Oedipus the King by Sophocles

Summary

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Zero to Well-Read

Episode: Oedipus the King by Sophocles

Hosts: Jeff O’Neill & Rebecca Schinsky
Date: November 4, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Jeff and Rebecca journey back to the origins of Western drama with Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. They explore what makes this 2,400-year-old tragedy enduringly powerful, how it shaped modern storytelling, and why it still resonates with readers today. The conversation covers not just the plot, but also the play’s historical context, artistic innovations, philosophical questions, and what it really felt like to encounter it as both a reader and an audience member.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Oedipus the King’s Place in Culture

• Unmediated Classic: Unlike other “classics”, Oedipus lacks pop culture adaptations, making it feel “almost completely unmediated by current contemporary culture.” (Jeff, 02:20).
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The hosts highlight its foundational role in illustrating the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy—the idea you bring about your fate by trying to escape it.
• Archetype of Existential Dread: The legend’s fame is rooted in its engagement with profound questions: “Can I control my life, or am I subject to forces beyond my control?” (Jeff, 03:54)

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2. What Makes This Play Endure?

• No Spoilers! Ancient Greek audiences already knew the outcome—it’s about the how, not the what (19:36).
• Collective Catharsis: Rebecca compares the original performance to attending a massive concert: “There were 15,000 of them in a big outdoor theater… sharing the same encounter with art.” (Rebecca, 09:23)
• Plot on Rails: The plot is “on rails”; there’s no ambiguity about what will happen, but the emotional experience—the catharsis—is what matters (Jeff, 57:02).

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3. Historical & Artistic Context

• Performance & Politics: The plays were the main event at the Dionysian festival in Athens. Up to a third of the city would watch, creating a Super Bowl-meets-Christmas atmosphere (Jeff, 34:13, 80:03).
• Formative Art: This was a new art form—acting, the chorus, the mask—all invented “within living memory” (Jeff, 32:02).
• Sophocles the Man: Not just a playwright but also involved in public life and military service—a figure embedded in all aspects of Athenian culture (Jeff, 35:42).

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4. Central Philosophical Questions

• Fate vs. Free Will: The play embodies the tension between prophecy (fate) and human action (free will). Oedipus’s downfall results from his drive for truth—“truth-seeking rather than Odyssean pride”—yet fate seems inescapable (Jeff, 20:46).
• Tragic Flaw: Traditionally read as a study in hubris, Oedipus’s insistence on discovering the truth is both his strength and downfall.
• Knowing Thyself: “Know thyself” is the Oracle’s command, but in Oedipus’s case, self-knowledge leads to ruin—a paradox at the center of the play (Jeff, 55:19).
• Political Authority: The play explores the responsibility of leaders to their people and how individual flaws have civic consequences.

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5. Reading Experience & Translation

• Surprisingly Accessible: Both hosts found the Fagles translation clear and readable. “It felt challenging and hard and weird in college…but I really enjoyed it [this time]—it was exciting!” (Rebecca, 46:51)
• Difference from Shakespeare: Easier than Shakespeare in both language and plot, making it a manageable read in one sitting (Rebecca, 48:00; Jeff, 48:00).

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6. Enduring Relevance

• Timeless Big Questions: The questions at the heart of Oedipus the King—about free will, fate, power, and knowledge—are “forever, permanent relevance” (Rebecca, 81:54).
• Cultural Lines: The play influenced philosophy, drama, and even modern psychology (as a foundation for Freud’s Oedipus complex, though the hosts delight in debunking Freud’s misreading—see Memorable Quotes below).
• Still Fresh: “The dynamics from this moment when politics was new are all present in today’s landscape. The characters are archetypes that are recognizable today.” (Rebecca, 80:03)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

“Of the works that are this famous… there is no adaptation to reference…reading Oedipus the King…felt to me like getting back to the source, weirdly, in a way other readings we've done so far have not.”
—Jeff, 02:20

“This is a work that is asking real existential questions…not about what did you think when so-and-so did this in the plot…it's the ‘what does it mean’ of it all.”
—Rebecca, 05:53

“The point is to have this feeling—this super intense feeling of recognition, of existential dread or joy—but that is what it's trying to produce.”
—Jeff, 07:00

“I cannot believe I'm actually going to like say this thing. And then we’re going to be in the moment where I’ve said the thing and you’re going to know it.”
—Rebecca, 52:41

“Boy, did they know how to plot…when you hadn’t run through all the story possibilities, you could really just hit it hard.”
—Jeff, 77:50

“This is about the fact that we have been and will always be afraid of what free will means and equally afraid of not having any and of what the hell to do with it if we have it.”
—Rebecca, 80:39

“Freud was doing a lot of coke.”
—Rebecca (debunking Freud’s Oedipus complex link), 18:25, 69:22

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Segment Timestamps

• Host Introductions & Cultural Context: 00:00–09:23
• Collective Experience of Ancient Greek Theater: 09:23–10:36
• Plot Summary & Spoiler Framing: 19:36–20:46
• Differences from Other Greek Versions; Innovation: 20:46–23:40
• Historical Context; Invention of Theater: 29:44–34:13
• Performance Dynamics and Audience: 34:13–35:42
• Reading Experience and Accessibility: 46:51–48:00
• Philosophical Core: Fate, Free Will, Knowledge: 55:19–58:48
• Immortal Questions Segment: 63:47–66:01
• Notable Quotes Segment: 70:48–76:27
• Final Hot Takes / Who Is It For: 76:30–79:32
• Crib Sheet & Scorecard: 80:03–85:36

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Notable Quotes (with Attribution & Timestamp)

• “It really felt to me like getting back to the source, weirdly, in a way that other readings we've done so far have not.”
  —Jeff, 02:20
• “We don't have any cultural touchstones for this play other than having read this play and having read Antigone…”
  —Rebecca, 02:38
• “This is the kind of book club I want to attend…that's not about what did you think when so and so did this in the plot…it's the what does it mean of it all.”
  —Rebecca, 05:53
• “It’s almost like castor oil for the soul—you’re just trying to get it out for a moment and it’s not going to go away forever.”
  —Jeff, 08:29
• “A plague is ravaging Thebes. The current king, Oedipus, sets out to find who murdered Laius...the call is coming from inside the house.”
  —Rebecca, 19:36
• “All the violence of these plays happens off stage…some of it’s thought to be sacrilege…and some of it is frankly practical.”
  —Jeff, 33:13
• “If you could know when you’re going to die, would you want to know? Would it actually give you a greater sense of control?”
  —Rebecca, 26:42
• “When Oedipus…blinds himself, that happens behind the skene…you’ve got to go from sighted Oedipus to bleeding eyes Oedipus.”
  —Jeff, 33:09
• “This is either the first or the middle of these three Theban plays, which is important to talk about.”
  —Rebecca, 44:21
• “Once you know this, you can’t unknow it. And they are…that’s what they’re saying to each other. And that stuff was so recognizable. That’s what made…this exciting.”
  —Rebecca, 51:47
• “The word strange comes up quite a bit in this book…‘I fear I’m at the brink of frightful speech’—which I say from time to time.”
  —Jeff, 73:28
• “Freud’s reading of the Oedipal complex basically comes straight from what Jocasta says here…it doesn’t actually come from Oedipus’s actions.”
  —Rebecca, 69:22

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Segment Highlights

Plot and Structure (19:36–24:49)

• Summary: The play assumes audience familiarity, focusing on tension from revelation instead of plot twists. The action is about Oedipus's journey towards the horrifying self-knowledge everyone but him already has.

Contextualization (29:44–35:42)

• The hosts explain the civic, artistic, and religious magnitude of the Dionysian festival, situating Oedipus the King as a cultural centerpiece.

Philosophical Debate: Fate vs. Free Will (55:19–58:48)

• Rebecca and Jeff weigh whether Oedipus is a victim of destiny, his own character, or a tragic mix.
• The dialogue probes whether self-knowledge is virtuous or dangerous.

Modern Relevance and Accessibility (46:51–49:10; 81:54–82:10)

• Both hosts find Oedipus the King surprisingly easy and pleasurable to read, debunking the notion that its ancientness renders it inaccessible.
• The central existential questions still echo in 2025.

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Quick-Fire “Immortal Questions” (63:47–67:01)

• Who am I? Central to the play—the invention of “who am I” as a philosophical question.
• What is the good life? Tied to both political and personal choices.
• How do I know what I know? The nature of knowledge, truth, denial, and the costs of inquiry.

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Fun/Irreverent Moments

• Taylor Swift as Sophocles: Imagining the debut of Oedipus as being like a stadium-only, once-in-history Swift performance (Jeff & Rebecca, 60:06).
• Muppet Oedipus: “Would this be watchable as a Muppet version?” Gonzo as Oedipus, chickens as the chorus (Jeff & Rebecca, 67:55).
• Freud was doing a lot of coke. (Rebecca, recurring, e.g., 18:25, 69:22)

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Recommendations and Takeaways

• Who is it for: Anyone curious about foundational art, existential questions, drama, or who wants to “artistically touch grass.”
• How to read it: Get a good translation (Fagles recommended), read the introduction, and supplement with context to enhance the experience.
• Why bother?: Because it’s a source text for so much that followed, still shocks/unnerves, and asks questions we still can’t answer.
• Further Reading: The other Theban plays (“Antigone,” "Oedipus at Colonus"), other Greek tragedies, Homer, or even compare to modern works like “Hamlet.”

