Oedipus

Edipo and the sphinx by Gustave Moreau (1864).

Oedipus (ancient Greek Οἰδίπους: "swollen feet") was a mythical king of Thebes, son of Laius and Jocasta who unknowingly killed his own father and betrothed his wife. mother.

The myth

Birth and infancy

While Laius, king of Thebes, was sheltered in the court of King Pelops of Pisa, he had entrusted him with the education of his son, Chrysippus. Layo fell in love with the young man and, breaking the sacred laws of hospitality, violated him. Chrysippus, in shame, committed suicide by hanging. King Pelops, as a father, asked the gods for a punishment for Laius, who received a prophecy from the oracle: that if he ever fathered a child, the child, once an adult, would kill him. Laius avoided contact with any woman, however, being drunk, he joined his wife Jocasta, and had a son in Thebes. When the child was born, Laius pierced his feet with fibulas and handed him over to a shepherd to leave him. Laius hoped to escape the oracle in this way since killing him directly would have been impious and he believed that no one would pick up a newborn with his feet crossed. Thus, he was abandoned on Mount Cithaeron, but was found by other shepherds who handed him over to Polybus, king of Corinth. Peribea or Mérope, the wife of Polybus and queen of Corinth, was in charge of raising the baby, calling him Oedipus, which means 'with swollen feet'.

Return of Oedipus to Thebes

Upon reaching puberty, Oedipus, based on gossip from his playmates, suspected that he was not the son of his parents. To clear up doubts, he visited the Oracle of Delphi, which predicted that he would kill his father and then marry his mother. Oedipus, believing that his parents were the ones who had raised him, decided never to return to Corinth to escape his fate. He undertook a journey and, on the way to Thebes, Oedipus met Laius (who was traveling to Delphi) at a crossroads. Laius's herald, Polyfontes, ordered Oedipus to give way to him, but due to his delay, he killed one of his horses. Oedipus was enraged and killed Polyphontes and Laius without knowing that he was the king of Thebes and his own father. The king of Thebes became Creon, brother-in-law of Laius, brother of his wife Jocasta.

Later, Oedipus encountered the sphinx, a monster sent by Hera who had settled on Mount Phicius and killed anyone who could not guess his riddles, including Haemon the son of Creon, and tormented the kingdom of Thebes.

To the riddle of: «what is the living being that when it is small walks on four legs, when it is an adult it walks on two and when it is older it walks on three?», Oedipus answered correctly that it is man since when it is A baby crawls, walks on two legs as an adult, and leans on a cane as an old man.

There was also another riddle: «They are two sisters, one of whom begets the other and, in turn, is begotten by the first». Oedipus replied: day and night. Furious, the Sphinx committed suicide by throwing herself into the void and Oedipus is named the savior of Thebes. As a reward, Oedipus was made king and married Laius's widow, Jocasta, his real mother. He had four children with her: Polyneices, Eteocles, Ismene and Antigone and the two brothers would later face each other to the death for the Theban throne. Another tradition affirms that the children of Oedipus were not from Jocasta but from Eurygania.

Banishment and death

Shortly after, a terrible plague or food shortage fell on the city, since the murderer of Laius had not paid for his crime and contaminated the entire city with his presence.

Oedipus undertakes the investigations to discover the culprit, and thanks to Tiresias he discovers that he is actually the son of Jocasta and Laius and that he himself is the murderer he is looking for. There are multiple versions of what happened from that moment on:

When Jocasta learned that Oedipus was actually her son, she killed herself, hanging herself in the palace. In alternative versions, he continued to live until, in the attack of the seven against Thebes, his sons killed each other, for which he decides to commit suicide.

Oedipus put out his eyes with the brooches from Jocasta's dress, fled or was exiled from Thebes, or was locked up by his sons in the palace, or continued to reign in Thebes for some time. He cursed his sons Polyneices and Eteocles and only his daughter Antigone accompanied him in his exile to guide him.

