{"id":13648,"date":"2023-11-14T10:20:59","date_gmt":"2023-11-14T09:20:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=13648"},"modified":"2025-10-19T16:17:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T15:17:10","slug":"classical-mythology-vol-21-25-by-elizabeth-vandiver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=13648","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Vandiver &#8211; The Tragedies of King Oedipus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>20 &#8211; <strong>The Tragedies of King Oedipus &#8211; Classical Mythology (Vol 21) by Elizabeth Vandiver<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Run time: 30:42 \/ 2011-01-03<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 640px;\" class=\"wp-video\"><video class=\"wp-video-shortcode\" id=\"video-13648-1\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" preload=\"metadata\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"video\/mp4\" src=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume21\/20.TheTragediesOfKingOedipus_512kb.mp4?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume21\/20.TheTragediesOfKingOedipus_512kb.mp4\">https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume21\/20.TheTragediesOfKingOedipus_512kb.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>(Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Elizabeth Vandiver<\/strong> &#8211; Hello and welcome back to lecture 20. In the previous lecture, we looked at Aeschylus&#8217; use of the myth of the House of Atreus in his trilogy, The Oresteia. In this lecture, we&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ve been calling it. The first of these, again, is that there&#8217;s some difficulty or problematic circumstance surrounding the conception and or the birth of the hero in this kind of story. And in Oedipus&#8217; 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.<\/p>\n<p>Oedipus&#8217; 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&#8217;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&#8217; sons, not one of his daughters, but one of his sons, and Pelops cursed Laios because of that action.<\/p>\n<p>Either way, Oedipus&#8217; parents know that Oedipus will grow up to kill his father. And in some versions of his story, that&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s norms. They&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s a prince of Corinth rather than son of Laius and Jocasta, king and queen of Thebes.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217; 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&#8217; 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&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s a feat of exceptional strength for one man to kill many men. It also, of course, is the working out of Oedipus&#8217; fate since he&#8217;s just killed his father, though he doesn&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;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<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s death, to his mother&#8217;s suicide in, I think, all of the versions of his story. At least in Sophocles&#8217; version, it leads to Oedipus&#8217; own self-blinding and exile. Now, we&#8217;re most familiar with this story through Sophocles&#8217; version, as I&#8217;ve said before in this course.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;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&#8217;s often made to Freud&#8217;s interpretation is that within the myth, Oedipus&#8217; 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&#8217;t know who Jocasta is.<\/p>\n<p>Freud&#8217;s theory of the Oedipus Complex, whether it&#8217;s psychologically correct or not, according to this objection to his interpretation of the myth, Freud&#8217;s theory of the Oedipus Complex can&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>The second great theorist of the 20th century who focused on the Oedipus myth was Levi-Strauss, the father of structuralism. He reads the myth in all its versions, not just in Sophocles&#8217; telling of it, as mediating between two conflicting accounts of human origin, what&#8217;s called autoxony and sexual reproduction. Now, autoxony is a word that simply means springing from the earth. Auto means self.<\/p>\n<p>Kthon, C-H-T-H-O-N, means earth, so autoxene means coming from the earth itself. And this is a theory of human origin that has left its traces in several Greek myths, usually in myths of particular cities. The Athenians, for instance, claimed that they themselves were autoxenous. Other peoples may have been created in one way or another, but the Athenians claimed that they themselves sprang from the earth of Athens.<\/p>\n<p>Levi-Strauss thinks that the Oedipus myth encodes or represents a conflict between the theory of autochthony and the observed reality of sexual reproduction. In his reading of the myth, the riddle of the Sphinx and Oedipus&#8217; uncertainty about his parentage both concern the essential nature of being human. Where do human beings come from and what kind of creatures are they?<br \/>\nThe riddle of the Sphinx, which Sophocles does not tell us, according to other authors, was just this. The Sphinx asked everyone she encountered, what kind of animal walks on four feet at morning, two feet at noon, and three feet at evening? And Oedipus was the only one who was able to recognize that the answer was man or a human being who crawled as a baby, walks erect as an adult, and leans on a cane in old age.