In Our Time - Oedipus Rex

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex begins with a warning: the murderer of the old king of Thebes, Laius, has never been identified or caught, and he’s still at large in the city. Oedipus is the current king of Thebes, and he sets out to solve the crime. His investigations lead to a devastating conclusion. Not only is Oedipus himself the killer, but Laius was his father, and Laius’ wife Jocasta, who Oedipus has married, is his mother. Oedipus Rex was composed during the golden age of Athens, in the 5th century BC. Sophocles probably wrote it to explore the dynamics of power in an undemocratic society. It has unsettled audiences from the very start: it is the only one of Sophocles’ plays that didn’t win first prize at Athens’ annual drama festival. But it’s had exceptionally good write-ups from the critics: Aristotle called it the greatest example of the dramatic arts. Freud believed it laid bare the deepest structures of human desire. With: Nick Lowe, Reader in Classical Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London Fiona Macintosh, Professor of Classical Reception and Fellow of St Hilda’s College at the University of OxfordEdith Hall, Professor of Classics at Durham University

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex begins with a warning. The murderer of the old King of Thebes, Laius, has never been identified or caught, and is still at large in the city.

Edipus is the current King of Thebes, and he sets out to solve the crime. His investigations lead to a devastating conclusion. Not only is Oedipus himself the killer, but Lyos was his father, and Lyos wife, Jakasta, who Edipus has married, is his mother. Edibus Rex has composed you in the golden age of Athens in the 5th century BC.

Its unsettled audiences from the very start. It's the only one of Sophocally surviving plays that we know missed out on the first prize at Athens' annual drama festival. A century later, Aristotle called it the greatest example of the dramatic arts. Freud believed it laid bare the deepest structures of human desire. With me to discuss Oedipus Rex and Nicolao, reader in classical literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Fiona McIntosh, Professor of Classical Reception and Fellow of St. Hilda's College at the University of Oxford, and Edith Hall, Professor of Classics at Durham University. Edith Hall, who is Oedipus, and what would he have meant to Sophocles' first Athenian audience? Edipus is the great king of Thebes in the Bronze Age, so that's five or six hundred years earlier than the audience. So it's a bit like us watching something set in the 14th or 15th century. He was king of one of the most important Bronze Age Greek settlements. Archaeologists have dug it up.

It had literacy. It was unbelievably wealthy. He comes out of his palace, the ruins of which still survive. in the flat plain of Beosha, Thebes is set in Beosha, far from the sea. Now this is incredibly important because almost all Greek tragedies and cities are set near the sea. So we have this airless stifling atmosphere. But he's enormously powerful. He is hugely respected.

He's married to the queen of one of the richest places in the world. But the air is full of disease. so we've already got a crisis atmosphere of a very great person who's an enormously successful facing a crisis. Is it possible, in your brilliant elliptical way, to lay out the story, the basic story of Oedipus, Rex? I can indeed. The play covers a very few hours in one day of the life of Oedipus and his city

when he's about 40 years old and his absolute prime. And in the course of that day, when he decides he's going to try and get to the bottom of why there's a plague afflicting the city, he goes on a series of detective trails and conduct several interviews in which he discovers actually that the woman who he's married to is his own mother and that he had actually killed her husband, his father. And he falls from the highest estate in Greece to being the lowest of the low, a pollute. person who's about to go into exile. Okay. Fiona, what do we know about when Edibus Rex was composed? Do we know much about the specific circumstances leading to Sophocles taking on this subject matter? Well, we don't know the precise date of the play, but consensus is that it was first produced sometime in the early 420s,

just after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War that began. in 431, a long war against Sparta and its allies. And the reasons for thinking that is that at the very beginning of the war, there are a series of plagues in Athens, terrible consequences. A quarter of the population was wiped out. Do we know anything about the nature of the plague?

We know that it had such terrible consequences, not only to human life, but also civil unrest. And that, of course, is reflected in the opening, scene of the play, where we find the citizens of Thebes appealing to this great leader, Oedipus, and the priest in particular, appealing to Oedipus, and as he says, not as a god, but as the best of citizens, the first of the citizen body. And that is another reason why people are quite confident it's the 420s. There are many echoes with Pericles, the great Athenian statesmen,

who kind of led Athens and its expansion of power. And so it is possible it has been said that there are many points of comparison between Pericles and Oedipus and Athens at that particular moment of crisis. Was there anything particular that led Sophocles of this story? It may well have been that, and other people have pointed out,

that this is the moment when there seems to be one great actor. And Euripides had just, in 431, produced his Medea, which was a single character tragedy, which is quite unusual at the time, although today we tend to think of tragedy as being about single character who become what we understand today as tragic heroes. But Oedipus may well have been played by the same actor. And so in many ways it's unusual in Sophocles' plays. because it is about, again, a single, tragic figure.