In Colonus, he was welcomed by the mythical hero Theseus and died there. His tomb was said to be in a sanctuary of the Eumenides between the Acropolis and the Areopagus in Athens.

However, there was another tradition, collected by Lysimachus of Alexandria, which said that when Oedipus died, the inhabitants of Thebes and another Boeotian village called Ceo did not want his remains to be buried in their territories and his body was transported to Atheonus, where he was buried, at night, in an enclosure consecrated to Demeter. When the inhabitants of Etheono found out about the fact, they consulted the oracle about what they should do and the answer was that the worshiper of the goddess should not be disturbed, therefore the remains were buried there.

Oedipus in the Greek tragedy

Photograph of a theatrical representation Edipo in the tragedy of Sophocles.

The oldest reference to the Oedipus myth is found in the Odyssey, in the chapter Evocation of the Dead. There, Epicaste, his mother, goes to the home of Hades to purge the incest, while Oedipus, although with setbacks, continues to reign over the Cadmeans of Thebes.

Sophocles dealt with the theme of Oedipus and his descendants in three works: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. These works were premiered in different years: Antígona in 442 BC. C., Oedipus the King around 430-425 and Oedipus at Colonus , his last work, in 406. They do not form, therefore, a trilogy.

At the beginning of Oedipus Rex, the people of the city of Thebes appear prostrate at the feet of Oedipus, who is the ruler of the city (after having saved it from the clutches of the Sphinx). A priest, on behalf of the other supplicants, asks Oedipus to put an end to the terrible epidemic that plagues the population. Oedipus will try to find out the cause of the crisis by sending his brother-in-law and at the same time his uncle, Creon, to Delphi to consult the oracle. Returning from Delphi, Creon conveys to Oedipus and the people of Thebes the sentence of the oracle: "the gods demand that the lands sullied by the murder of Laius be purified by the banishment of the person responsible for the crime." Oedipus then becomes determined to relentlessly pursue the murderer and punish him harshly, not knowing that he is digging his own grave. From this moment on, and while the protagonist does everything possible to unmask the murderer, various characters in the play, such as Tiresias, his mother Jocasta, and even a servant — having found out who is being sought — will try to to make him desist from such purpose. But, despite everything, Oedipus will continue to unravel the case until he knows the truth.

In the play, the Theban people, (represented as the chorus), will play a very important role, giving their opinion on all the decisions made by the rulers of the city, and having a lot of influence over those decisions. Sophocles makes insistent use of tragic irony and the idea appears that the character ends up recognizing himself, knowing who he really is (anagnorisis). Moments of maximum tension are reached: the conflict between Tiresias and Oedipus, the discussion between Creon and Oedipus, and finally the conversation between Oedipus and Jocasta, who tries to distract him at all costs so that he abandons the investigation into his tragic fate.

The Oracle of Delphi had already told Laius when he was born: "he will kill his father and marry his mother". To avoid this, Laius had ordered to kill him: they left him hanging by his feet in a forest. He was found by a pious servant who gave him up to other parents.

Already an adult, at a crossroads on the road to Thebes, Oedipus had a bad encounter with a man whom he killed, and that man was Laius, his father. Jocasta—with whom he had had four children—was his own mother. When Oedipus learns of his tragic fate, he removes his eyes with his own hands and exiles himself from the city, led by one of his daughters, Antigone, who will not abandon him until her death. It is worth mentioning that banishment was a maximum penalty in Ancient Greece, a penalty considered in itself as a death.

In practically the last year of his life, Sophocles wrote Oedipus at Colonus, a book in which the protagonist, turned into that beggar who wanders aimlessly, blind, and hand in hand with Antigone, he will end up dying in a forest near Athens, where he will be buried and great honors will be paid to him. The tragic conflict between the two sons of Oedipus (Eteocles and Polynices) is also presented in this work.

There are many other versions of the character Oedipus from different classical writers in different periods of Antiquity.

In the Middle Ages versions of the Oedipus myth survive in the Christian legends of Saint Alban, Saint Gregory and Saint Julian.

