The Plot

Hello,

my name's Richard Seaford. I was for many years

professor of ancient Greek at the University of Exeter.

I'm going to talk in this short lecture about the action of

Sophocles’ play, the Oedipus Tyrannus.

Now, the action of that play isn't really an action at all

in a sense. It's simply a discovery.

What happens is that Oedipus discovers who he is.

Now, before the beginning of the play,

many years before the beginning of the play,

the king of Thebes, Laius,

and his wife

discovered from a Delphic oracle that if they had a son,

that son would kill Laius. So when they did have a son,

they put the son out on the mountainside,

in order that the son would simply die. In fact,

they gave the little baby to a shepherd

to expose the child on Mount Cithaeron,

but the shepherd took the baby, pitied it and didn't expose it.

What he did was to give it to another shepherd, a friend of

his, who took the baby to Corinth.

Now that happened on Mount Cithaeron,

and I would add here that one of the best ways of

experiencing Greek tragedy is to go to the places where

the action occurred. You can go to Thebes.

You can go to Mount Cithaeron and look down at the Theban plain,

and get a real sense of the setting of the Oedipus Tyrannus.

Greek tragedy is full of place names which you can still go and

experience. Anyway,

the Corinthian shepherd takes the baby to Corinth, where it's

adopted by the king and queen of Corinth.

The baby grows up, becomes a young man, and is led to believe

at one point that he may not be the son

of the king and queen of Corinth.

He consults the Delphic

who tells him that he will kill his father and marry his mother,

and assuming that the king and queen of Corinth are indeed his

father and his mother, he decides not to go back

to Corinth, but wanders off, and at a place where three roads

meet, he meets a stranger in a chariot. They get into a kind of

argument. It's the first recorded example road rage, and

he simply kills

the old man, the complete stranger.

He then goes on to Thebes and finds that Thebes is in the

grip of the Sphinx, a female monster

who puts a riddle which nobody can solve, and this

means the death of the young people. But he, Oedipus, solves

the riddle – I'll come back to that in another lecture –

and as a result, he marries the queen Jocasta not realizing that

the

woman is his own mother.

The play opens, then, some years after that in which Thebes is

suffering from a plague, and the action of the play is

Oedipus gradually discovering the truth.

The earliest theory we have of tragedy is by Aristotle in the

fourth century BC,

and Aristotle is particularly interested in the plots of tragedy. He

says that's the most important part of a tragedy. And he says, well,

some kinds of plot are good and sometimes of some kinds of plot

are not so good,

and he says there are two elements of the plot,

which are particularly important, and they are

reversal,

peripeteia in Greek, and recognition,

anagnorisis in Greek.

And the reversal, well, the best kind of reversal is from

good fortune to bad fortune,

but it's not any kind of fall from good fortune

to bad fortune.

It must involve the intention

of the person who suffers the fall, so that, for example,

if Donald Trump tomorrow is knocked over by a bus and

dies, there's nothing tragic about that.

But if Donald Trump,

as a result of his overwhelming desire for power and wealth

becomes president and because he becomes president,

all sorts of scrutiny is

applied to his past business affairs,

and he ends up in jail, that's an almost perfect example

of what Aristotle meant by peripeteia, or reversal.

As for recognition,

it's not any kind of recognition,

but Aristotle says it's the recognition

of who people are, who are your dear ones, who are

your enemies, and so on. And of course, both these

elements of plot – reversal

and recognition – are right at the centre of the Oedipus

Tyrannus, because Oedipus by his own actions

goes from good fortune to bad fortune,

and that is a recognition, and particularly a recognition

that his wife

is his mother.

It's a recognition of who the people around him really are.

Now,

Aristotle particularly likes the Oedipus Tyrannus because,

as he says,

the recognition and the the reversal go together,

they're the same action in the sense that it's by recognising

what he has done, who the stranger was whom he killed,

who his wife is, that

Oedipus falls into abject misery,

exile, complete isolation.

And in fact,

the whole structure of the Oedipus is very tight,

as is generally the case with Greek tragedy. If you read

Homer, then you will, of course,

know that there's plenty of passages which seem like digressions,

the style is leisurely,

it's not all centred around a single action,

but when you get to tragedy, it's quite different.

The Oedipus, all of it, is either directly or indirectly

centred around contributing to the central moment, which

is the discovery by Oedipus of the truth.

That makes Homer and tragedy very, very different in style and conception.