Sophocles, unusually, for the great playwrights of the time, all of whom came from elite backgrounds, he was very involved in the civic life. Can you describe to people what that meant? In Sophocles' case, that meant that he had been a general. He was also involved in, as far as we know, in the religious life of the city. He was, from some accounts, the priest of Asclepius.

And I think people have inferred from the tragedies, and this in particular, that the gods are of central concern to Sophocles. And even if they are conspicuous by their absence in this particular play. So I think that it's always perhaps dangerous to try and read the life through the work. I think it's much easier to read the life of the city. And in this case, perhaps Pericles, but definitely. definitely the citizen body of Athens in some way being represented in the chorus and definitely some people have even suggested the fate of the city in Oedipus itself.

So in other words, this is a city that is absolutely, as Edith said, on top of its self and Oedipus represents it, but it's just about to enter a period when its heady optimism, it's belief in humanism that the people are at the centre of this world, this Greek world, and very soon that's all going to come crashing down as it does for Oedipus on themselves. Can I go back to you from Omedeatia, because we rushed through that, I think.

I had thrown away the idea of the golden age and it would you amplify that before I move on? Yes. So the Athenians had led the Greek alliances that beat the Persians. This is crucial in about, in the two Persian invasions of 490 and 480. And in the wake of the victory had started to build up their own empire.

And they had soon stopped calling it a Panhellenic alliance and just said that we are the imperial power and they got an awful lot of money off all the other Greek states, islands and city states in their empire. That money explains the golden age. Pericles could not have been able. built the Parthenon. He could not have paid the jurors. He could not have paid the Navy. He could not have got the boats built by the rich taxpayers without that revenue. So I would like to say, yes,

it's an inexplicable mystery, but actually I think there was a very savvy guy, Pericles, who managed to get himself re-elected every year for over three decades, because he did have to get re-elected every year. And he also brought in, he was a great internationalist, by which I mean not non-Greeks, but he brought in experts to the city encouraged a culture where all the best philosophers, all the best architects,

all the best artists, came to Athens. So we're talking something much more like Elizabeth in London under Elizabeth. It's still the range of it. I mean, sorry. No, you were brilliant,

but we're talking about poetry. We're talking about drama. We're talking about music. We're talking about invention of sports. We're going to a whole range. I think that the point is that Athens actually had an inferiority complex culturally, right, before the Persian wars and under the tyrants. In the old myths, the Iliad, the Odyssey, Athens hardly appears at all.

It wasn't an important Bronze Age city. It just wasn't. So all the mythical cycles like those of Oedipus, the Argos myths, Heracles, all these, the Trojan War, Athens is simply not significant. So it goes on a programme of inventing itself. The other cities have their own. and literary genres. So Sparta had choral lyric, the East had epic. Athens invented theatre, right, out of nowhere, actually before the Persian Wars, but it was after the Persian Wars at these great dramatic festivals. So you're talking about a conscious self-invention as cultural leader, as well as economic leader of the Greek world. Nick, Nicola, riddles play a big role in the story, not just the riddle of the Sphinx, but also various oracles. What are these riddles and what role do they

play in the drama. Well, you alluded to the backstory, and of course this is a play which is all about its own backstory, and a big part of that backstory is why Oedipus is King of Thebes in the first place. And the reason is that he is the one who destroyed the monster who was terrorizing Thebes, the Sphinx, by solving its riddle. The famous riddle of the Sphinx, which you referred to, runs what goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening, and Edipus is the one who figured out that it meant us. It meant human beings because we crawl when we're babies. When we're adults, we walk on two legs.

And then when we get to my age, we're hobbling around on a stick. And this was so brilliant. This display of riddle solving was so openly that the sphinx threw herself off a cliff. And that was the end of her. And Edipus then comes to the mysteriously vacant throne of thieves as a result. So he's the great solver of riddles, and he owes his job to the fact that he is the world's greatest detective. But then in the course of the play, he's subjected to a series of pieces of partial information, a series of new riddles, which he has to use the skills that have propelled him to this point to unravel.

It gradually becomes apparent to the audience, if not to him, that all these riddles have a single author, the god Apollo. There are five prophetic injections for oracles and the prophecy of the Apolline prophet Tyresias, all of which go back to the single god Apollo, who never appears in the play and whose voice is never heard. But Oedipus has the job of trying to assemble these individual riddling snippets into a single narrative, and he fails at every turn. But because his identity is so bound up, his role has a problem solver, as a puzzle solver, that he can't let it go. And eventually that's what leads him to his destruction.