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Scorecard (out of 50)

• Historical Importance: 10/10
• Readability: 9/10
• Central Questions/Current Relevance: 8/10
• Book Nerd Read Cred: 9/10
• Oh Damn Factor: 6/10
• Total: 42/50

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Cocktail Party Crib Sheet

• Oedipus the King = “the Super Bowl, Fourth of July, the Oscars, and Christmas all rolled into one” for ancient Athens.
• The play’s real stakes: “We have always been afraid of what free will means and equally afraid of not having any and of what the hell to do with it.”
• It’s not about surprises—it’s about feeling something big, together.
• Freud’s Oedipal complex? Not really in the text. Oedipus never “wanted” to do what Freud implies—don’t blame Sophocles!

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Summary prepared by podcast summarizer AI for Book Riot’s Zero to Well-Read.

Transcript

[Jeff O'Neill]

Foreign.

Welcome to Zero to well, read a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Join us today as we journey back to ancient Greece and we attempt to solve the riddle of Oedipus the King. Before we jump in, though, if you're enjoying the show, we would sure appreciate it if you would share it with friends. And of course, leaving us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever. Maybe your listening is a huge help. As the show continues to grow, we are really thrilled with the response that we've had so far. We had a little time on the Apple podcast homepage that's been very exciting to us. And as a little incentive to keep the magic going, if we can get to 150 ratings on Apple Podcasts, we're going to add a special holiday episode.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You know, I'm tempted not to tempt the fates to tempt prophecy and sort of get people to rate and review, because here's what we learn. Metopus the King Rebecca because we don't know what we're doing. We don't. We don't know what's going to happen. And it goes disastrously wrong if you try to control your fate.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And even when you think that you're making good decisions, you can be plagued by the fear that you've been doing it wrong all along and it might turn out that you have been.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We were joking a little bit before we started recording this episode that we've had some nice response and we do see some variation based on the. The book we're talking about. And I don't know, Rebecca, where Oedipus the King is going to fall. It's an unusual text and we're going to get into a lot of the ways. But I was thinking about this and I wasn't sure to put this in the hot takes or wherever else we may put it, but of the works that are this famous, like people, if they don't know anything about Oedipus, they've heard the story. They know the word Oedipus, they've heard maybe Oedipal complex because Freud was just doing so much cocaine. But there is no adaptation to reference. There isn't like, like a. Even I've never heard of one like that, like that that's in the cultural consciousness at all. There have been movies and stuff done, but they don't survive into the. The current cultural moment. And so it feels when you're reading this almost completely unmediated by current contemporary culture. Because even when we're. Hamlet is coming, I think it will come out already by the time we've done this episode, even the oldest text we've done has been so mediated.

Right.

Most of the other things have had a movie adaptation are out there in some other kind, or there's other books by this author. But reading Oedipus the King, which is the middle of the three Theban plays, which are not a trilogy, which we'll get into, it really felt to me like getting back to the source weirdly, in a way that other readings we've done so far have not.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think that's a great way to put it. This is one of those that if you have, if you've read it, you've read it, you probably have not seen it. Like, I don't recall ever seeing, you know, an advertisement for like a local theater doing a performance of Oedipus the King. And you're right, there is no like pop culture adaptation of it. This is not like, this is not a story that lends itself to that kind of adaptation or updating very easily at all. It's not like, oh, you can just spin Emma into Clueless, or you can spin the Taming of the shrew into 10 things I hate about you. This is tough stuff that Sophocles is dealing with here. And I don't know if it's that. If it's just that this is such an old but really foundational way of telling this story and that it's so particular to theater. Like, what do you do with the chorus? If you try, you know, with this Greek chorus convention, if you try to make a movie out of this, it would be hard to do a live action version that wasn't just a camera on a stage. And I don't know that anybody wants to just do a camera on a stage for this. We don't have. I don't have any cultural touchstones for this play other than having read this play and having read an Antigone, which is another one in the cycle.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The thing that probably most endures is more of. I guess I could have put this into takeaways later, but I'll put it here is the idea of a self fulfilling prophecy, which there aren't as many examples that, that I could think of and I did a little research is like, there's not another one that's of this import as Oedipus. Like Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars. I Mean, not really. That comes a little bit later. There's some other things here, but even in psychology, like I don't know if there's any actual clinical evidence that self fulfilling prophecy is a real phenomenon, but this idea that in order to avoid something that you want, don't want to happen, you bring about its conclusion, I guess. Appointment at Samara by John o'. Hara. Like, there's these other things where this idea is super interesting to us because as you note in the notes before, and we're going to talk about it some length, this text, this play is wrestling with one of, if not the hypothesis, question mark central questions of human understanding, which is, can I control what. What amount of control do I have over my existence? Is it all left to chance, as the Queen Jocasta says? Is it completely a matter of making good, informed choices one after another? And you will get to where you want to go, as the Oedipus of the beginning of the play seems to think. But as a piece, it is almost a perfect plot, which we'll talk about a bit more. I think that's the other thing that struck me. This is an air type plot and it has ancient Greek tropes insofar as they were inventing the tropes that we know, which is also a fascinating part of this. But it feels like such a monument to itself that it's very hard to say something like, I think Oedipus should have done this, or I didn't like this character. This. It resists that kind of engagement we're so used to now.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, it doesn't lend itself to contemporary book club questions, you know, you might find in the back of a paperback. It's. This is a work that is asking real existential questions. Like, this is the kind of book club that I want to attend. And if you're. If you have already made it this far into this episode, this is probably the kind of book club that you want to attend as well. That is not about what did you think when so and so did this in the plot? And should they have done this other thing? What would you do?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Jocasta? Did you like messenger one?

Right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

What would you do in this situation? It's the, what does it mean of it all? And if we cannot fully control our destinies, what actions do we take? How do we try to live a good life? Is it. Is what's the point of it all if there are elements that we can't control? And Oedipus is wrestling with, like, is it just the gods and fate? Or do I have free will? But those. These questions are still applicable today, I think, eternally applicable. And that was one of the great pleasures of going back to this for the first time since my formal education.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I think if you. If you're interested in tackling it, either before listening to the rest of the show or after. One thing that's been very helpful to me in a few times I've had a chance to teach it, is to reframe your expectation about what the work is trying to do. Because, you know, in an Aristotelian sense, like, you know, Aristotle says this is the perfect tragedy. And in fact, it's sort of a chicken and the egg thing where he defines tragedy based on Oedipus because he likes Oedipus so much. So, ergo, like, it's a strange dynamic here. But one thing, the thing that ancient Greek theater was trying to elicit in its audience's response is catharsis, right? Which this idea of like, big feeling that you sort of have in the moment and then it kind of flows out of you and you sort of feel better, you know, in the denouement, after the afterglow of having this really intense experience. And that's the point of eliciting that experience not even to answer a question, not to ask a question, not even to get resolution or to leave ambiguity. The point is to have this feeling of. This super intense feeling of. Of recognition, of existential dread or joy. But that is what it's trying to produce. So even saying that. Even saying. And I think it does, but even saying that Oedipus and Sophocles are asking questions is not actually what they're doing. What Sophocles is trying to do is just to have this big feeling about being alive and not resolve it, hold it for a moment.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Confusing, it is.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And that other people feel this way.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And other people and other people feel this way. So that. That's a different. I think I was trying to think of, I guess in something like Romeo and Juliet or Titanic or I'm just something with big feelings, right. That aren't all good, that aren't all pleasurable. I think that's the other thing that is important about this idea of catharsis is that there's. It's almost like it's like castor oil for the soul. Like you're just trying to get it out for a moment and it's not going to go away forever, Right. There's no sense that you're going to solve anything. Or like, I've read this book and now I understand love or, you know, that I shouldn't run away from my family when I think I'm going to do something terrible. It's not even about providing solutions or moral instruction or anything else. Except for that feeling of. That temporary release of the feeling of being inextricably and permanently, at least for a while, human.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. And that the folks viewing this in 5th century BC were experiencing it collectively. They were not sitting, reading this play in their living rooms. There were 15,000 of them in a big outdoor theater. They're kind of packed in there and they were having these feelings together. It's like that collective expression when you go to a concert and you can feel unified with people because you are sharing the same encounter with art. That's the way that this story was experienced. And I think it's still the ideal way to experience something like this. It's one of the things that makes me love going to the movies, you know, like, because you can feel the vibe in the room as everybody laughs together or everybody goes oh, no. Or whatever it is. And there are moments in this play where you can, like where I could imagine like folks nudging each other like, oh, did you. Did you pick up on that? Because I picked up on that. Like, he's doing that thing, isn't he? And that, like, remembering that that was what was happening here. That this was written for people who were going to experience not just catharsis, but a collective moment of catharsis with a story that they were all already familiar with.

