, I do think ending on fate is a very good, good thing to do because I think if, if fate is kind of the resounding ending note that this play ends on, I think where Oedipus of Colonus picks up is this notion of Providence. That fate, while sometimes apparently cruel by all external measures and even maybe all objective measures, providence or fate or the gods or what have you, often has plans that are far beyond like the, what, what, what possible material things that you could use to justify suffering. Right. Like you could say, oh, well, if I work out, like, that's painful and that's hard, but I get stronger and like I'm more capable of fighting in a war and doing all the things that I need to do. I grow in virtue in that sense. In Odysseus's case, his suffering just seems so overwhelmingly crushing that there could not be possibly any good to come of it. And yet this is kind of what we've hinted at this whole time as we see in Colonus, there is something that can come out of it. And so, yeah, fate turning into Providence, I think is an interesting way to lead into Oedipus at Colonus for next time.
- [144:57]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
The very low brow version of this that my kids have been grappling with is the prince of Egypt when they Sing the song about that. You're just a thread in a tapestry, but the thread can't see the tapestry as a whole. So that's your seven year old metaphor on how this works. But it works, like, with kids. Right? Like, you can't. You can't see divine providence. Right. The thread can't see the entire tapestry. And so I think it's really. I think if you compare this play in Antigone, it seems very clearly to me that Sophocles is trying to show his audience that there is an ordered cosmos and man has to respect that. And how much of that is like a pantheon versus the divine or the oracle, Adelphi, I think we could parse that out. But there's certainly a cosmic order that the divine participates in that man has to respect.
- [145:48]
Eli Stone
Yeah, And I think too, if you want to put it in terms of like, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Not that I think that that is the best way to read Greek tragedies, necessarily. If you want to say that Antigone really presents a strong and robust cosmology. Right. Oedipus. Oedipus almost like, presents that too strongly, like it's too fatalistic, like, yeah, there's this grand cosmos and that we're subservient to it and we need to, like, fight the powers that be and, you know, observe the laws of the gods over the laws of men. Right. But then you get Oedipus and it's just like, oh, yeah. And also there is just crushing sorrow and sorrowfulness and like misery and life sucks. And it's like, oh, wait, what about this grand cosmic thing? Right, that. Weren't we just all excited about that? And so that's, I think, a really radical juxtaposition.
- [146:39]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
Josiah, do you have a. Do you have a last word for us to close out? Oedipus Rex?
- [146:45]
Josiah Moser
I guess it's not a last word. The only thing on my mind right now is a question, and that is, you know, I guess this does lead into Oedipus at Colonus, but, like, how much of Oedipus at Colonus was. Was his own creation versus how much it was already a part of the established myth, because the myth of Oedipus is well known. I was completely unfamiliar with Oedipus a Colonus until I read it within the last year. So that's just kind of been on my mind now. Is, like, was this his own way of dealing with these issues of, like, bringing it together and, like, giving a more positive resolution to the story, or is it something that was already in it, but he drew it out in a different way.
- [147:25]
Deacon Harrison Garlick
My understanding of that, because I looked into that, because in the. In Antigone, our guest David Niles really asked that question basically of like, well, how much can we say that Antigone is seeking a death like her father did, if Sophocles basically invented how her father died? And he hasn't written the play yet? So it gets really murky about how much is this Sophocles invention. So my understanding is broadly, is that there are other myths that Oedipus ended up at Colonus, but the details of that basically virtually only come from Sophocles. And so then, then we have the big debate of, like, well, how much of that is his invention and how much of that is he channeling from other sources that we don't have? And so I think it's a great question because I really like contextualizing it, as you said, which is, well, how much of that is him wrestling with the knot that he's basically tied here in Oedipus Rex? That's very fatalistic. That's very good. So next week we will be reading Oedipus at Colonus, if you want to continue to join us on Ascend, the Great Books podcast. Josiah Eli, thank you so much for all of your thoughts and wisdom and helping us to parse out this text. Everyone can go and check out the great books podcast.com and check out our guides and articles, and we will see everyone next week. Thank you, guys.
- [148:49]
Eli Stone
Thank you.