You mentioned the word detective. What is he trying to solve? Initially, he's trying to solve a crime in the city of Thebes, the murder of the previous king, Lyos, which he learns from the first oracle delivered in the course of the play, which is reported by his brother-in-law Creon, that the reason they, there is this pandemic in Thebes, it's because Apollo is angry that the murderer of the previous King Lyos is still at large. But as the quest unfolds, Oedipus finds it dovetailing with a much deeper question that he's been carrying with him all his adult life about his own identity, which he had previously consulted the Delphic Oracle about when he heard back in Corinth,

where he was raised, that there was a story that he was not in fact the child of the King and Queen of Corinth, that he was an outsider. And that set off a chain of events which led him to Thebes and actually to the events which he's going to discover

in the course of the play have actually set him up for the ending that we all know. Thank you. Edith His wife, Jakasta, is a major character although she doesn't have a big part. How is she depicted in the plot?

Jocaster has got a surprising amount of authority. At one point, Oedipus actually says that he shares power with her and her brother. He implies it's actually a troika, but he doesn't act like it, okay? But she has a very great deal of influence over him when he is having almost a fist fight with Creon, who he suspects because he's very paranoid

because he's been in power for too long. Creon is Dukasta's brother. Yes. When he's having a fistfight, he accuses Creon of trying to subvert his authority and get rid of him and perform a coup

because he's extremely paranoid as all people are who are in power for too long and not regularly re-elected. He calms down when she comes out. She has this very soothing effect on the men of folk. She takes charge.

She's also deeply conservative about the need to press for information. Her philosophy is very much, everything is good, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That is JoCaster. I think that we have to also remember,

she's often played by really very elderly actresses, and this is unfortunate. She cannot be more than about 52. Oedipus is about 38 or 40, and her name, Eocasti, means excellent in violence. Now, Aphrodite, the goddess, sex was called violet-crowned Aphrodite. So Oedipus turns up at 20, this brilliant young buck,

and gets off with this incredibly sexy woman who's around 31, right? And has four children in about four years. So we're very much given this idea that this is a very strong and happy sexual union. Now this is a woman who in the previous marriage had to give up her baby. Right? Also, Lyas was gay. Now, that's not in the play, but everybody knew it from the myth. She had had an incredibly miserable 20s, finally got this gorgeous, brilliant young man on the throne with her,

four beautiful children. She has everything to lose. That she does. Fiona, Creon has been mentioned. Can we develop him a little bit? Yes, Creon, I don't think it's possible to construct such an exciting backstory as we've just heard of Jakaster. But I think it's important to remember that Creon was already known,

especially through Sophocles Antigone, a play that dates to about 4-4-2, so some 20 years before this play. And Creon in the Antigone, he is now the ruler of Thebes, because as he has now become leader, we see that he's a man of principle, real principles at the beginning of the Antigone,

but very soon turns out to be a leader that finds it remarkably difficult to live up to his principles, and by the end of the play, if not a little earlier, and I think most kind of modern audiences feel definitely earlier, he is showing signs of being a tyrant. So when we come to the creon in Sophocles-ed Edipus rex, it's a very different creon. Creon from the very beginning, he's returned from the oracle because he was sent before the beginning of the play to find out, as Nick said, what was the cause of the plague. And he acts as innocent messenger.

And in the next scene, he's confronted by Oedipus, his brother-in-law, and being accused of being a conspirator, co-conspirator with Tyresius. And the suggestion on Oedipus's part is this is because Crian resents the fact that he has not inherited his right. successful succession. And you're suggesting a collusion between Tyresius, the blind purpose and Creon. Because Tyresius knows the whole plot,

knows what happened, all the way back, and has told the audience that, and told Oedipus that. Absolutely. And Oedipus thinks it must have come from prodding from Creon. He absolutely believes that they are in cahoots together. But Creon, in this confrontation with Edipus,

makes a brilliant defence. I mean, he says he has all the power he needs and none of the responsibility. As much influence as he like, why on earth would he want the pressures of being a leader? However, that's not the end of the story, because even if he is on the receiving end of something that's completely unwarranted in the middle of the play, by the end of the play, when he has become the new leader of Thebes, I think we get a glimpse of the Creon who's going to emerge as tyrant in the next, sequence and there's at least the final line when he says you are Oedipus no longer ruler of this city

that in most productions and I think most commentators on the play will say this is a signal that Crian who is either proto-tirant elsewhere or indeed an actual tyrant is emerging in the final moments of the play. I just want to say that there is huge doubt about the date of Antigone. The Iliad begins with the plague. There's absolutely no reason why we should put this around the plague. And we do not know when the Antigone was put on. It could quite easily be the way round that he's so inspired by watching the ascent of Creon in Oedipus that he then writes the Antigone. I mean, that's just an academic controversy. We go back to Nick. He's called Oedipus Tyrannus in the play, Nick. Can you comment on that?