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[Jeff O'Neill]

Today's episode is brought to you by Hachette Audio, publishers of the audiobook the Dinner Party by Viola van de Sant, read by Rose Elisa for fans of Cleopatra and Frankenstein and assembly an intimate and darkly propulsive story told over the course of a dinner party from its careful preparations through its explosive, irrevocable finish about the tensions of love and autonomy, grief and female rage, and the surprising moments when they come crashing to the surface. Franka left the Netherlands behind to start her new life in England with Andrew Andrew, who suggests a dinner party with his colleagues to celebrate their big upcoming launch. A dinner party that Franke must plan and shop and cook and clean for a dinner party during a heat wave when the fridge breaks, alcohol replaces water and an unexpected guest joins their ranks, upending the careful balance between everything Franka once was and now is. I don't know about you, but it sounds deliciously messy to me. Make sure to check out the audiobook the Dinner Party by Viola van de Sant, read by Rose Lisa and thanks again to Hachette Audio for sponsoring this episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Bloomsbury Publishing, publishers of the Marvel Age of Comics series. A series of concise, affordable, beautifully designed books that explore the history of over 85 years of Marvel Comics. The series is an epic, deep dive into the creators, characters and cultural forces that shape the Marvel universe. Launching with volumes on Daredevil, the Avengers and Doctor Strange, this series is a must read for fans of comics, superheroes and pop culture history. You can start your collection and pre order all three today. I also think they make great gifts for the comic book lovers in your life, which might include yourself. They include everything from Doctor Strange's debut in 1963 to the mighty Avengers versus the 1970s and also the fall and defiant rise of Matt Murdock in Daredevil BO Born Again. So make sure to check out Marvel Age of Comics and thanks again to Bloomsbury Publishing for sponsoring this episode.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So maybe that's a good place into what is this all about?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, before we get there though, if you don't have a copy of Oedipus the King and you want to pick one up, boy are there a lot to choose from. And let me tell you that you can find one on Thriftbooks, which is sponsoring this first season of Zero to well Read. I see 423 editions here, 12 of those collectible and that looks like just a translation by Bernard Knox. So maybe that was a super popular one with an introduction by the great playwright Thornton Wilder. There is the three Theban plays. That's the. I don't know. Did you have the same Penguin Classics? I know that you did the fables translation. This one's a fables too. But I don't know if there's multiple editions. You can get that one for 489 in good condition. I bought mine for you know, a local used bookstore in good shape. I think there's something to me to reading one of these classics. I kind of want to used edition with like some other strangers half hearted notes in the margin that peter out a third of the way through when they collective moment reading. Yeah, you can get a Cliff's Notes version there. You can get the Oxford edition with commentaries new and hardback for 212 if that's something that floats your boat. I've done a couple different translations. I like the Lattimore, I like the Fitzgerald. They're all pretty good. I think the Fitzgerald's the one I remember. And I'll get to this in the famous quotes because when I was reading this Fagle's translation there's a couple of quotes from the edition I used to teach that I say every now and again and I'll save that for our quotes and they're slightly different and I. I was very sad about that. So I need to go dig up my original. We are. This is our first. Is our first week of translation. Yeah, it is our first work of translation which we're not really going to get into because even though you and I are clearly scholars of ancient Greek, that is a Gordian knot that you have to acknowledge and move on pretty quickly of the problems and possibilities of translation. So order the 15 or more you could buy for all 10 people in your book club. You can get them the same edition for less than 50 books, have it shipped to you or for free. And then that would also get you closer to a free reading. Rewards from Thrift books. Here we know what I should do. I should keep a running tally or of how much it would cost you to buy all of the books that we've talked about so far in my recommended. You know here, here's my pick for the book.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, you know I bought almost all of my books for this season from Thrift Books because even though ones that we're reading that were already on my personal shelves, I wanted like a fresh copy that my. My former self had not Made notes in.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, look at you. How responsible.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, responsible particular. Dealer's choice, right? Yeah, but I'll be doing the same thing. We're starting to plan our next season which will kick off in January, and I'll. I will be doing the same thing. We love Thrift books. I also read the Fagl's translation and I thought about asking you, you know, back in the summer when I was buying my books, which translation you were using. Did we want to sync up on translation? But I think that sometimes it's nice when we're reading different versions. Like we read different versions of Hamlet with different commentary and that can be helpful. But I did read the fables the Penguins. It's a Penguin classic of the the three Theban plays and I really liked it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

All right, so with that, I guess let's give the readers like a 5 second. They could pause the episode themselves. What do you know about the story of Oedipus? Just think to yourself out there and it could be as little as I know Oedipus as a word. And that's literally it all the way to. I'm a scholar and this is what I've studied. What do you think, Rebecca, if you were to make a reference in your own social circles. We can't speak for everyone. Can we speak for ourselves to Oedipus? What do you think the median understanding of someone you might be talking to about a book or books in general would know about Oedipus?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think that most of the folks I know who tend to be on the nerdy side. Let's set the context.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's what I said.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We are would recognize Oedipus or Oedipus complex from the Freud and would probably be like, doesn't this have something to do with wanting to sleep with your mom? And that's probably about as far as we would get. Some of them, there's a couple history majors would have read it in college. I mean, I read it in college and this was a very different experience than what I remembered from 20 years ago. So I also wouldn't count on folks remembering much more than doesn't he sleep with his mom? And isn't it bad somehow?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, the answer to that is yes, for sure it's bad. And yes, he does. But the wanting to is very much a. We can get into this. I don't know what happened. That's not. That's not what I mean.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

As we said, Freud was doing a lot of coke.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So yeah, at one point, Jocasta When Oedipus is like, oh my God. She's like, you know, it's a dream. You know, everyone has a dream of with their mom. And I was like, do they? But even having said that there, at least there is this idea that it's a dream. Like it's something that's out there, but that everyone wants to. That oedipal complex is a real psychological phenomenon. Is not a thing to my understanding. I did a very little bit of googling. It's like.

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Claimed it was unconscious, but still.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. So anyway, tell us what it's really. What's the real story? At least this story of Oedipus, which is important.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes. So this is set in ancient Greece. It was first performed in 425 BC. So many, many.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm so bad with BC because like what's older than. Is 490 older than 510? I, I drives me nuts.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

No, 510 is older.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I know, it makes me nuts. I'm reading Sophocles biography. This guy is aging backward like Mork. It's driving me. I can't do it the first time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Mork and Sophocles have appeared in the same sentence.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, half baked idea. Can we start at zero and just. Let's just pick zero, like when the reset meteors hit. This BCE stuff is not. This is for the chickens. I don't like. Go ahead.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay. So a plague is ravaging Thebes, which is where the play is set. And an oracle has revealed that the plague is punishment that's being wrought on the city because someone murdered the former king Laius. The current king Oedipus sets out to find out who murdered Laius so that he can end the plague and save the city. There's bad news for Oedipus though, because the call is coming from inside the house. Oedipus has unknowingly fulfilled a prophecy that he would kill his mother. Sorry, kill his father and marry his mother. And the play follows Oedipus as he uncovers the truth. And if it sounds to you like I have just spoiled the whole thing, like chill out. Because the play was written for an audience that was already familiar with the story of Oedipus and they knew where it was driving. The action of the play doesn't show how he kills his father and marries his mother. It knows that he has already done those things. And we the audience are supposed to know that he has already done those things. The tension of the play is about what happens when he finds out and what it means to him as he goes on the search for truth that begins as this search for Laius's murderer and ends as his discovery that it's him.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And they would have been familiar with the idea of Oedipus as someone who had this prophecy and then fulfilled it unknowingly. But there are key differences that we're not going to go into all of them here. But I want to say that is an adaptation of a story and this is something the ancient Greeks did where they were telling different versions of it. Even Aeschylus, who is the inventor of tragedy and a older but contemporary peer of Sophocles, had his own version. And I think that's also something that's hard to remember in these cases is these figures. I wish, I wish I could. I wish I could feel what it felt like for a audience member in this play, how, what their reaction to this kind of story would be. Because here's another thing that's super hard to remember and I have this for takeaways later. It's like this is a political, cultural, an artistic and religious experience all wrapped up into one. So in part and parcel, these are real figures, but also subject to artistic creation by these playwrights. It's, there's, there's no artistic moment like it's in our, in our experience. It's very hard to find any kind of analogy. But part of it is knowing the story, knowing what's going to happen, the inevitability of it, but also seeing how this particular playwright, in this particular interpretation, adaptation is going to tweak it a little and give us a little difference here. And the signal difference in my reading about how this version of Oedipus is different from others is that the, there's much more of Oedipus's own will that brings about his, like his search for truth, his revelation, self revelation is the thing like, I need to know the truth, I need to find what's going out. Jocasta, his wife slash mother, says, just turn away from this, don't look at it. And we'll get to my quotes a little bit later when my, you know, one of the key ones is like, I can't, I don't care what's going to happen. I have to know the truth and it's true. Seeking rather than Odysseus pride, you know, we can get in. We're going to talk about hubris and fatal flaws. That is the thing that leads him to, towards his own destruction. But the Plot itself has a switch watch, like, perfection. And the prophecy that he gets as a kid and he's told so that he leaves his home was the same one his biological parents got that got them to get rid of him. And so everyone is trying to get around this prophecy, and in doing so, they bring it about. And so, you know, when I've taught this before, the students are tempted to be like, well, if they just hadn't done that, then this prop is like, well, that's it. But you see, they did, like, wait a minute, like, and you get into that cycle. So I would just encourage people to leave all of that. Just push all of your. Like, what people should have done. Just push that to the side. Rebecca, don't you think like it? I don't think it's fun or helpful.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, it's not fun or helpful. And then we don't get to do any of the other things that we get to do with this work of art. If Oedipus never leaves home and if his family never. If his original parents never try to get rid of him, also that doesn't resonate with human nature. Like, what kind of new parent gets a prophecy that, like, this terrible thing is going to happen with your child? And what kind of person grows up hearing that they're going to do a terrible thing and doesn't attempt to do something to avoid it or control like, this seems a very fundamental part of human nature to me, that if we are told it's likely that this thing is going to happen to you, or in Oedipus's case, it is foreseen, like, the gods have declared, this is your fate. We're not great as a species at being like, okay, yep. At just accepting it. Of course there's going to be some kind of resistance. This is a really extreme example of both what the prophecy is and what the response would be. But it makes sense to me that everybody we meet here was trying to avoid it in some way. They did really extreme things to try to avoid it. But then they were trying to avoid a very extreme thing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. I think if there's anything to. If you can get outside of it just for a second. I think one interesting perspective to think about in this regard is not what they should have done with the prophecy, but the. Again, I'm going to use post Christian language here. If there is an original sin here, it's the desire to ask the oracles about the future. Right. The desire to go beyond their contemporaneous, limited human saying to have A kind of access to dip their cup briefly into a well that they don't really get to have access to in a full way. It's funny, I was showing my kids back to the future the first time the other day, and I think the closest thing to the danger of prophecy in contemporary culture is, you know, sort of this mythology we built around time travel. It's like you don't want to know too much about the future because you can get yourself erased. Your photograph is going to get erased in the past. It's a similar kind of idea that knowing, having a little access to knowledge that is normally outside the realm of human understanding is more unwinding than buttressing. Like, it's going to go bad more often than it's going to go well. But. And in each case, we see people trying to intervene on their own behalf. And that's something that struck me this time, that it's much more collective. Right. It's not just Oedipus. It's also Jocasta and Laius. It's also the king and queen of Corinth. It's also the shepherd who gives the kid away. And like, several people take pity on this child that's been left to die on the hillside, which is a superhuman emotion that is not seen in this book, in this play, as lamentable. It's natural. Right. So this conflict between human emotion and experience and knowledge with supra, human knowledge. And when those two things to come together and when you mistake one for the other, that's when everything goes sideways in a real fundamental way.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, it resonates for me with that question people will ask today sometimes of like, would you. If you could know when you're gonna die, would you. Would you want to know? And if you would want to know what. What is it that you think you could do with that information? Like, would it give you a greater sense of control? Maybe. But would you actually have more control? No, you're still gonna die. You still don't have control. And that fundamental. That's. I think the deep fear, the deep truth in this work is, like, we don't have control. That's. I think, one of the things Freud is drawn to here. We're afraid of death. We're afraid of all of the things we can't control. And we will go to pretty extreme lengths in service of helping ourselves feel like we have some kind of control. And it's great hubris and very risky to think that we can control almost anything in the universe. And, you know, as you were saying, like, the audiences would have been familiar with a bunch of different versions of this one. And it is this, like, trying to exercise free will and that Oedipus goes on the search for truths. And that differentiates this performance. Like, that's the thing that Fagles says makes this version of Oedipus universally recognized as the dramatic masterpiece of the Greek theater. Like, that's a huge deal. And when it debuts in 425 BC, that's in this moment of intellectual revolution. Like, knowing what's happening in the culture then was really powerful to me, as I was. Was reading up for this, that this is right as the idea of history, like, history as a thing, is developing. Like, people are just becoming conscious of history.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Like, Herodotus had just invented the word history, basically.