<\/p>\n<p>So the Sphinx&#8217;s riddle has to do with what sort of a creature is a human being and also lays emphasis on feet. And Levi-Strauss thought that the emphasis laid on lameness in Oedipus&#8217;s family. His grandfather Labdicus has a name that means lame one. Oedipus&#8217;s name means swollen foot, and refers to a detail of his myth that before he was exposed his father Laius pierced the baby&#8217;s ankles in order to lame him. Levi-Strauss sees this stress on lameness as a reference to autoxiny because in stories of autoxinous origins very frequently humans who are born from the earth are lame or at least have some sort of oddity about their lower limbs, the last bit of them to emerge from the earth. Now, there&#8217;s no doubt that the detail of the piercing of baby Oedipus&#8217; ankles is an odd detail in the story as it&#8217;s come down to us. It makes no logical sense. The infant is exposed as an infant. He can&#8217;t even crawl yet. What&#8217;s the point of laming him?<\/p>\n<p>And Levi-Strauss says that the point is simply that the myth requires this element of lameness in Oedipus as in other members of his family. So, according to Levi-Strauss, the myth, which is about the origins of Oedipus, mediates. Remember, structuralism sees myth as mediating between oppositions. The Oedipus myth mediates between the theory of autochthonous human creation and the observed reality of sexual reproduction, represented in Oedipus&#8217; story, obviously, by his union with his mother, Jocasta. Now, I think it&#8217;s fair to say that very few classicists have been fully persuaded by Levi-Strauss&#8217; reading of the myth.<\/p>\n<p>Other scholars connect the Oedipus story with initiation rites, since very frequently in initiation rites for young males, there&#8217;s at least some sort of symbolic killing of or setting aside of the father. But as I mentioned when we were talking about the possibility that the Theseus myth reflects initiation rites, the main problem for this interpretation is that we simply have no evidence of ancient Greek initiation rites, so we just don&#8217;t know, if the myth reflects those or not. Now, among literary critics and classicists, the most common reading of Sophocles&#8217; play, if not of the underlying myth itself, has been to see it as exploring and representing the conflict between fate and free will. This is a pretty obvious element in most modern readers&#8217; view of the play as Sophocles presents it.<\/p>\n<p>The actions taken by Laius, Jocasta and Oedipus himself all lead inexorably to the inexorable working out of fate. It is precisely because Laius and Jocasta choose to expose their infant son that he can grow up ignorant of who he is and therefore kill Laius and marry Jocasta without knowing what he&#8217;s doing. If they had brought him up themselves, he would have known who they were.<br \/>\nand therefore it&#8217;s the very fact that they try to avoid their fate that enables their fate to be worked out similarly with Oedipus if when the Oracle of Delphi told him you will marry your father you will marry your mother and kill your father if he had returned straight home to Corinth to his adoptive parents he would have been safe it&#8217;s precisely because he tries to avoid his fate that he walks right into it. And so many modern readers see the play as looking at the conflict between the fact that these characters are fated to commit the deeds that they commit and yet it is their freely chosen actions, the actions that they choose to do through their own free will, that leads them directly into that fate.<\/p>\n<p>However, one objection that&#8217;s often made to this interpretation is that it&#8217;s basically an anachronistic reading. We moderns, people in modern American and modern Western culture, tend to see this conflict between fate and free will very clearly delineated in this play. But that may be an effect of the Christian tradition in which free will is stressed as being so crucially important to human spiritual development.<\/p>\n<p>Ancient Greek authors do not ever seem to have pointed to the Oedipus play as particularly involved with fate and free will. And in fact, it&#8217;s noteworthy that classical Greek doesn&#8217;t even have a term for free will. This doesn&#8217;t seem to have been a conflict that they were particularly interested in talking about. It&#8217;s glaringly obvious to us and I&#8217;ve spent many class hours having students talk about and work out and hash over how can free will exist if actions are fated to happen and yet we see in the myth that these fated actions are played out through free will choices, but this topic which we find endlessly fascinating really does not seem to have engaged the ancient readers of this myth or viewers of this play to the same extent.<\/p>\n<p>Another way to interpret the Oedipus play and one that I find very fruitful and very useful is to see Oedipus as the paradigm of a rationalist intellectual, someone who seeks to establish truth not through consulting the gods or through religious ceremonies and rituals, but through the questing of his own intellect, through the intelligence and rational use of his own mind. Again, if we take this reading, we have to beware of anachronistic assumptions. Many modern readers who do see the play in this way, who see Oedipus as the paradigm of a rationalist intellectual trying to figure things out through his own intelligence,<\/p>\n<p>Many modern critics who take that view tend also to see it as an unambiguously good thing, to assume that Oedipus is thus some kind of proto-humanist hero who uses intellect, reason, and logic to get away from superstition and irrationality. But in the context of 5th century Athens, in the context of the society for whom this play was written and the society to which its author Sophocles belonged, most people would probably have seen such an intellectual independence as a negative thing, not as a positive thing. In fact, Sophocles here is drawing on or I think making reference to one of the great intellectual movements and one of the great philosophical controversies of his own day. He is casting Oedipus as a Sophist and looking at the philosophical movement that we call Sophism through his exploration of the Oedipus myth.