Well, that's the title in the manuscripts. That's the Greek title. The show is called Oedipus Rex after the traditional Latin title, which has been carried over as the title of many of the modern adaptations. But the Latin word Rex king doesn't quite mean the same as the Greek Tyrannos. It's important to realise that, of course, that is not Sophocles title. Soffleague is just called his play Oedipus. And the reason it's acquired this Sir title is that in later generations, they needed to distinguish between this and another play called Edipus,

which Sophocles wrote at the very end of his life. In fact, he left in manuscript as his death, and it was put on five years after his death by his family, a play called Edipus at Colonas, which also survives, his great late masterpiece, which in some ways bridges the gap between Oedipus, Rex, and her Antigone. But the word tyrannus is not quite just a king. The Greek has two main words for king.

The standard word is Basilius. which is traditionally, although not exclusively used, of hereditary rulers with a dynastic claim on kingship. But a Tyrannos is actually a rather different kind of ruler. It's more akin to the English autocrat. It's someone who has emerged not necessarily from a privileged background by birth and has seized power through force or, through political influence

and is sustaining that position by his own strength. And this word is used heavily in this play, particularly of Edipus. It comes in a lot in that debate between Edipus and Crian that Fiona was referring to. And at some point

when it became necessary to distinguish between these two plays, this was the word that was chosen to mark this Edipus rather than the one at the end of his life. But the word Tyrannos is actually a very charged one in Athenian politics. And although it can be a perfectly neutral term and some of the times it's used in this play,

it's a perfectly neutral term. It's also a term that carried a big charge in the Athenian democracy, which itself was established as a response to the ejection of their own tyrannical dynasty, which lasted for two generations. And at the beginning of every meeting of Council and Assembly, they would recite a curse against anyone who intended to set up a tyranny or to restore the old tyranny. So it's a word with a charge. Would you say that Edipus was a tyrant? Yes, absolutely. He's called that repeatedly in the play and he displays increasingly tyrannical qualities. A very uncomfortable moment is when he orders the thiefen who has tried to bring him the good news that's turned his life around to be tortured. But he's also technically,

he thinks he's technically a tyrant because he's come into power not for dynastic reasons but on the way for popular support but the play shows he's actually the king because he's the descendant of kings. The most important line in the play arguably and possibly the most famous line in Sophocles

comes not from many of the characters but from the chorus where in the single most important ode of the play they sing hubris arrogance and unaccountability overreach breeds the tyrant or a tyrant. And in that ode, they're singing about two different kinds of overreach. There's a kind of good overreach which benefits the city, which is for the public good. And that's what they seem to be assigning Oedipus to.

But there's also the kind of person who goes around murdering kings. And that's the beginnings of tyranny. What they don't know at that point is that these are actually both the same person. Thank you, Edith. The chorus sings an ode asking what it would mean for humanity of the oracles were not after all messages from the gods. They do sing this extraordinary ode where they say if it turns out that the Delphic Oracle is wrong, then our entire ritual structures collapse. Why should I dance the chorus for the gods anymore?

I think that's one of the most famous lines. If it is true that there is no providential justice and that there is no sense and there is no reliability of any of the things we're used to consulting like the oracles, then why should I do religion anymore? But of course, by the end of the play, they're saying this was all predicted long ago.

It's absolutely true. And they do say to Edipus Juan, Earth, did you blind yourself? And he says it was a point. The hand was mine, but it was Apollo. The play absolutely reaffirms the completely unquestionable veracity. And the power? And the power of the gods to destroy, especially, as we're told more than twice,

he never had a chance because this was predicted not only before he was born, but before he was even conceived. Thank you, Fiona. The end of the play has puttle some audiences. Why do you think that is? In many ways, it's because it's unexpected. It's also, I think, often misremembered. So even by people who've seen the play, read the play,

they often confuse the ending of the play. They either think, or generally think, that the very end of the play, in a way, gestures towards the next part of the story, Edipus at Colonas. and they imagine that at the end of this play, Edipus Rex, Edipus now the embodiment of the third part of the riddle, the blind man with his staff,

leaves the city, we misremember, together with his daughter, Antigone, in order to go into exile. And that's what Oedipus asked for. But that's what is denied by Creon to Oedipus. I think there's another reason. It's not just that we collapse the Oedipus rex with the Oedipus at Cologneus. I think we also, partly because of modern adaptations,

we also confuse the ending of Sophocles' play with the ending of Seneca's play. Because at the end of Seneca's play, which is extremely different, not least because we see Jakasta on stage, after the truth about her identity and Oedipus' identity is made. incest is apparent, it's palpable. We watch Jakasta kill herself with her sword, a deeply, obviously, phallic enactment of both her crime and also an absolute statement about the need for her own punishment.

