Oedipus at Colonus

The first story in the trilogy, called Oedipus Rex, is the famous one. Oedipus is a noble king who is trying to figure out why a plague has struck his land. His investigation leads him to the horrendous discovery that he had earlier in life inadvertently killed his father and then married his mother, who subsequently bore him two daughters. The central idea that is made clear by the chorus at the end of the play is that even the most virtuous man can be brought undone by the vicissitudes of fate.

It had been a long time since I’d read the second play in the trilogy, Oedipus at Colonus, and I didn’t really remember much about it. So, I decided to read that upon discovering the book in my cupboard. As is often the case when re-reading great works of literature, the meaning of that play came through much clearer to me this time around, and in this post I want to discuss one of the themes that occurred to me.

In the first play, Oedipus begins the story as the paragon of virtue. The action of the play describes his fall from grace. At the start of Oedipus at Colonus, however, Oedipus has somehow fallen even further than his position at the end of the first story. He is now an old, blind, and destitute man wandering away from his home led by his faithful daughter Antigone.

In fact, when we meet him at the start of the play, Oedipus is, to all outward appearances, the inversion of virtue. He is the opposite of what a Greek would have taken for the ideal man. This meaning is reinforced by the fact that he has been banished from his hometown of Thebes. That is why he and his daughter have ended up at Colonus, which is in the neighbourhood of Athens.

This last point is crucial to understand. For an ancient Greek, banishment was worse than death. Socrates could easily have run away from Athens after being sentenced to death, but he chose to drink the hemlock instead. Why? Because it was better to die than to be separated from one’s own city-state. Banishment amounted to being made less of a person and something more like an animal.

Thus, Oedipus really is almost no longer a person when we meet him at the start of the second play. He is more like a ghost, or an archetype. Unlike a typical Greek hero, he is no longer capable of any meaningful action, but, as he himself tells us, he still has his voice, and he can still speak truth.

Oedipus and Antigone find themselves in Colonus, which is midway between Athens and Thebes. Sophocles then introduces the leaders of both of those cities, Theseus from Athens and Creon from Thebes. We have met Creon before. He is Oedipus’ brother-in-law/uncle (remember, he married his mother), who featured in the first story of the trilogy.

Creon became ruler of Thebes after Oedipus’ fall from grace. We learn that he has ill-treated Oedipus, firstly by refusing to banish him when Oedipus wanted that and then by actually banishing him once Oedipus had gotten over the worst and settled down into some kind of peace. Creon continues his mistreatment by showing up at Colonus pretending to care about Oedipus’ welfare by inviting him back to Thebes. Actually, he wants to use Oedipus for his own purposes.

Theseus has never met Oedipus before and owes him nothing. That is why his reaction to the appearance of the old, blind man is most telling. Despite the fact that Oedipus is now the outward inversion of Greek virtue, the Athenian king can still see that he is a great man. He understands that it is fate that has brought Oedipus undone rather than any failings in his own character.

The fact that all this takes place in the midpoint between Athens and Thebes and features the rulers of those two cities means that Sophocles is setting up a very clear dichotomy between Theseus and Creon. The latter does not care about virtue at all. All he sees in Oedipus is a weak old man whom he can do with as he pleases. Theseus is an even more powerful ruler than Creon, since Athens is stronger than Thebes. He could also do as he pleases with Oedipus, but Theseus chooses instead to respect and honour the old man’s inherent virtue.

In Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles is making a political point that a society which forgets virtue and worships only power (as Creon does) will come undone. That point is clear. But there is a much deeper meaning at play here, one that has direct relevance to our times.

To a large extent, we live in an anti-heroic culture. I’m not talking about Hollywood movies; I’m talking about the way we actually run our society. We don’t have leaders because we don’t want heroes. What we have is a managerial class of technocrats whose claim is that they act for the “greater good”. Of course, that exact phrase is rarely used. But “we’re all in this together,” “diversity is our strength,” “keeping the community safe,” and similar phrases all amount to the same thing.

We did not get to this state of affairs by accident. It’s the result of a battle of ideas that’s been going on for centuries. One of the easier ways to understand that battle is competing attitudes towards history.

Most cultures have some variation of what is called the great man theory of history, which implies that history is created by virtuous and powerful individuals who bend the course of events to their will. The West used to have this idea of history too, but it got superseded in the 19th century by the idea of history as a set of impersonal forces. In this way of looking at things, leaders are just a vehicle through which larger forces play out. It doesn’t really matter who is in charge; the result will be the same because it is determined by external forces not individual character.

As is often the case in human affairs, an idea that captures a certain truth about the world gets taken way too far and leads to awful outcomes. Somehow, the idea of history as determined by social forces morphed into a denial of the individual. Not just the leaders but all members of society became nothing more than vehicles for the “greater good”. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this led to mass murder. The Nazis murdered those who were not contributing to the greater good of creating a master race. The communists murdered those who were not contributing to the greater good of a communist utopia. Other examples could be found of the same pattern, but these are the two most notable. 