<\/p>\n<p>Now, the sophists were a group of itinerant teachers. They were centered in Athens, though most of them were not native-born Athenians. And they taught a great many things, but one of their most important areas of teaching was in the field of rhetoric and argumentation. And one of the reasons the sophists were so controversial in 5th century Athens was that they taught young men to argue both sides of a subject equally fluently. They taught what we would recognize as techniques of debate. To us, this seems utterly uncontroversial. We teach debaters in high school to argue both sides of a topic equally fluently and probably like our debate team teachers, the sophists meant this as a way of honing their pupils&#8217; intellects, training them in constructing logical arguments, training them in seeing what evidence will and will not support. But in 5th century Athens, when this was done for the first time, it was seen as a very unnerving and a very dangerous thing.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>If the sophists taught young men to argue falsehood as persuasively as to argue truth, then how could anyone when confronted with a sophist trained person know if that person was telling the truth? How can we trust what someone says to us if falsehood can be argued as persuasively as truth? And so the sophists were often accused of training young men to make the worst argument seem better and of corrupting the morals of young men by doing so.<\/p>\n<p>The most famous sophist was Protagoras. And in what we know about him, we see that it was not just rhetoric that made the Athenians by and large nervous about the sophists, but it was also their approach to the gods and to knowledge in general. Protagoras wrote several works, none of which have survived. Unfortunately, we have only fragments of his work, usually single sentence fragments.<\/p>\n<p>His most famous saying is usually translated, man is the measure of all things. I like to paraphrase that a bit as the human intellect is the measure of all things because I found that very frequently modern students, when they hear man is the measure of all things, interpret that to mean something like man is the crowning pinnacle of creation by which standard all other creatures are to be judged. That, I think, is not at all what Protagoras meant by it. I think he meant, rather, our own minds, our own intellects are the only measuring stick we have for us to judge the rest of the world.<\/p>\n<p>Our intelligence is our only measuring stick. In another sentence that probably opened one of his books, Protagoras says, about the gods I know nothing, whether they exist or not, and therefore I will not speak of them, and that I think encapsulates what scared the Athenians and worried the Athenians about the sophists Protagoras is not an atheist though he was accused of being one he&#8217;s not saying there are no gods he&#8217;s saying I don&#8217;t know if there are any gods and more than that he&#8217;s implying gods are irrelevant I&#8217;m not going to talk about them I&#8217;m not interested in them I&#8217;m interested in the human mind human intellect and what it can do now obviously, if gods are considered irrelevant, the validity of oracles is called into question.<\/p>\n<p>And as we talked about when discussing Apollo and the oracle at Delphi, oracles were an extremely serious matter in Greek society. They were taken seriously, they were trusted, they were believed in. A group of people who intentionally and directly questioned the validity of oracles are not going to be very popular among Greek traditionalists and the sophists indeed were not very popular. This was all taken extremely seriously by the way. The most famous indication of how seriously the sophists were regarded and what a threat they were seen as being is that Socrates was executed in 399 BC largely on charges of being a sophist.<\/p>\n<p>He said he was not. He said that his teachings were very different from Sophism. But the charges against Socrates, the charges which led to his execution, were that he had corrupted the youth of Athens and that he had denied the gods of Athens, the charges made against Sophists. So this is a very serious subject, that Sophocles, I think, addresses in Oedipus the King. And if we look at the play, the Oedipus myth as Sophocles uses it, in this context, we see that Oedipus can be read as an example of, almost a paradigm of, a sophist.<\/p>\n<p>He refuses to simply accept what the oracle at Delphi tells him will happen. More importantly in the play, he refuses to accept the warnings of the prophet Tiresias, an old blind prophet who tells him rather frequently in Sophocles&#8217; play and pretty clearly that he is the one who killed Laius and that he is living in an incestuous union with his mother Jocasta. Oedipus directly accuses Tiresias, a prophet of the gods, of lying. Furthermore, Oedipus is also sophist-like in his insistence on his own intelligence and his determination to reason out for himself the puzzles of his origin and the question of who killed Laius. It&#8217;s the question of who killed Laius that motivates the action of the entire play.