And then we watch the blinded Oedipus with his staff. It's a hugely moving final few moments of the play as he gropes his way into exile. But that doesn't happen. Why does he blind himself? Why does he choose that route? Why does he blind himself? He chooses to blind himself because he says he cannot bring himself

to face his parents. He is so, this is the only way he can live with the reality and the shame of what he's done. If he were to go to Hades and confront his parents, he could not endure that. Okay, Nick. What do we know about how the play, do we know anything about how it was originally staged?

Well, we know quite a lot about how the plays were staged in general and there's quite a lot of information in the text about what's going on. So you've got to remember that these plays are all staged in real time in a single location. There's a standard set that's set outside the palace and everything that happens happens in the space of basically an hour and a half the time that the play takes to be performed. And it's in many ways a very important. spectacular play. It opens with this phenomenal display of Oedipus' kingship in action as he's

being supplicated by his people, including children. The priest says we're here men of all age groups. But Edith just calls them all my children in this, not my citizens, in this very paternalistic way. So it's a big spectacular demonstration of his status at the beginning of the play. And by the end of it, he's gone through one of the very few mask changes in surviving a tragedy. He's a literally different face and he's got a completely visualised realization of the depth to which he's fallen. And all of that has happened in real time on a single set. The audience would also be particularly aware of the codes of where the offstage spaces are. So there's a there's an side route that leads into Thebes and there's a side route

leads out of Thebes, and gradually we're going to learn that that's where Edipus has come from, where he's trying to sentence himself to return, but he doesn't. He goes back into the palace at the end, and we never find out what the last oracle says about him. He's kept there in a limbo that the play keeps us the final mystery. Do we know what the first audience made of it? Well, it didn't come first. It didn't come first in the competition It didn't come first in the competition

Sorry, three tragedians competed against each other Every year at the competition And Sophocles almost always came first He came second Now the way that We don't know Because we don't know what year it was performed It was a play by Iskalus' nephew Philatles

Or a group of plays But we don't know what the plays were there So let's pass quickly over And continue with this, he was second He was second The way that the judges were randomly selected by a lot to avoid corruption, but if they went away from the noise made from the audience,

in terms of approbation, they got into trouble. So it was a bit like a sort of clapometer. So that is very interesting. But there again, Medea came last. The fact that they didn't do well at the first production, I think can often mean because they were so shocking. What do you think there was about it, which caused Aristotle to give it such a,

paying such high regard. Aristotle is writing at least a hundred years later than this. There's already now a performance repertoire, and he's also got a huge library of the books. He develops a theory of tragedy that it is all about a certain kind of action, representation of a certain kind of action, which involves massive change in fortune, which produces pity and fear, which he says of the appropriate tragic emotions. and in all of the ancient repertoire, this is the tragedy which he thinks does this most efficiently and he says that is so

because even if you just read it or just hear the story, you get a shiver down your spine. You wanted to pop in. Aristotle's great dramatic value is plot. Aristotle thinks slightly controversial in his day that plot is more important than character. And one of the things that he responds to very strongly about this play, I think I'm partly on a personal level

because he's also a great theorist of causality and logic is the way the steps in the plot follow on from one another and the way the pieces of information slot together to present a sense of overall inevitability which is random to the characters but is actually deeply purposeful to the spectators. And Aristotle loves that kind of plotting

and he thinks that there's something about the satisfaction that it delivers which is particularly effective. It's also, of course, a play about thinking, about intellectual activity, and Aristotle, as the greatest mind of his age possibly ever, is deeply interested in intellectual... Well, that's debated too.

But the idea that the whole play is about deduction and what happens if you're the smartest man in history and it still doesn't save you. It destroys you, Harkley, the story of Aristotle's life as well. Can I just... Can I just add to Aristotle's observations about the connection between the reversal, change in fortune and the recognition?

And he says that this play is so special because they are coincident. And it happens in a central pivotal moment, which then provides the dynamism for the second part the play. And I think if we look at a lot of modern adaptations, we can appreciate just how correct Aristotle was, because where that connection is not there between the reversal and the recognition, there's often, and especially I'm thinking in French neoclassical plays, when there is long periods when we know the outcome of the play, but unfortunately we have to endure the

action, whereas the great thing about Sophocles was that he kept us, as you say, Nick, on the edge of our seats, even as readers, but particularly as spectators as we watch the twists and turns in the plot. How was this play preserved after classical antiquity? Seven of Sophocles, nearly 100 plays, got chosen basically for the school curriculum, which meant that little boys in the ancient world, studied them, and the plays that weren't chosen for the curriculum weren't copied out enough times to make it basically to the libraries of Byzantium. The seven that made it to the libraries of Byzantium, where they were regularly recopied out and stayed, even on the Christian curriculum, up to a point. The ones that stayed there