One of the truths that the idea of history-as-a-set-of-impersonal-forces captures is that heroism is not enough. The great man theory of history had the problem that it airbrushed out all of the people who tried and failed. For every great leader who seemed to change the course of history, there were a thousand who got crushed. Viewed this way, it really does seem that the conditions matter more than the individual.

We can use the metaphor of a seed to explain this. In the best-case scenario, a seed germinates and grows into a healthy plant. But there are any number of things that can prevent that outcome. Maybe the seed gets eaten by a bird before it germinates. Maybe it germinates only to get trodden on by an animal. Maybe there’s not enough rain, or the soil has become degraded. The conditions must be right for the seed to grow. The study of history-as-a-set-of-impersonal-forces pays attention to the conditions in which the seeds grow. That is valid.

But as any gardener will tell you, if you plant ten seeds into the same growing medium, you get ten very different seedlings. It’s all well and good to pay attention to the conditions in which the seeds grow, but you have to also accept that seeds have an individuality to them.

The problem which took hold in the 19th century was the combination of the history-as-a-set-of-impersonal-forces idea with the blank slate philosophy of human development. The blank slate theory equates to the assumption that all seeds are the same and the only difference between them is the growing medium. It tells you to spend all your time worrying about the external conditions and no time worrying about the individual.

Translated into human political terms, the belief became that we should only worry about improving social conditions and not about individual virtue. From that position, it is a very short jump to the belief that the individual has no inherent value at all and that, given a choice between the greater good and the individual, the latter must be sacrificed.

But that is exactly what Sophocles had already shown us two millennia earlier in Oedipus at Colonus. Creon is the ruler of Thebes, and he is not just screwing with Oedipus out of spite; he wants to use Oedipus for the good of his city. He tries to shame Oedipus into doing what he wants by telling him that it’s for the good of his countrymen and it’s his duty to do what he is told. Creon uses the greater good argument. (Incidentally, it’s the same one we all heard during covid when we were told to get the vaccines and wear the masks).

Oedipus rejects this, but we can get a better understanding of the importance of his response by comparing it with an almost identical story from the Bible, the Book of Job.

Both Job and Oedipus are formerly successful men who are brought undone. Oedipus is being screwed with by Creon in much the same way that Job is being manipulated by Yahweh. In the Bible story, Job complains about his treatment, but his friends tell him to fall into line. For a long time, he refuses to do so, however, the story ends by him giving in. Yahweh rewards him for his obedience by giving him back the things he has lost. The moral of the story is that obedience and submission are good.

Creon is offering Oedipus almost the exact same deal: Do what I say, and I’ll give you back your old life. Oedipus could easily have been overwhelmed by feelings of despair. Pragmatically, he has the welfare of his daughters to think of. There are all kinds of reasons why Oedipus might want to accept the deal. But it never even occurs to him to do so, and his thundering denunciation of Creon is one of the most powerful things ever written as a result.

But we can be even more specific about the meaning here. The 19th century realised that virtue is no guarantee of success, and it concluded that the thing to do was to pursue the greater good. Sophocles starts from the exact same truth but draws a very different conclusion.

Oedipus is the very embodiment of the idea that virtue does not equal success. He is a good man who has been undone through no fault of his own. If anybody has reason to resent the world and to renounce the concepts of virtue and justice, it should be Oedipus. And yet he never once considers this. He still believes in virtue. When Creon shows up and offers him a grubby little deal, Oedipus gives him both barrels of the only weapon he has left, his ability to speak the truth. 

What Sophocles is saying, I think, is that virtue must be upheld even and especially by those who have been brought down by fate. That is why tragedy is the most affirming of all genres and why the appearance of tragedy is such a landmark event. It acknowledges the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but does not give in to resentment or to submission to power. That message is reinforced in the third book of the trilogy, where Antigone shows that she is truly her father’s daughter by also refusing to yield to unjust commands.

It is because Creon has turned away from virtue that he will bring his kingdom undone. Meanwhile, Theseus is the ruler who can understand that Oedipus is still a great man even though circumstances have brought him low. His reverence for Oedipus is a reverence for virtue itself. By contrast, Creon is like the modern technocrat who cares not for the individual but only for the “greater good”.

What had disappeared by the 19th century, and which is still missing in action in our time, is the idea contained in tragedy that virtue does not guarantee success, but that we must cherish it anyway. The childish notion that virtue = success must be gotten rid of, but we mustn’t then swing to the opposite childish notion that virtue plays no role. Sophocles’ Theban trilogy, arguably the greatest of all Greek tragedies, does this by honouring a man and his daughter, both of whom are virtuous but fail in worldy affairs. It is the reverence for the spirit with which that failure is borne which sets tragedy apart.

Put into philosophical terms, we can say that heroism and virtue are necessary but not sufficient conditions for success. Once we convince ourselves that they are no longer even necessary, we ensure that success can never happen, and that quickly leads to destruction. Sophocles had already warned us about that, and the tens of millions of deaths from the 20th century should have been enough to ram home the message. Nevertheless, we continue to blunder on in the name of the “greater good”. We do so because we have lost the tragic view of life.