Oedipus Rex

“Our city—

look around you, see with your own eyes—

our ship pitches wildly, cannot lift her head

from the depths, the red waves of death...

Thebes is dying. A blight on the fresh crops

and the rich pastures, cattle sicken and die,

and the women die in labor, children stillborn

and the plague, the fiery god of fever hurls down

on the city, his lightning slashing through us—

raging plague in all its vengeance, devastating

the house of Cadmus! And black Death luxuriates

in the raw, wailing miseries of Thebes.

Now we pray to you. You cannot equal the gods,

your children know that, bending at your altar.

But we do rate you first of men,

both in the common crises of our lives

and face-to-face encounters with the gods.” 

The priest’s horrific description of Thebes’ suffering sets the scene in more ways than one. The miseries that plague Thebes center on bodies, especially reproductive bodies: Something has gone very wrong in the fertility of the land. This blight foreshadows Oedipus’s unwitting crime, and the priest’s reminder that the king can’t equal the gods prepares the cruel twist of fate at the play’s heart.

“[...] I sent Creon,

my wife’s own brother, to Delphi—

Apollo the Prophet’s oracle—to learn

what I might do or say to save our city.

Today’s the day. When I count the days gone by

it torments me...what is he doing?

Strange, he’s late, he’s gone too long.

But once he returns, then, then I’ll be a traitor

if I do not do all the god makes clear.” 

These ominous lines prepare the way for bad news. Sophocles’s audience would have been familiar with the myth of Oedipus, and thus would have known that, in this passage, Oedipus is predicting his own punishment. The dramatic irony here will only intensify throughout the play, and it creates the sense of a mythic, fated pattern at work.

“Now my curse on the murderer. Whoever he is,

a lone man unknown in his crime

or one among many, let that man drag out

his life in agony, step by painful step—

I curse myself as well...if by any chance

he proves to be an intimate of our house,

here at my hearth, with my full knowledge,

may the curse I just called down on him strike me!” 

With even richer dramatic irony, Oedipus calls down a curse on himself that will indeed be fulfilled. Part of the tragedy of the play is that Oedipus is a good king: fair-minded, thoughtful, and empathetic. That he does not exempt himself or his own family from his search for Laius’s murderer shows an unselfish commitment to the Theban people.