managed to get out in manuscript form before the Ottomans burnt down Constantinople and into print in Italy. Could I offer another explanation as a As to why Sofekly's play survived, not in the manuscript tradition, but in the public imaginary. And that was that the figure of Oedipus was of real interest to the Christian imaginary. And so very early on, Oedipus as regicide and as incestuous son, albeit unintentional, was very easily assimilated to, in the first instance, Judas and subsequently to the play even in its Seneca inflected form but actually people indeed believe that there was at least an awareness of the Sophocleian version before the first edition

and I think we need to know all the time that a story where regicide is at the center of the story and also familial. confusion is going to be compelling. And for Christians, it became a way of reading, especially those who had in many ways transgressed, but always ultimately repented. And so Edipus, I think, has a story outside of the textual tradition as well. The play was banned from an English stage for a long time. Why was that and why was the band lifted? It was never staged. Nobody stage actual Greek tragedies. Aversion until about 1880. Aversion by John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, which was a restoration tragedy, was actually quite popular and did rather well. But despite the

fact that it staged incestuous couple and so on, everybody died. Edipus gets punished. This is the crucial thing. It is not left open at the end, what we're doing with this sort of polluted character indoors. So Dryden and Lee Edipers, until about 1770, did get the occasional outing. But we know from something that was said in the romantic period that audiences had suddenly turned against it and found it really revolting and upsetting. So it was implicitly banned. Was this because of the incest?

The lack of punishment for it. In restoration tragedy, you can be as naughty as you like provided you die at the end. That's the basic rule. You can have brother-sister incest, and despotishes the whore, right? But everybody's got to die. The problem with this Oedipus, as it is actually with Madeer,

is this getting off with it apparently with some impunity. So when people started getting interested in putting on Greek tragedies the authentic texts, which is not until the end of the 19th century, at that point it was refused a licence. And for about 25 years, it was quite impossible. a particular man called Courtney, who was a sort of dramatist, who was the drama critic of the Daily Telegraph, submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, who had since Walpole's Day, the right to put plays under the Blue Pencil for political reasons. It was refused to license because of the sex element. This is Edwardian morality.

And that went on for about 15 years, it was not possible. but when Max Reinhart, who's very unbelievably important German directors, let it be known that he wanted to put his version on in London, finally, the translation by the Regis Professor of Greek at Oxford, Gilbert Murray, who had a lot of clout, got a licence, and it was finally staged, I think, in 1912. We're going near the end of the programme, but we can't go without talking about Freud.

So who's going to start? Fiona. I'm going to suggest that not only, and I would not be the first to say, that not only Freud's interesting and quite complicated own family background may well have led at least to some intuition about the complexity of at least a desire for the mother because in Freud's family,

his father had had a previous marriage and he, with Freud's own mother, was considerably younger and therefore not very different in age from Freud's half-brother. That's been suggested by a number of psycho-analysts. So thinking and developing something that is going to become the Oedipus complex is beginning in the 1880s to be central to Freud's understanding. And when he's in Paris, he goes, according to Ernest Jones,

to see a very, very important production of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. From 1880, Edipus has been played by perhaps the greatest 19th century French French actor called Jean Munais Sully. And seeing Mune Suli in the role seems to confirm a lot of what Freud himself had thought about the play. And he had a German gymnasium education when he grew up in Vienna. and he had been told that this was important play about fate. He never believed that. And he absolutely argues in the interpretation on dreams that of course it is not that we respond to the fate,

but that we respond to something, all of us, including people of my gender, in theory, we respond to Oedipus's dilemma because it could have been indeed our own. own. And Munei Suli, as he describes playing, taking the part of Edipus, talks about stripping off the layers of self as he reads the text. And in many ways, that mirrors Freud's own account of watching the play and, of course, in the end, psychoanalytical practice. Do you have anything to add? We're near the end now. But do you have anything to

do you have anything to write? Freud was particularly attracted to that moment in the play where Giacaster dismisses dreams of incest. She says lots of people have slept with their mother in dreams. It means nothing. And Freud could not believe his luck at that moment because this, of course, is exactly what he wants to show the dreams are trying to tell us that actually they're anything but meaningless and the fact that Gacasta is shown to be completely wrong

is the entire point of the play. And that took him off to read the only extant ancient dream interpretation manual which is called the interpretation of dreams by Artemidorus of Daldus. It's actually from the high Roman Empire. But in but one of that, it's actually organised by index. There are no fewer than 17 different positions in which Artemidorus' clients have dreamt about having sex with their mother.

