20 – The Tragedies of King Oedipus – Classical Mythology (Vol 21) by Elizabeth Vandiver
Run time: 30:42 / 2011-01-03
(Transcribed with the help of AI – S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 – Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)
Elizabeth Vandiver – Hello and welcome back to lecture 20. In the previous lecture, we looked at Aeschylus’ use of the myth of the House of Atreus in his trilogy, The Oresteia. In this lecture, we’re going to turn to the most famous and perhaps the greatest of all Greek tragedies, Oedipus the King by Sophocles, and look at how Sophocles used the underlying myth of Oedipus in that play.
Now, the story of Oedipus has become, in this century, probably the single most famous individual Greek myth of all, due of course largely to the influence of Sigmund Freud and his use of the Oedipus myth in his psychological theory. The basic outline of the story, as it appears in various ancient authors, includes several elements from the now familiar test and quest pattern, as I’ve been calling it. The first of these, again, is that there’s some difficulty or problematic circumstance surrounding the conception and or the birth of the hero in this kind of story. And in Oedipus’ case, of course, the problem has to do not with his parents wanting to conceive him, but with their knowledge that after they bear a son, he is going to do some truly terrible things.
Oedipus’ parents, in all versions of his story, know that their son will grow up to kill his father, Laios. They know this either because of an oracle that they’ve been given or because Laios was cursed by Pelops in an interesting connection with the House of Atreus story. According to some versions, Laios kidnapped and raped one of Pelops’ sons, not one of his daughters, but one of his sons, and Pelops cursed Laios because of that action.
Either way, Oedipus’ parents know that Oedipus will grow up to kill his father. And in some versions of his story, that’s all that they know. Other authors elaborate the story and add the detail that Oedipus will also grow up to marry his mother, Jocasta. So, Oedipus, it’s safe to say, is not a wanted child. His parents try to get rid of him shortly after his birth by exposing him in the wilderness.
Infant exposure, by the way, was accepted in ancient Greek society, so far as we can tell. It was probably never terribly widespread, but it was an accepted way of getting rid of an unwanted or defective child to leave the infant in the wilderness to die. So by leaving their son Oedipus exposed, Laius and Jocasta are not committing any kind of transgression against their culture’s norms. They’re perfectly within their rights to do so. However, this being a myth, the child is, of course, rescued and brought up by strangers. In fact, he’s brought up by the king and queen of Corinth. And so Oedipus grows up in ignorance of who he really is, thinking that he’s a prince of Corinth rather than son of Laius and Jocasta, king and queen of Thebes.
Another aspect of the traditional kind of test and quest story that we see in the story of Oedipus is that the young man performs feats of exceptional strength and bravery, exceptional cleverness, or both. We saw that in the stories of Theseus and Heracles both. In Oedipus’ case, he performs a feat of exceptional strength when he does actually, in fact, kill his father Laios. This happens after Oedipus has gone to Delphi, according to Sophocles’ version, at least, to ask the god Apollo who he is. And the god tells him, you will kill your father and marry your mother. Oedipus assumes this means that he’ll kill his adoptive parents, whom he thinks are his real parents. And so he vows never to return back to Corinth, takes off in another direction. As it happens, he’s heading towards Thebes, and on his way there, at a crossroads, he meets an old man with a great many attendants. This old man, of course, is Laius, though neither Oedipus nor Laius know who the other one is. They quarrel over who has the right of way on the road, and in the ensuing melee, Oedipus kills King Laius and all his attendants except one.
So that’s a feat of exceptional strength for one man to kill many men. It also, of course, is the working out of Oedipus’ fate since he’s just killed his father, though he doesn’t know it for some years afterwards. Oedipus also shows exceptional cleverness when he solves the famous riddle of the Sphinx. The Sphinx was a female monster who was terrorizing the town of Thebes. She asked everyone who passed by her a riddle and those who could not answer her riddle she killed and ate. Oedipus is the only one who’s able to answer the riddle therefore in distress over his conquest of her the Sphinx kills herself and Oedipus therefore frees Thebes from this malign influence of the Sphinx. So that’s his exceptional cleverness, that he could solve a riddle that no one else is able to solve. And yet another element from standard folktale motifs of this type of story
The successful completion of these tests, whether of strength, courage, cleverness, or whatever, is often the granting of a bride to the young man in question. And so is the case with Oedipus. Because he solves the riddle of the Sphinx and frees Thebes from her torment, Oedipus is granted the hand of the recently widowed Queen of Thebes in marriage. Unfortunately, of course, this is Jocasta, his mother, though neither of them know it. So Oedipus has fulfilled his fate of killing his father and marrying his mother. And his discovery of the truth of his actions leads to Jocasta’s death, to his mother’s suicide in, I think, all of the versions of his story. At least in Sophocles’ version, it leads to Oedipus’ own self-blinding and exile. Now, we’re most familiar with this story through Sophocles’ version, as I’ve said before in this course.
And in the 20th century, this myth, particularly as presented by Sophocles, has become extremely important in popular culture because of the use made of it by two of the most influential theorists of myth this century has seen, Sigmund Freud and Claude Levi-Strauss. Freud, as we discussed in the third lecture back at the beginning of the course, Freud assumes that the myth as presented by Sophocles reflects the unconscious or subconscious desires of all male children to kill their fathers or at least supplant their fathers and have sexual relations with their mothers.
And it’s because of this, Freud thinks, that the play appeals no less to modern audiences than it did to ancient audiences. He reads it, in effect, as a kind of wish fulfillment fantasy. Well, quite aside from the fact that this has always seemed to me unsatisfactory to explain why the play appeals to females as well as to males, one objection that’s often made to Freud’s interpretation is that within the myth, Oedipus’ ignorance of his true parentage is an absolutely crucial element. He does these things without knowing who these people are. So, as many scholars have pointed out, if Oedipus felt Oedipal desires at all, he would feel them towards his adoptive mother and not towards Jocasta because he doesn’t know who Jocasta is.
Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex, whether it’s psychologically correct or not, according to this objection to his interpretation of the myth, Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex can’t tell us much about the myth itself or how the myth works, as opposed to providing an explanation for why the myth appeals to its audience. The second main objection to Freud’s theory is one that we discussed as an objection to psychological theories of myth in general, namely that Freud simply assumes the unconscious works and in fact the entire human psyche works the same way and in all cultures at all times. He assumes that the psychological impulses of small boys in 5th century Athens, 5th century BC Athens, are the same as psychological impulses of small boys in late 19th and 20th century Europe. That is, at the very least, a questionable assumption and one that perhaps needs to be demonstrated rather than just asserted.