Is it possible to cut through the later interpretations of Sophocles’ play and to cut around Sophocles’ hegemony over the story and try to decipher what the myth was doing before Sophocles got his hands on it, so to speak? Well, we can try. The most unusual thing about this myth is its association of parasite, of killing a father, and incest. Now, right away, Sophocles’ treatment of the play and our familiarity with it means that we don’t see that as an unusual association. We are so accustomed to the idea that this man killed his father and married his mother, taking that almost as one unit of action, that it’s perhaps a surprise to realize, in classical myth at least, those two actions, parasite and incest, are very, very seldom associated with one another. There are a good many classical myths about sons killing or almost killing fathers and vice versa.
But mother-son incest is almost never associated with those myths. Parasite and even lesser violence against fathers was regarded with absolute horror in ancient Greek culture and particularly in Athenian culture. In Greek comedy, one of the worst insults you can throw at someone is to call him a father beater. That’s one of the most unimaginable crimes and therefore that’s one of the worst things you can call someone.
We tend to see the incest with Jocasta as the more horrifying of Oedipus’ two actions, but that’s probably anachronistic. For Sophocles’ original audience, probably the thing that raised the hair on the back of their necks and gave them goosebumps and made them shudder with discomfort in their seats was probably Oedipus’ killing Laius more than Oedipus’ marriage to his mother, Jocasta. Now, a scholar named Jan Bremer has suggested in his discussion of the Oedipus story that the incest was added to the story precisely to underline the horror of the parasite. Brimmer says that parasite, cannibalism, and incest are the worst imaginable transgressions in Greek society, probably in most societies. There’s no cannibalism in Oedipus’s story unless we see it as displaced onto the Sphinx who does eat humans.
But the incest here functions, Brimmer thinks, as the cannibalism does in the House of Atreus to underline the horror of the murder. And Brimmer puts it very succinctly when he says, quote, the monstrosity of the transgression is commented upon by letting the protagonist commit a further transgression. So in Brimmer’s view, which I think is a very persuasive one, the underlying core of the myth is the horror of Parasite, of a son killing his father. And the incest with the mother is tacked on as a detail to underline how dreadful that son killing his father is. And there I’d remind you, as I said at the beginning of the lecture, that in some versions of the Oedipus myth, what Laius and Jocasta know about their unborn son is that he will kill his father. So that’s evidence, perhaps, that that was the original version of this story.
Oedipus’ eventual heroization at Colonus, his becoming a hero, is a reminder of a point I made when I first started talking about heroes, that heroes in the sense of guardian spirits were not by any means necessarily noted for good deeds. It’s Oedipus’ crimes that mark him out as different from the rest of humankind, and it’s that difference that makes him eligible to be a hero that can protect Athens. And in this context, it’s interesting to close by considering Burkert’s reading of this particular myth. Burkert connects the story of Oedipus with the actual Greek ritual of a scapegoat or a pharmakos, to use the Greek word, a person who would be driven out of a city to take some terrible disaster, such as a plague, with him.
Now the crucial element here is that the pharmakos is not a good noble self-sacrificing individual who volunteers to take all the sins or misdeeds of his city upon himself and thereby free it from plague. The pharmakos must by definition be disgusting or foul or polluted in some way. He’s an object of disgust and hatred and the idea seems to be almost a kind of what’s sometimes called sympathetic magic that this most disgusting and foul of human beings draws with him as he’s driven out of the city whatever disaster it is that’s troubling the city. And so in that context, in this regard, it’s precisely Oedipus’s pollution through killing his father and through sex with his mother. It’s precisely the disgust that the chorus in the play expresses towards him once they find out what he’s done that makes him able both to lift the plague from Thebes and later as a heroized spirit to protect Athens.
So in this lecture, we’ve looked very quickly at interpretations both of the Oedipus myth itself and of its treatment by Sophocles. In the next lecture, we’ll take slightly a different approach and look at some of the anomalous and frightening female figures, Amazons, monsters, and the mythic Medea who interact with Greek heroes in various different stories.
(Transcribed with the help of AI – S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 – Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)