Yeah.

In that century, like, someone had to.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Invent the idea of theater. Someone had to invent history. Political theory is new, democracy is new. Philosophy is just developing. Like, Aristotle has read and seen this play. And these ideas and questions of the play, like, also might seem kind of basic or fundamental, but it's because these are the very first questions humans were asking about what the hell we're all doing here when they figured out that we could do these things, that we could track history, that we could ask philosophical questions about what it all means, that we could use art to explore things and to have a collective catharsis. And the plays were also highly political. They were, like, in many. In many instances, plays in this era were used to criticize government officials and public figures in ways that were super sharp, that we would even, like, Jimmy Kimmel would shy away from, you know, from, like, how sharp the critique was. But it's like, this moment of intellectual revolution is important, but that it's kind of the first moment of intellectual revolution is also an important piece of grounding information.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. At least in the West. And it's so hard to. I thought my dad and I have played this game of, like, if you could go be in, like, five concerts of all time, which concerts do you go to? And I've since expanded that to cultural moments. Right. And I would. I think I would use one of my five picks on going to see the. Well, we haven't talked about this. How the scene of these plays performed once.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes, yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Sophocles. These plays were part of this Dionysian festival that happened in late March or early April. There was a very formal competition. Three playwrights each submitted a suite of plays. A comedy, a tragedy and a satyr play. The Tragedies were first in the morning, which is, you really got to get your coffee and wake up, darling. We're going to a 9am showing of Oedipus. I hope you're ready.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well, this is how you get your catharsis. You get all the big feelings out and then you have a comedy.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean, and this may be obvious, except it's so obvious that it's worth saying is that they didn't have electric lights. So if you're going to get nine plays in a day, you got to start at daybreak because the thing is going down like you may have torches and something, but very difficult for 15,000 people to see. Three playwrights were invited and then it was judged. There was a panels of judges who were elected. There was first, second and third. And this was the big deal. The cultural life of Athens, which was the center of Greek development at this particular time. We have seven extant plays from Sophocles, though there's historical record of at least 123of them having been produced. Even how we have the text that we do have is a story and worth its own multi part miniseries on pbs. But suffice it to say, the transitory nature of this were part of what made this powerful. Because these plays came out of earlier rights of singing and dancing. Like very basic singing and dancing stuff. The chorus. Chorus, the Greek word means dancer, right? So that's choreography is where we get the root for that. There's going to be a lot of roots like Thespis, who invented acting, essentially. Like, let's have one person stand outside the chorus and do some talking at us and like, that's an actor. Oh, so what you call actors? Thespians. He invented that crap.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

A guy invented acting.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Like, yes, invented the idea of it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This was one of my intrusive thoughts while going back to this was like, right. We haven't always had these things. Someone had to invent. Like, what if we added to this singing and dancing, a person delivering performed lines and then we could call it a thing. And then what? Now that we have this form, what do we do with it? How new and exciting this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

What can it do? Yeah, very exciting. And Aeschylus added a second actor. He's like, we have two people that we can talk to are in software. Wait a minute, I'm gonna be like Gillette adding blades to the razor. What about three. And suddenly get into the three body problem where that three. That three actors, usually only two of which were on stage at the same time, but sometimes they were all because, as you imagine, there's more than three characters. So you've got to go behind this Skene S K E N e which we call scene. They'd go behind it to change their outfits. They would wear masks that were heightened, but not grotesques. Because you've got to play to the 11,000th person up there, your facial. Facial expression. Acting wasn't a thing because most people couldn't see it. So he had these, you know, these, these mass. So when Oedipus. Spoiler alert. No, we're not doing that. What am I doing? When. When oedipus.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is 2500 years old, the horrible.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Truth about his existence and blinds himself. That happens behind the skiing and all the violence of these plays happens off stage. Some of that is thought to have been. We don't know exactly why. Apparently some of thought to have been like that sacrilege to show violence in this cultural, historical, religious setting. And some of it I think is frankly practical because you don't have that many people. You got to switch your masks, right? So you got to go from sighted Odysseus to bleeding eyes, not Odysseus, pardon me, Oedipus. And then you could move people around. They could do costume changes. Men were playing all the roles here. The other thing that I looked up is the. The great amphitheater of Athens was rebuilt after a fire and it was expanded with stone seating 15,000 people. There were only 50,000 people living in Athens at the time. So a third of the. They would release people from prison on bail so they could go see the play. Like, it's remarkable. It's really remarkable. There's really nothing like it. I'll give away one of my takeaways. I was like, this would be like if the super bowl and the Fourth of July and Christmas were all the same thing.