<\/p>\n<p>Sophocles&#8217; version of the Oedipus story opens with Thebes suffering under a great plague Oedipus sends a messenger to the Oracle at Delphi to find out what is causing this plague, the answer comes back that the cause of the plague is the fact that the murderer of Laius is living in Thebes, unknown and unrecognized. And so Oedipus sets out to discover who it is that murdered Laius, and that leads to the entire unraveling of the whole story.<\/p>\n<p>So if we read Sophocles presentation of Oedipus as a presentation of a sophist, a kind of prototype of a sophist, then I think Sophocles play indicates pretty clearly that in the view taken by this play the human intellect alone is not sufficient for understanding the world. I think Sophocles here is coming down on the traditionalist side saying that sophism doesn&#8217;t work. The human intellect alone cannot solve all the problems of existence. In particular, Oedipus acts throughout the play on a mistaken premise. All of his logic works perfectly well, except he begins from the mistaken premise that he is the son of Polybus and Merope of Corinth, not the son of Laius and Jocasta of Thebes.<\/p>\n<p>And so his entire intellectual structure crumbles because it&#8217;s built on a faulty basis. I think that&#8217;s a fairly clear warning by Sophocles of the limitations of human intellect and the mistakes to which it&#8217;s liable. Sophocles also seems pretty clearly to say the gods&#8217; oracles are indeed valid and the gods must indeed be taken into account. And throughout the play,<br \/>\nSophocles underlines all of these ideas with a running correspondence that he makes over and over again in the play between knowledge and blindness, ignorance and sight. Tiresias the prophet is blind but knows the truth from the beginning of the play through to the end.<\/p>\n<p>Oedipus, when he has his eyes, when he has those senses that are so important for intellect, so important for human reasoning, he doesn&#8217;t know the truth. He doesn&#8217;t know who he is. While he has his sight, he&#8217;s ignorant. Once he learns the truth, he blinds himself. And so throughout the play, Sophocles underlines his themes by stressing the idea that sight in some way equals ignorance, blindness in some way equals knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>All of these different readings of Sophocles&#8217; play indicate how very difficult it is to separate the Oedipus myth from Sophocles&#8217; particular retelling of the Oedipus myth. Oedipus the King has become so central a text in Western literature that it has even eclipsed Sophocles&#8217; own further telling of the story in his later play, Oedipus at Colonus, where he treats of the death of Oedipus. In that play, Oedipus comes to Athens, to a town named Colonus, which was actually Sophocles&#8217; hometown near Athens, dies there and becomes a protective spirit for the Athenians, becomes a hero worshipped by the Athenians. But Oedipus at Colonus is not nearly as well known in general terms as Oedipus the king.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>Is it possible to cut through the later interpretations of Sophocles&#8217; play and to cut around Sophocles&#8217; 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&#8217; treatment of the play and our familiarity with it means that we don&#8217;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&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s one of the most unimaginable crimes and therefore that&#8217;s one of the worst things you can call someone.<\/p>\n<p>We tend to see the incest with Jocasta as the more horrifying of Oedipus&#8217; two actions, but that&#8217;s probably anachronistic. For Sophocles&#8217; 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&#8217; killing Laius more than Oedipus&#8217; 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&#8217;s no cannibalism in Oedipus&#8217;s story unless we see it as displaced onto the Sphinx who does eat humans.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;s evidence, perhaps, that that was the original version of this story.<\/p>\n<p>Oedipus&#8217; 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&#8217;s Oedipus&#8217; crimes that mark him out as different from the rest of humankind, and it&#8217;s that difference that makes him eligible to be a hero that can protect Athens. And in this context, it&#8217;s interesting to close by considering Burkert&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s an object of disgust and hatred and the idea seems to be almost a kind of what&#8217;s sometimes called sympathetic magic that this most disgusting and foul of human beings draws with him as he&#8217;s driven out of the city whatever disaster it is that&#8217;s troubling the city. And so in that context, in this regard, it&#8217;s precisely Oedipus&#8217;s pollution through killing his father and through sex with his mother. It&#8217;s precisely the disgust that the chorus in the play expresses towards him once they find out what he&#8217;s done that makes him able both to lift the plague from Thebes and later as a heroized spirit to protect Athens.<\/p>\n<p>So in this lecture, we&#8217;ve looked very quickly at interpretations both of the Oedipus myth itself and of its treatment by Sophocles. In the next lecture, we&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>(Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>20 &#8211; The Tragedies of King Oedipus &#8211; Classical Mythology (Vol 21) by Elizabeth Vandiver Run time: 30:42 \/ 2011-01-03 https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume21\/20.TheTragediesOfKingOedipus_512kb.mp4 &nbsp; (Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=13648\" class=\"more-link\">Lexo <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-extracted"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}