So Freud just said, not only is it in a myth, which means it's deep in the human psychic structures, but I can actually prove that everybody's always had this dream. And can I just add that in 1885, not only did Jean Munais Suli take the part of Edipus, he also played Hamlet. And I think one needs to feel quite confident that the linking of the two plays by Freud is in some ways a response to Mune Suli's performances.

Well, that's been a fair old gallop around the course. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Edith. Edith Hall, Fiona McIntosh and Nick Lowe, and our studio and studio. engineer, Jackie Marjoram. Next week, Thomas Mann's most famous novella, death in Venice. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did we not say that you regret not having time to say, Fiona? I think it's really important to think about Oedipus in more recent times, especially since the Second World War, where I think the Freudian baggage has been quite problem.

And I think it's quite difficult after a very, very famous production of Oedipus by Lawrence O'Libia. Immediately after all in 45, which apparently was quite extraordinary because he also took the part of Puff in the Critic as a part of a double bill. After that, and maybe in some ways because of that, I think there was a shift, not least towards the tragedy. hero generally, who now, thanks maybe to Arthur Miller and others, had become problematic. And definitely someone who's called Oedipus the King in the Anglo sphere is potentially problematic. And I think it becomes then quite difficult. Once the star system gets kind of to some extent dethroned, the star is no longer someone we're going to the theatre particularly to watch, I think people rethink.

Edipus. And I think they rethought Edipus in quite interesting ways. I'd suggest one way was to put Jacasta centre stage and Martha Graham did that in her extraordinary night journey in 1947, her dance drama. And

the other ways would be, maybe rather more controversially, would be Stephen Berkhoff's Greek slightly later in 1980, where Edipus now called Eddie is absolutely an anti-hero and resides somewhere in the East End, so you decenter,

dethrone the hero, absolutely. Or, and this is not, of course, unique to Sophocles' play, you reframe Edipus from a post-colonial perspective. And from the 1960s, particularly Ola Rotimi's extraordinary, the gods are not to blame,

set against the backdrop of the Biafran War, is one, I think, really exciting example of that. I would simply add that, because there is no war, most Greek tragedies are set against a background of war, because there is nothing about imperialism or colonialism in it, and because there isn't a female chorus, and because it's not about women's rights, the plays in the 1970s that came to prominence are still are the plays with war, women, ethnicity, colonialism, like Trojan women, Medea, the Orostaya,

all of those kinds of plays. So it's not been of the Zal. that doesn't stop stars like Ray Fines wanting to do it at the National Theatre or Al Pacino organising for himself you know it's if you are a male star you still want to do the Oedipus but you're not absolutely the centre of what people want in the repertoire can I say the one thing I would like to add because all right I would have liked us to talk more about the dialectic between voluntary action and fate the extraordinary conception of Sophocles

that is so brave. This is the play of all Greek tragedy which is at its most extreme that nerthing any human ever did could have ever stopped this. This was just going to happen. It's the nearest to coctose infernal machine that you can get. And yet, the only reason Edipus finds out about it and we can have a tragedy is because of the kind of person

he is. If he had not been restless intellectual with a drive to be the saviour of his people, then he would never have found out, and he and Dukasta could have lived happily ever after in blissful ignorance, which is what she actually is trying to do. He only goes on the detective trail to find it all out and for it to come out because of his personality. And I do think the tyranny thing is really interesting because even in the beginning of the play, he still seems to be a fairly reasonable monarch, who is done all the sensible things. He insists on talking in public to

people not behind doors, no secrets. I've sent to the Delphic Oracle. As soon as there's any opposition, he starts threatening people. He threatens Creon. He threatens Tyrese, well, Tyrese has first, then Creon. He even threatens the chorus with death and exile. And then in the extraordinary scene when he finally happens, his treatment of slaves is deplorable. He actually threatens to torture the very man who has completed the puzzle for him and who meant, intended nothing but the best room all along. Could we talk a little bit, Nick, about Pericles' citizenship law

and biological identity and why that might be so central? Sorry, I don't, that's me asking you. After that, yeah. Like Edith, I think this is probably a play of the 430s all thereabouts. And it's in the early years of a notorious law,

which in other ways is also the route of Europdes Medea that restricted Athenian citizenship to those of full citizen parentage on both sides of their heritage. And amongst other things

this kept lawyers in business for the next century because everyone was suing one another trying to prove that they were, particularly their political opponents, trying to prove that they were not fully entitled to be voting Athenian

citizens because of course the democracy is not a full democracy, it's only a democracy of all adult male citizens on both sides of the family. And one of the things that this play is responding to is the law court culture that is beginning to emerge the earliest law court speeches, another of the roots of detective fiction, are starting to appear. The first murder mystery within perhaps 20 years of this play's performance in a law court speech. And it speaks to a deep anxiety about citizenship, birth, who I actually am, that is linked to the underpinnings of democracy itself as the only alternative that the Athenians have ever come up with to archaic tyranny.