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Really remarkable. You cannot grasp how important this was and how fast the art form was changing at the same time. That's really important. Sophocles himself. This is not a Homer or. It's weird that we have more. Some people have more faith that Sophocles existed than Shakespeare, which kind of blows my mind given the historical record. But he was seemingly a normal participant in Athenian life. This is another thing that's kind of hard to wrap your head around too, because the worlds were so small and certainly democracy was not available to anyone in a really serious way. Like Sophocles was also the greatest playwright, but also served in the military as a 15 year old and then also was in political life to help sort some things out. Like all just a really enormous figure in the cultural life of the day. I don't. There's not a lot else to known about. I think it's also helpful to remember when you're reading really any text, but certainly text from the ancient world, that our contemporary formulations of cultural categories break down in a serious way. Right. Race breaks down, gender breaks down, sexuality breaks down. Sophocles had at least some interest in having romantic relationships with men. Just was the case. You know, that's one of the. Rightly or wrongly, that's sort of one of the Cliffs Notes thing people remember from ancient Greece is that homosexual relationships, especially among men, were not frowned upon really in any way that I understand. Maybe it wasn't the same as having a family and everything. But you weren't persecuted for it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. There wasn't the stigma that has been attacked contemporary Western cultures. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And you know, ancient Greece, we used to describe a melange of city states, Athens, Athens being predominant, that sort of dotted the Aegean Sea. And that includes places, you know, include cities off Asia Minor. Ilium or Troy was on the coast of Turkey. And so that really did. That really evades our East, West Black, white, colored, non colored constructions that we have today that are real but also temporary and culturally determined and other things like that. And I think that's one of the great pleasures of reading things like that are very different in a very different time is it helps give some perspective on the contingency. It doesn't say they're not impactful, but the contingency and malleability of these categories that feel to us so fixed at certain times.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes. And while you're talking about, you know, having perspective on the context of this work, like, I really can't say enough how important it is to go into this knowing that the audience would have been familiar with the story that the play is drawing on. So you as a reader or you as a viewer, if you've managed to find a performance of Oedipus the King to go see, it's expected of you that you know that this was the prophecy. He has already done it. How what he's about to find out about himself is not the surprise. How he finds it out is what the play is all about. And read the intro material like the Fagles.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Very good.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, the Fagl's one is great, like, but. But with the Hamlet translations that we were using in that episode. Read the intro material to this stuff that is not contemporary to our time because we don't share cultural context with the people who created this work or the people that were the intended audience for it. And it is not just helpful, but I think really necessary if you're going to invest your time in doing this kind of reading. Give the extra hour to reading all of the introductory material.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It is super helpful to be reminded of, here's what was happening, here's who Sophocles was, here's how people would have encountered this story. And it really does enrich the reading of the play as well. Because that's the stuff where somebody delivers a line and you're like, oh, that's foreshadowing. And the audience would have known it was foreshadowing. And there's real pleasure in being like, oh, I know where this is going, because we all know where this is going. And so everybody's leaning into forward on their seats at the same time. And when you have that experience and can imagine these ancient audiences having the same experience, I think that's very helpful for encountering this as closely as we can get to what the intended experience was. But it's still very far away.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Still very far away. And, you know, I think this is a Case where you can get something from just reading the text, you know, downloading a PDF of Project Gutenberg and just reading the text play as it is. Again, that's always going to be a subject of translation, unless you're reading some ancient Greek. But the more context you give, the more depth there is to your experience. Right. It becomes a historical inquiry and investigation as much as it is a cultural and artistic one, which has its. I certainly find helpful. I think they reinforce each other. Right. Because in reading this fable's introduction, one thing that I was either either learned for the first time or was reminded of is that the oracle at Delphi, the source of these prophecies, was still in business in 425 BC. You go there, open. Yes, it's open. And the priest there would, you know, scrawl out some stuff for you if you asked it a question. Super influential, it might be said. Probably something that would be taken over by the state pretty quickly in today's political environment. You can't have. It's kind of like the press or the fourth estate subject the bridge between the divine and the human. But in the moment of the play, the idea of getting prophecies in the oracle and taking them seriously was not a. It was not a conceit, Right. It was not sort of a suspension of disbelief proposition that you needed to enter into. Like it was there. And in this century, as the Greeks are working on political democracy and philosophy and history, the tension between human understanding and non human reality is very much up for grabs. What can we create? How can we. Are we subject to the Olympians? What are we subject to? Anything that isn't us. And if so, what is it? And if not, then what do you do? Those questions were very much fomenting at the time. And the answers that have come out and still get asked are very much like, you know, have a little bit more been parlayed into the realm of sort of nature versus nurture. We're not wondering if it's Aphrodite and Dionysus, we're wondering if it's neurons and DNA. But the, the idea is similar of like am I me and just a collection of whatever and subject to the whims or just a bunch of neurons firing, or is there a core consciousness and free will that is independent, autonomous, flawed and consequential and still resonates in many.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It does, it does, yeah. These ancient playwrights were often wrestling with humans relationship to the gods and to fate, like they are, as you said, they're consistent Consulting oracles. And they're doing that in the plays because people are doing that like in real life. Like fates are fulfilled, like prophecies are given. And it's notable that in Oedipus the King, there are no supernatural events. Someone goes and talks to the oracle, but there is no intervention by the gods. There is no like deus ex machina kind of moment. This is all human stuff. And that was a pretty significant shift that's also happening at this time of cultural relationship revolution in ancient Greece where it's not just like public life is not just centered around religious life anymore. The. This like rise of philosophical thought and history and individual inquiry is leading people to question whether the gods are a thing and if they are a thing, how influential are they? How influential should we allow them to be in our lives? And here this play is one man entirely dealing with what if it's all on me and I can't help but it up no matter how hard I try.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And then the primacy of the city state too. Right. There's a lot of talk in. In the play Oedipus the King about the. The king's ruler, the king's responsibility to the city, the primacy of the city as the political unit. An unusual political arrangement between Jocasta, Creon and Oedipus that I didn't do. I should have done some follow up reading around where there's sort of this tripartite thing, but not really because Creon is accused by Oedipus of like fomenting discord by soliciting this prophecy that, you know, there's this plague because of who killed Laius. And Creon's like, why would I do that? I've got it good, baby. I've got all the. I've got all the rewards of being king, but I'm also not the one that wears the crown.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Some of my favorite quotes there.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So that. That's also very much at play. Let's see what else is worth pointing out. Well, this is the actual scene of it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is either the first or the middle of these three Theban plays, which is important to talk about. They were like historically presented in the order in which the events happened, which is Oedipus the king, then Oedipus a Colonus, then Antigone. But Fagles and a lot of contemporary translators actually encourage breaking them into the order in which they were written, which is Antigone, then Oedipus the king, and then Oedipus a Colonus, because that prevents Readers from viewing them as a trilogy. They're not intended to be a trilogy. The best analogy I have for this is that you can watch all the Marvel movies in the order that they came out in theatrical release, or you can watch them in the order of how the storylines unfold. And he's saying, read these or engage with them in the order that they were written, because that allows you to see how the questions Sophocles was asking and the ways that he was approaching the stories evolved over time.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And I think the three of them are best thought of, like, three character stories orbiting around a central myth, which is a cool way. Antigone is amazing, too, by the way, if anyone's.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think that was the first one that I read. When did you first read this?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I.

You know, I. I wrote down in our notes that I think it was for Western civ. And I read it right before taking a test on it. I actually think I read it in high school as part of a Western literature course. I don't. I don't remember. It's lost to the sands of time. I've taught it a couple times, but, yeah, I don't. I think. I think either Western, but again, I was either 17 or 19, so it's pretty close either way.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I was. Mine was in a. This honors seminar my freshman year of college that you got credit for literature, philosophy, history, and theology in. It was six hours a week. Like, three hours of lecture, three hours of discussion per week. This was. I think the first semester was like antiquity to the Middle Ages, and then the second semester was the Middle Ages up into more contemporary work. It was, unbeknownst to me in 2001, like, the signal experience of my college education, formative in ways that continue to have interesting impact on me, like, shout out to the Jesuits for putting together a class like that. But also, this work makes so much sense in that context because you can encounter it as a literature, philosophy, history, and theology all rolled into one, and I hadn't touched it since then.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Interesting. So speaking of, what was it like to encounter what, like, describe your own reading experience of, like, eyes going over the words?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. This was a lot more fluid and compelling than I expected it to be or than I remembered. I think this felt challenging and hard and weird when I read it in college because I had never read anything like this before. I was. I was new to reading stuff by the ancient Greeks. I have no idea which translation we read like, and that probably matters quite a bit, like, how difficult someone wants to make the language. I found Robert Fagels translation to be very readable, very straightforward, especially coming off of our recent read of Hamlet. Like, this is shorter, first of all. Like, you can do this in basically one sitting. But I found this to be easier. Like, there were no. I didn't have to go, you know, trying to figure out what the language meant. You're not having to do your own acts of translation the way that you often need to do with Shakespeare. Of, like, what is that a reference to? And what is the joke here? Like, the language is not working on multiple levels. This is very straightforward. And I like. I really enjoyed it. It was kind of. It was exciting. I was telling my husband, like, Sophocles is really hitting for me this week. And that's a thing I didn't expect to be saying. What about you? We hadn't talked about this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, I said its straightforwardness is almost shocking. And some of it's a translation, but some of it is the plot and character are bold coloring. You know, painting with really bold strokes. There's not a lot of shading here. I think both in spirit, form and effect. It is playing to an amphitheater of 15,000 citizens. And you want to use brighter colors with more delineated elements because that shows up at a distance. You aren't left wondering about, wait, what actually happened. There's no ambiguity about motivation, like all the things that come with modernity, that sort of post Shakespeare, frankly, when we talked about Hamlet, we got into some of the stuff that Hamlet was creating. You get none of that here. So you're left with something more directly and simply powerful and odd and disconcerting. And I say question mark satisfying because I still have. And I guess that we have the word cathartic because that's the right word for it. It is cathartic in a way. And it describes attention as satisfying a displeasure all wrapped up into one. That's unlike other kinds of artistic or really emotional experience you're likely to have.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. And it. I'm just realizing this as you're talking about it, but this is one of my favorite ways to encounter a story where it opens with either here's the thing, like, here's who done it. I love a. This is how it happened. Or we're not trying to find out, like, oh, my God, he married his mother, but where the. Where the whole point is how. How did this happen? And how do we figure it out? Like, we will have an upcoming episode as a preview for folks on the Secret History by Donna Tartt which is one of my favorite contemporary examples of this. On page one you find out who's dead and who did it. And then you spend 500 and some odd pages getting to like doing the rewind of. But how I. I find that to be so much more satisfying and like there's just more depth to that experience than a straightforward like, okay, something bad is going to happen to Oedipus. What's the bad thing going to be? And how does it unwind? I liked that the audience knows and we're supposed to know when we begin what the thing is that happened and that you get to dwell more in the process of uncovering and his trying to make sense of it. I really appreciated that. I was kind of like, am I gonna read the other two just for fun now?

[Jeff O'Neill]

You might. I mean Oedipus, a colonist. Colonist that's after he's blinded himself and has been exiled and sort of wandering around. Yeah. I think the pleasures of different art is of course different and none. None is better than the other. But like the mystery where you're trying to figure out what happened has sort of the pleasure of a jigsaw puzzle. This is gonna sound very strange and I apologize, but. But it's real and authentic and I'll say it here. The thing I was thinking about when I got to the end of this and what I was feeling reminded me of a recent trip my family took to the zoo and we were watching deer carcass to get fed to the condors there. And Rowan, my daughter, was like looking at it and she was like, this is terrible and interesting and I can't look away. And it's like. Feels very. I was like, yeah, I get that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Very elemental.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's very, very elemental. And it's hard to describe kind of a feeling. And I find it frankly, when we're looking at read alikes down the. I didn't have a lot that weren't. Yeah. And there, I guess Romeo and Juliet, frankly has a similar kind of feeling.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

There are moments in this, like just to. What does it feel like to read it? Where Oedipus is talking to someone and he's trying to get information from them about what happened in his past or what they know about how all of this came to be. And the person starts to tell the story and then. And pauses and is like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm gonna tell you this. I said I was fear.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm on the brink of frightful speech. That's the one of the quotes I say, yeah, that's from my old translation. I fear, like I'm about to say something terrible.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That stuff is right. That stuff is so elemental. The like, oh my God, I never thought I would have this conversation. I can't believe I'm gonna tell you this. Are you sure that you want to know? Because once I say it, I can't unsay it. Like once you know this, you can't unknow it. And they are, you know, that's not the exact language they're using, but that's what they're saying to each other. And that stuff was so recognizable. That's what made one of the things that made this an exciting thing that still felt fresh. And to go back to that catharsis feeling for me was that like, yeah, this is what it is like when you have found out that something bad has happened and you, you just have this unshakable need to know how it happened or what the details were or something. And I think we've all had the experience of being on both sides of those equations of, of either you're the asker and you've got to brace yourself or you're the one who's going. I cannot believe I'm actually going to like say this thing. And then we're going to be in the moment where I've said the thing and you're going to know it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, yeah. And that, that human personal understanding and human understanding is a one way street. You can't go back.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think that's true both on the individual level for Oedipus, but it's very much at stake in the development of Greek philosophy and intellectual life. It's like once we figured out the Pythagorean theorem, there's no going back from there. Like we now have to live with this particular knowledge. And so Jocasta keeps saying, don't turn away, turn away. Even as that is sort of practically right and might. It would work if you could do it. We also know it's impossible. At the same time, one thing that's hard to remember for me as well, we were joking about spoilers before. This is an artistic world in which spoilers were impossible. Because all of these stories were known already. Every single one of these plays functioned under an element of dramatic irony, which is when the audience knows more about what's happened and is going to happen than the characters do, because they already know, they have heard in whatever the equivalent of kindergarten was for Athenians. They're just always already in circulation. So the how and why and the permutations and combinations that get us to the place where no, we're going to is what's interesting at stake rather than the creation of a novel. I mean literally novel story. Right. Which is I. I can understand that in my head, but I sort of can't feel that in my heart. I don't know what that would be like to encounter stories like that. Let's see, what's it all about? The big ideas. We talked about a lot of these. It's interesting that we haven't talked about hubris or tragic flaws really yet because I think in a high school reading that's the thing that's really brought about. But it's certainly at stake here, which is, you know, the classic sort of I don't want simplistic is certainly true. But the drive by reading is that Oedipus's tragic flaw is his hubris, which is an overconfidence. Right. Like he thinks he can contend with divine knowledge and master it. And that way lies disaster. Disaster comes from the Greek for against the stars. So there you go, we're all going to go Greeks all the way around. And then knowing thyself, the. It's. It's so one of the delicious. I don't know if it's a contradictions, but sort of Ouroboros is the snake eating its tail of the Oracle of Delphi is the Know thyself is the inscription at the oracle. But also knowing thyself leads to the disaster. And like you can't get away from it. Right. There is no getting outside of this snow globe. It's built in and sort of the trap doors are. Are all around and self referential. It's like kind of dizzying to think about. It is in that way.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Dizzying is a really good word for it. I think. I'm just like. There are a lot of levels to this and there's certainly. There's stuff about the hubris and his tragic flaws that feels really present and relatable today. There are moments where Oedipus is making declarations about I'm gonna save the city and I'm the great man who's gonna do it and you're all gonna thank me. And I thought, boy, I saw that on the news last night.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, it doesn't feel that old very much about good kings and bad kings. Even in a proto emergent democracy, the acknowledgement that whoever we elect still has an awful lot of power and their goodness or badness of Their actions will have, you know, I mean, it's. It's obvious to say now, but serious ramifications for the Bali politician. And here it's metaphorized into this idea of the plague. Right. I guess if there's one supernatural element that is in the background, like, literally in the background, here is. It's this plague that's been brought about by the gods because of this sin of Laius having been killed. And we need to figure this thing out. A very quick overview of Aristotle's six elements of tragedy. They are, in rough descending order. Plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, or scenic effect and song. Plot and character being the most important. Less emphasis on the diction or ideas. But I think to have a big, spectacular, cathartic moment, you need dramatic plots and big, bold characters that you care about, and then those other things are secondary. The. The idea of the plot being. I. This is one of the things that struck me is like, we just don't get plots like this where the plot is just on rails and it isn't even really subject to scrutiny. It's so tightly.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, I read the whole thing in an hour.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And it just goes like. You jump right in page one. Someone is telling him, this is why the plague has happened. And then he's off of like, well, we better figure out who killed Leias, and then I can stop the plague, and I'm the great man who can do it. Even as everyone he encounters along the way is like, buddy, you are not gonna like what you find out here. Just insist. Insists on proceeding. He can do it, and it really does, like, on rails is the right way to put it. It just remains wild to me, remembering that somebody had to invent theater as a form and that this is one of the earliest expressions of it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Fagels makes the point. You have the note here of fate versus free will, and that's clearly at stake here. But Fagels does a good job in the introduction that I read, saying that the Greeks didn't, like, have a term for free will, but they sort of defined it negatively by. Well, if you're. If it's all fate, that's one thing, but if it's fate plus something else, what is that something else?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And how can it be fate plus something else?

[Jeff O'Neill]

And it's a helpful formulation. Heraclitus, you know, only had fragments of his work from the ancient world. But one of them is character equals fate, or character is fate. So the idea that who you are and what happens to you are intertwined like this only happens to Oedipus because of who Oedipus is. It's not so much written in the stars as written into whom, who he is. Like, he is going to get this prophecy. And because Oedipus is who he is, he will bring about his own fate. So it's like not a script that's written that you can't avoid. It's almost like a personality DNA where you are going to. You are going to respond to this. These things in this way because of who you are. And the great question of liberal education and frankly the great question of, you know, Aristotelian thought and Plato is can you do anything about that?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Can you.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Can you get outside of yourself to change even who you are enough? And it's. It's the great warrant of liberal education that sometimes I wonder about. Like, can you get around yourself enough to get around yourself? Which is hard to. Hard to formulate as well. What else? And what's about Rebecca, before we go.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You know, I think we. I think we nailed it all. Tell me about your intrusive thoughts.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I was. I was trying. I was trying to. Are you. You read what I put here?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I did.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I was. I was trying to imagine what an equivalent cultural moment to the first performance of Sophocles new Tragedy at the Dionysian Festival. Like at the height of Sophocles fame. Right. The most important Greek Trajan of its age at the most important venue telling one of the great stories. And I. Did people know what the plays were, that they would get titles? I don't know what kind of. Did you just show up and you didn't know. Is it going to be.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Sophocles is on first.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Let's see what Orestes. Or is it going to be, you know, something else? Here's what I. Here's what I could come up with. Imagine that. We got word that in March Taylor Swift was going to performing her new album Only Once live at. I don't know. I don't. What's the biggest stadium? Wembley. What can fit. I don't know how many people to be the equivalent of Athens. I'd be like a 3 million person stadium in London. London.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's one of those big Asian arenas where BTS performs. That's what we're talking about.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Think of what the energy would be like.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, bananas.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We've never seen anything like it. We've never seen anything like it. So that's my interest.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I appreciate that. That's a good one.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And should we do that? Would that be more talk about monoculture. Wow.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, the Ticketmaster possibilities are really stunning there.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Wow. My God. Yeah, I was trying to look at the. I was trying to do some research about the economics of this. Like, you didn't get rich writing these plays because there was only one performance and they had to be affordable enough that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, nobody sounds there. None of them are professional playwrights here, as you were saying. Like, they've all served in the military. They're involved in public life. This is just like the side hustle, the thing they're doing for fun. Somewhere in there.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It sounds like the rich. Some of the rich citizens of Athens underwrote these productions like it was a form of, like, de facto, you know, altruistic taxation of some kind, but sort of expected that if you were the great wine merchant or whatever, that you were gonna under. Brought to you by Cleanesis's red wines that you mixed one part to three or whatever. I don't know if they had branding or whatever, but it's like that. That's what the reality. It was so embedded into the cultural life that it wasn't even extricable from it. Like, it just. It just seems like it was put together that way. Is it for you, Rebecca? Is it. It's for you, if what.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

This is the hardest episode for me to answer these on yet, because, like, it's kind of hard to make a pitch to anybody in 2025 about. Just go spend an hour reading Sophocles at the same time that, like, there are so many worse ways to spend an hour. This was really enjoyable. So I have a lot of, like, man, just go give it a shot. Like, I think a lot of folks probably have a ton of reasons for just not being interested. And, you know, if you're interested in the history of this kind of stuff, if you want to have your mind blown a little bit by. Right. Drama was new at some point. This is what it looked like when it was new. What are the origins of how we think about dramatic theater and all of the, you know, everything that we've spent the last hour talking about. It's worth reading. But this. This is a. Doesn't lend itself as easily to the, like, who's it for? Who's it not for? Recommendations. Anti recommendations as anything else.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And it's sort of beyond taste at this point.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, this. That's a great way to put it. Yeah, this. This isn't about personal taste. Like, if you're curious at all and you haven't read these since school or if you've never read them, I do think it's a really good use of a couple of hours. It was fun.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. I think you could make a night of it. Read the introduction, maybe get jump on Wikipedia, read a little about the Greek theater. Like, I found myself feeling very grateful to have had to have a few hours.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

To journey back and imagine myself and remind myself of. Of these moments and these dynamics, these cultural, artistic and historical forces colliding at this moment. There was a. It was sort of a way of like artistically touching grass. I feel like that was very, very much useful to me.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

We talked in the Hamlet episode about how Shakespeare was writing in another big moment of cultural revolution and intellectual revolution. And what was happening in Shakespeare's moment was that a bunch of these ancient works were finally being widely disseminated and like that they were the catalyst for this whole new level of thought and of creation. So I also, I do think that if you are interested in drawing those lines between like the major forces of Western art, this is the starting place or one of the starting places. And it's really satisfying from that perspective.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's time for immortal questions. But before that I realized that I should have, when I first introduced the immortal questions, I should have put in brackets at the front that most of these works that we're going to talk about have the question of who am I? Built into them. Very few of them don't have that built into them. So we'll take that as our rstle and e of the immortal questions, who am I? But that's very much, much the primary one here. But here's the thing I would also say is in these moments, this is when the idea of who am I? Is invented. Like for the first time. That's really at stake.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Which I know, Right?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And the idea that you could ask that, but then also maybe create it, right. That you are not subject to the eye that's been laid out for you. That maybe you can do something about it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But then maybe not. We don't know that we have not just always sat around wondering. That is just a mind blowing reminder.