Well, I always find it very interesting that Pericles, of course, lost his last legitimate son in the early years. of the plague and the Athenians exceptionally allowed or wade the legislation to allow his his son with Aspasia, the non-Athenian citizen, to become an Athenian citizen. And one might say that just as Pericles was hoisted, hoist by his own potard with the legislation, so perhaps was Oedipus as he pronounces the curse at the beginning of the place. I always find that really interesting and also why the obsession with biological identity,

which is usually absent in other versions as well. And I'd just like to say, we should have mentioned the name Oedipus, although it actually means, does a Greek verb foot be swollen? It means swollen foot. So it's explained because he had his ankles pittent as a child. There's something wrong with his feet.

but it sounds in Greek also like the verb I know Oida and there's play on that in the tragedy so the guy who's supposed to be no foot know it all foot is actually the guy who never knew and that there's a very strong interest actually in to use the philosophical term epistemology how do we know what we know and the fact that the memories of the things that happened

both 40 years ago when he was exposed and 20 years ago when he killed his father, no two versions are ever identical. So there's this epistemological anxiety about the veracity of memory. Does it matter that he seems to have killed his father inadvertently? We didn't talk about that. It wasn't inadvertent.

It was a massive, massive incident of what we would now call road rage. Just a second. I'm sure you're right now, man. But I just want to clarify it because you're not running. He didn't say, that is my father. I'm going to go. That's what I'm saying.

There was a fracker. And in the fracker, one of the people who killed turned out to be his father. Yes, but he overreacted. Okay, I just want to say that the earliest, the evidence from earliest in the past that we're given, that he has a problematic personality is not from his childhood. He's perfectly fine if somebody's told you a rumor that you're not biologically your father's child to go off and ask the God. But the fact that when he is just a pedestrian at the place where three roads meet, and a king comes past in his carriage, and he's in the way.

He doesn't just quietly get out of the way, but ends up killing, as he said, all of them. Now that is not the mark of a well-balanced personality. I agree with that. So he knew he was killing the king? He didn't know he was killing the king. He didn't know he was his father. And he made the mistake of leaving one witness alive.

Who is the slave? He ends up commanding to be tortured in order to get the vital information over that that was the same baby that was handed over to the Corinthians. I can sense the response of all of you to this discussion.

But the sort of truth he wanted, do you think that wasn't, he wasn't permissible for him to twist the chaps arm up his back, I think, no, he shouldn't have done that? No, he's allowed to in ancient Athens, but there's no play where, there's only one other instance where a slave is threatened with torture.

It's a play by Euripides. And the fact he says, get his arms behind his back, let's do it now, right now, in the middle of the sacred theatre of Dionysus, at the moment when he discovers who he is, sums up his whole very violent and cruel and distorted personality.

So you think that Oedipus was violent and cruel and distorted? Yes, I think he had become like that. I think he started out with a restless personality, was worried about who he was, which any teenager is going to do their head in if you like. But I do genuinely think Sophocles, who had to be when he was general, elected back in every year and all, you know, you were completely accountable for your actions.

Edipus has been in power for 20 years and we all know what happens to people who've been in supreme power for 20 years. Actually, that is really helpful as well because I'm thinking the other really violent scene is in Edipus at Calumus. It's when we absolutely know that Creon is a tyrant. and as he grabs the children. He does. And therefore, I'm absolutely thinking that we read that scene, I mean, not only as an ugly scene, but an absolute sign that Oedipus is now tyrannical.

However much we don't want him to be, he is. The crayon at the end seems to be more tyrannical. He definitely is potentially an even worse tyrant in the making, and I think we're asked to see that, and it's very difficult to forget the other crayons. And where are the boys? Where are the boys? There are two, he says, young men, my sons,

Etychles and Polonises, they are not there at the end of Edipus. You know, where are they, while all these terrible things are going on with the plague in Athens? Don't ask me. But that's left very strange. Why is Creon in charge, not Oedipus's sons? I think the really... He's a producer. John, would you like cups of tea and biscuits?

I would love some now then, but I'm afraid I've got real problems because of... Yes, you're Cabin-Wites. I'm Helena Bonham Carter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes. She received a brown envelope and says, do not open it until you get on the plane. A series of rarely heard tales from World War II. They knew they were going to be caught, and actually that was sort of part of the plan. Unsung heroes, acts of resistance, deception and courage. That is a morning that is seared.

into my memory. I will never be able to forget the terror of that morning.