[Jeff O'Neill]

A reminder of what? The questions that we have here that we consider. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? And what's the deal of good and evil, Rebecca, which jump out to you?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh boy. I mean, how do I know? What I know is the big one.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's A big one.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I think that's a big one. But there is some. What is the good life? There is some. What do I know? What do I owe my neighbor? Or in Oedipus's case, what do I owe these people that I'm leading?

[Jeff O'Neill]

What owe to the city? What do I owe my, you know.

Right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Is this all there is? Is kind of integrated into am I fated to something? Is there a bigger plan? Not so much on the certainty of death. No, not so much on what else might there be? Yeah, a little bit with good and evil.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But I mean, he's not pre good and evil. It's like.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, it is. Because he's not deciding between doing good things and bad things. When the play starts. He has already done the bad things and he doesn't know the full context in which he's done them. He doesn't even know that one of them was bad. He knows that he killed a man. He doesn't know that that man was Laius. He doesn't know that the woman he's married to is also his mother. A lot of immortal questions. Count on the Greeks to be doing a lot of it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

If it's been a while since you've had a reason to think about Greek mythology, I think it's helpful to remember that unlike in sort of a Judeo Christian worldview, which is one I know better than other religious systems, the gods are a source of power and you are supposed to honor them. But they're not paragons of behavior. They're not sort of like Here are the 10 commandments to do good things to please the gods. It's much more like they're. They are Mercurial. Well, literally mercurial because Mercuria is the name of the. There's the Roman name for Hermes. They have quixotic, almost human like characteristics. They are horny and deceitful and wrathful and jealous. And so to please them is not to do right action by your fellow man or to fulfill these commandments. It is to pay obedience to them. You know, sort of sacrifice your oxes and pour out the wine and don't do things they don't want. Want. But it's not about good and evil that those. I don't even know what the word. I don't know what the word evil comes from. Like literally the entomology of. Of that would be. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm pretty sure, yeah. Like Oedipus is not navel gazing here about all Right. And Sophocles is not navel gazing through Oedipus about, like, what it means to be a writer, what it means to create art. This is pre that stuff.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean, that's what Aristotle. This is the kind of thing that got people thinking about art and writing, rather than thinking about art writing itself, which is a weird thing to say. Could you get most of the gist from watching the signal adaptation?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Who knows?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Were there one? I mean, if you went to go see a production, I'm sure, like, colleges and stuff do this from time to time. You would get it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You would get it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Maybe even more than just. Certainly more than just reading on the page.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. Maybe Apple TV will do this, since they're disgusting. In big, gorgeous adaptations of things that no one watches. Go for it. Okay, let's go to your Muppet question.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Would this be watchable as a Muppet version where a human plays the main character? I have the most disturbing question of this yet.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, this is upsetting. But a Muppet chorus would be chaotic.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The chickens be the chorus with, like, the guy who leads the chicken. Chickens being the leader. Yeah, a sub question would be. Okay, I know it's disturbing and never going to happen, but were it to happen, which Muppet plays the main character or which human plays the main character? I think Gonzo as Oedipus here would be all right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I like that.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The most obliviously confident of the Muppets is Gonzo.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I was gonna run back my Adam Driver selection. There are not many moments in which I don't want Adam Driver Driver to be on stage with a bunch of Muppets. But I know Gonzo as Oedipus. And then I guess you get to pick a human for something else. So maybe, like, I don't know, he's.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Like, what are you doing, Gonzo? Calm down. Anyway, that would be funny. So let's see what's next. Miscellaneous trivia adaptations, rumors, Mr. Tret misattributed quotes, etc. I said a couple mine already. About 15,000 people attended these at the peak out of an athenian population of 50,000.

That's wild.

I also have can be thought of as an adaptation of the Oedipus story. So maybe we can chill about a sexy withering heights or whatever. We've been doing this for 3,000 years, and not only is it fine, but sometimes the adaptation survives longer.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, it's gonna be okay.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And then you just have so Freud and the Oedipal complex. And like, I just need to remind us all once Again, that Freud was doing a lot of coke. And his, like. Freud's reading of the Oedipal complex basically comes straight from what Jocasta says here. It doesn't actually come from Oedipus's actions, because Oedipus doesn't know that Jocasta is his mother. He's not having some unconscious drive to have sex with the person he sees as his mother. He just happens to have married the woman who is his mother, but he doesn't know that she's his mother. And that's very different from what Jocasta claims most men have the experience of wanting. And then what Freud bases the Oedipal complex on. So it's really like, if anyone anything, it's Jocasta and Freud working together on what it should be called, something other than the Oedipal complex, because it's really not about Oedipus's design.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Didn't even know Jocasta was his mother.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, right, Right, right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Not for nothing. Like, she kind of came with the throne that he got when he solved the riddle of the.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's the last thing he finds out. He finds out that Leus was his, that this man he killed was Laius, and then he finds out that Laius was his father and that Jocasta, his wife, was his mother is the last one of. Of the big discoveries.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's helpful to remind yourself with Freud that he got the big thing right, which is there's more going on in there than we think. But literally everything else was wrong, which is, you know, you could do worse. But the specifics are really tough. All right, let's do favorite notable lines. Rebecca, what do you want to chat.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Okay. I mean, I've said earlier in the show that I really love that you can imagine what the audience is experiencing here. And I like that you can tell that Sophocles is having. Having fun with all of the foreshadowing. Like, there's a line, let the man drag out his life in agony, step by painful step. Oedipus says this, and the audience would have seen Oedipus limp on stage, that he has this chronic and pretty pronounced limp. Oedipus says, so I will fight for him as if he were my father, stop at nothing, search the world to lay my hands on the men who shed his blood. And he says this to an audience of people who know that Leisure was his father. Like, that stuff is just fun. But then also, all the moments with Tiresias the seer are great. Tiresias tells him, I say, you are the murderer you hunt. I pity you, flinging at me the very insults each man here will fling at you soon. And that read to me like what we say today about certain presidents for whom every accusation is actually a confession. Creon has this moment of going, I don't know. And when I don't, I keep quiet. And that the italics on I keep quiet.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Did they have italics?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Mine, I think.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Mine was italicized.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No, I'm like in ancient Greek. Oh, did they italics come from, I.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Don'T know, verbal italics? At least I keep.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I keep quiet. Yeah, you imagine very. Let's see, I've got a couple here. Count no man happy until he is dead. That's an end line from the chorus. That's also something that Solon says in Herodotus is the Histories. And this was a big idea in the ancient Greek world is like, it's not over yet. So you do not count your chickens until you're dead, because disaster could still find you here. And that itself, I think that you don't know you're happy until you're dead. Is this kind of contradiction that the Greeks were interested in? Like, that's a. It feels like it might be a platitude, but it's so deep and weird and discomforting that it's hard to. Hard to wrap your mind around. The word strange comes up quite a bit in this book, in this text. And I don't know if it's the same Greek word that Faggles is interpreting is just using a strange. But I guess my intrusive thought here, like with Hamlet, I always kind of like to think about if there's like a breaking of the fourth wall at some point where I have been saved for something terrible and great, something strange. The idea that in that moment, that could speak for Oedipus, his story being the subject of other people's understanding. Like, I've been saved. To be a character in a play at some point is a fascinating idea to me. I'm right at the end of Horrible Truth. I've got to say at the shepherd. I believe that's where I got. I fear I'm at the brink of frightful speech, from which I say from time to time, I fear him at.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The brink of frightful speech is better.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's more Shakespearean.

Yeah.

And. And I think one reason that the Fagl's translation reads so smoothly is I think that's intentional. I think there's a version of that that feels more stentorian that feels more. I don't know, that amps up the floweriness or the complexity of the language. And there could be a virtue of that, but getting through it is one of them. And then, Creon, what if you're wholly wrong? Oedipus says, no matter. I must rule. And I think there's something to that. And probably for the own, the most sane response to the truth of you can't know everything and yet we must live is somewhere not no matter. It's like, yes, I know I could be wrong, but I've got to do something anyway. And to walk into any situation or into your life with, well, could I attenuate if I. If I am wrong, Is there a way to make it not as disastrous as it could be? Because one of the things Oedipus does, as soon as you hear about the truth, he just goes full speed, 100% into, I'm gonna kill this guy. Where this is gonna be. You can't believe how quickly I'm gonna get this and how bad it's gonna be. Like, is there a version of this where he had heated Creon's warning and says in Aspis, you know, you're right. There's something else going on here. Let's. Let's investigate. Investigate, but tread carefully. But the truth is going to be the same whether he treads carefully or not. So it doesn't even really help you in that regard.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. My last favorite is the chorus near the very end. And we were talking yesterday about, are we going to call this Oedipus the King or Oedipus Rex? And, you know, the connection between Rex and tyrant pride breeds the tyrant Violent pride gorging Crammed to bursting with all that is overripe and rich with ruin Clawing up to the height headlong pride crashes down the abyss Sheer doom no footing helps all foothold lost and gone and here's the kicker. But the healthy strife that makes the city strong I pray that God will never end that wrestling. And like, sitting here in 2025 with a sick Simper Taranis tattoo on my body and a protest to attend tomorrow. But the healthy strife that makes the city strong I pray that God will never end that wrestling.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Like.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Like this stuff is still relevant. And that's one of the reasons, I mean, that we're doing this show, but also one of the reasons to go back to these old works and to have these moments of, like, yes, we have been doing this for thousands of years.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. My favorite line is the chorus trying to Wrestle with the truth of Tiresias as a being, but also what kind of knowledge he represents, which is this is imperfect, but not access to imperfect knowledge. The chorus says the skilled prophet scans the birds and shatters me with terror. I can't accept him, can't deny him, and don't know what to say. I mean, boy, that feels really like. I just don't know. I don't know what.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But here we are.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, here we are. You have any hot takes you want to get off?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You know, I think these ancient works only seem hard when you're a kid if you first encounter them as a young student, because they are still totally different from anything you've seen before, or you don't have the grounded, like, full context of what's happening. Maybe you have one of the more Stentorian translations. But my experience with this text was. I don't. I don't even remember what made me think that this was intimidating. Like, I had a little. I don't think I told you. I had a little hesitation when we were looking at the lineup for the season, and you were like, there's nothing. We don't have anything from antiquity in this first season, and we should find something. And I remembered kind of struggling with these, and I was like, do I really want to do that? Maybe some of it, too, is. I've got 20 more years as a reader under my belt than I had at the time.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But you've got skills you didn't have then, right?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But this was not. Not challenging at all. And I really felt like, okay, it was only that because I had never encountered anything this old, and I didn't have the context. And so, like, read the introduction and give yourself the context. But, man, this was. It was so much more fun. And that's been my experience with almost everything that we've gone back. Like, the really old stuff that we've picked up for this season, like, go back and read these old books. Like, my hot take Forever is some of the old stuff sticks around because it's actually it. It does stand the test of time for a reason.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I. I have a couple here. Boy, did they know how to plot when you hadn't. When you hadn't run through all the story possibilities, you could really just hit it hard.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Nobody was on Goodreads marking down their favorite tropes and remixes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

They didn't have 3,000 years of stories to contend with. We were just sort of inventing some of the great arcs of all time. I also hear that Creon rules. This is the one that struck me as a character. There's more complexity to Creon here. His again, not a monologue because he's talking to Oedipus, but his long speech about why I wouldn't be trying to usurp the throne is because I have a good. It's really about the good life and. And proximity to power. Because one of the quotes you made you. You relayed before was about the more power you have, the more possibility there's to get over your skis about your confidence and your certainty. And the more you do that you get over leveraged on your position. And that is something that can crumble quite quickly. Whereas Creon, because he's proximal to power but doesn't wield it, sees it with greater clarity than Oedipus does. He's more careful because he has to negotiate Oedipus where if Oedipus doesn't have to negotiate anyone, he can run into these titanic forces because the only thing between him and that kind of calamity is human nature. The reality of death, the limits of understanding. It's not sort of political or cultural. Also I've just got a shoe prophecies. If you have a prophecy, just no Zoltars, no Chinese fortune cookies like Han Solo says in Star wars, never tell me the odds gods, just never. I can't think of one story where someone got a prophecy like, you know, that was a great idea. I'm so glad. Let's run it back. Just get rid of prophecies. Don't want them.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Good life advice coming out of you today.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Further reading. I mean there's not really read alikes. I. I don't think you can do more Greek theater. You could do the Oresteia. You could do and I guess like.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You could do like Oedipus shows up in places of the Odyssey.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So you could go back and see some of that. Or just do this. Just read this one.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Just do this. Yeah. Cocktail party crib sheet. I already did mine about this is like the super bowl, the fourth of July, the Oscars and Christmas all rolled into one. And it's also that thing that's being performed is Taylor Swift's new album that's going to perform.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think that's just the best way. But also like this is ancient and it's timeless. Like the dynamics from this moment when this was written, when politics was new, are all present in today's landscape. The characters are archetypes that are recognizable today that have probably been recognizable forever. And then I think the real cocktail party drop is just this is about the fact that we have been and will always be afraid of what free will means and equally afraid of not having any and of what the hell to do with it. If we have it, what are the consequences? Can we even know?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. At one point Jocasta's like, it's all chance. We just live by chance. And everyone's like, yeah, but that's, that's, that's, that's not right either.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Have it all be fate or all be chance. Both of those ends of the spectrum feel diminishing and also not. They don't feel true. I guess they don't feel true. And most people it doesn't feel true to. But it nor does it also see that it's all free will, all faith. It's somewhere in the messy middle, I guess a dialectic. If we're going to get all 19th century philosophical about it. The final beat. A zero to. Well, right. Cred score. Each one gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. The five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read cred, and oh, damn factor. Historical importance, obvious 10.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

A 10. Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Readability. Interesting.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think this probably varies with translation, but I found it to be in the 9 to 10 range. It was very readable for me. What about you?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'd say nine or ten, or maybe even nine.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, let's give it a nine.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Ten is like a real page turner where it's. There's no friction at all for me. But we'll give it a nine.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, we'll give it a nine.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The current relevance of central questions for this one, we could almost just strike out current. Yeah, but like.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It'S forever permanent relevance.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I get it. Can't really be a 10, I don't think, because we have central questions, questions that aren't at all at stake here. But the central questions have not gone away. So eight.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think an eight is fair there.

[Jeff O'Neill]

This one I have no sense of.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

For book nerd read cred. Yeah, it's. So this is, I think more than anything else we're talking about this season. This is a work that if you encounter it, you probably only encounter it for school. Like how many copies of Sophocles are selling in a given given year that people are just reading for fun. And so there's.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's a great point.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Like there's a way where this has high read cred because if you go out and seek it on Your own. That's a pretty book nerd thing to do. But you're probably not doing it for engagement with book nerd read cred, which.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Makes it higher somehow.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, maybe so.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Maybe.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Maybe we're just talking ourselves. Is this an 11?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Right. This is a giraffe off. It's off the scale. I'd say I'd give it at least an eight.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

All right, I'm gonna give it a nine.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay. Oh, damn factor. This one is so hard to know because.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Impossible for me.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, say why it's impossible. Well, thinking along the same lines.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Because we know basically how everything is going to unfold. Going through the story, there's not really an oh damn moment or like, there's not an artistic surprise. And also, we can't experience this the way that Sophocles audience experienced it, where they did know all of these other versions of the story. So I was trying to think about this for myself. Like, what if, like, I. I grew up knowing, I don't know, Little Red Riding Hood and somebody took me to see a production of it?

[Jeff O'Neill]

That blew you away?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That blew my mind. Because they. They took this familiar story and they told it in a completely new way. What would that be like? And so that it could be.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And invented a whole new art form at the same time.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right. Like, it's. I guess this is theoretically a 10 on the oh, damn factor to me. But as a reader in 2025 who can't possibly engage with this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The way it was meant to be experienced 2,400 years ago.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I don't.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I don't even know how to put a number on this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, it's. It's hard. I mean, I think the only way for me, the. Oh, damnness of it, because we know the story, we're not reading the original Greek, and the idea of theater is so baked into how we understand art and culture to work in the west. There's a. There's a version of this that's 10. When I think of when I get my mind blown about thinking about the actual scene of what this month. Like, yeah, the whole scene is like. Like a 10. But as an actual reading experience, I think it's only like a six.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. I think that's fair.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oedipus is not too dissimilar from other myths where you sort of know them. It's hard to give. You can give self Alisa, of course, much amazing credit for what he does with the art he has, but this is not Hamlet soliloquy, a thing of almost pure invention. Right. Like he's, he's moving around pieces, but the Lego pieces he's selecting is them and or deselecting them based on a relatively finite set. And it's always impossible. Me as a person who a large part of what I read for is the language to not have access to the Greek. I don't know what I'm missing and I guess there's a demerit for it. It's just hard for me to get super excited and on the, on the level of the line, it's not super exciting. There's some moments.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Clearly there are some moments, but it's not exciting. Yeah, it's not a. Like you're not reading this one for the pleasure of the sentences, certainly. Well, we still arrived at a 42 out of 50. That's respectable.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean you should. Right? I mean it should be extremely high. It should be extremely high. Let's see. Rebecca, show notes are book riot.com listen you can email us at 02 well read bookriot.com zero to well read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast network and if you do have a moment to rate and review the show on Apple podcasts especially, this is behind the scenes stuff but more than 80% of our listens happen through Apple devices and software. That really helps people find the show and we want to keep the good momentum going to find people who are willing and eager, even Rebecca to listen us to talk for 90 minutes about 3000 year old plays that everyone knows the end to. Rebecca, thank you so much.