In Oedipus Philosopher (1988), Jean-Joseph Goux argues that Oedipus represents the power of reason, capable of unveiling riddles with the exercise of intelligence without having to appeal to the gods or to any ancestral knowledge, being the one who initiates the path of philosophical thinking "that reaches the top with Descartes".

Oedipus in literature, music and cinema

EdipoAndré Marcel Baschet.

Edipo in ColonoFulchran-Jean Harriet (1798).

The legend of Oedipus has inspired numerous classical and contemporary authors.

Theater works on the character of Edipo

• Edipo king and Edipo in Colono of Sophocles
• Edipo of Séneca
• The Seven Against Thebes of Esquilo
• Edipo by Giovanni Andrea dell'Anguillara (1565)
• Edipo of Pierre Corneille (1659)
• Edipo of John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee (1678)
• Edipo de Voltaire (1718)
• The Romantic Age of August von Platen-Hallermünden (1828)
• Edipo of Francisco Martínez de la Rosa (1829)
• Edipo and the sphinx by Joséphin Péladan (1903)
• Edipo and the sphinx of Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1906)
• Edipo of André Gide (1930)
• The infernal machine of Jean Cocteau (1932)
• Oedipe ou Le crépuscule des dieux of Henri Ghéon (1938)
• The sphinx without secret of Ricardo López Aranda (1958)
• Oedipe ou Le silence des dieux by Jean-Jacques Kihm (1961)
• Complex of Augustine Cuzzani (1975)

Novels and poems about the character of Edipo

• The Tebaida of Publio Papinio Estacio
• Le Roman de Thèbes - anonymous centuryXII
• Edipo on the road of Henry Bauchau (1990)
• Edipo king of Didier Lamaison (2006)
• Months Oedipes of Jacqueline Harpman (2006)
• Layos, the story of a Greek myth by Josep Asensi (2009), Evohé Editions, ISBN 978-84-936908-1-6
• The death of the pitia Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1976)

Edipo in music

• Edipo in Colonna of Sacchini (1786)
• Edipo Re of Leoncavallo (1920)
• Oedipus Rex Stravinsky (1927)
• Oedipo of Enescu (1936)
• Oedipus by Regina Spektor of the Songs(2006)
• The End by The Doors of the album The Doors (album) (1967)
• Thebes Age of Les Luthiers in Sonamos, despite everything (1971) (can quite gestation)
• Miseria by Night R.I.P of the album Black Diamond (Black Diamond) (2011) (changing)
• Edipo Rey de Def Con Dos del album Tercer Assault (album) (1991) (canción)
• Oedipus der Tyran de Carl Orff 1959 Oedipus der Tyrann premièred at the Württemberg State Theater, Stuttgart, on 11 December

Edipo in the cinema

• Edipo re by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967, with Franco Citti, Silvana Mangano and Alida Valli.
• Edipo re, by Giuseppe De Liguoro, 1909
• In the work of the Colombian theatre duo El Águila Descalza, Mother's going. the tragedy of Edipo Rey is described in a humorous way.

Oedipus in comedy

• Epic of Thebes, Les Luthiers. (1969)

Oedipus Complex

This myth inspired Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex (infantile complex aggregate of loving feelings with the parent of the opposite sex and hostile feelings with the same sex). In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud clarifies the relationship he finds between the Oedipus Myth and the Complex:

Yeah. Edipo king is capable of moving the modern reader, like his contemporaries the Greeks, is because the effect of tragedy [...] does not depend on the conflict between destiny and human will, but on the peculiar nature of the material that is revealed [... ]

Origin of the myth

The myth of Oedipus, prior to the literary version, could have originated from a foreign invader of the XIII century B.C. C. who married a priestess of Hera thus accessing the category of sacred king. Similar to Heracles being adopted by Hera during her apotheosis, Oedipus would have been adopted by his wife Jocasta during a later ceremony while sacred custom involved the death of the predecessor king in various ways, in this case possibly by being bound by the feet to a cart drawn by horses and dragged through the streets, something that would also happen with Hector. Oedipus would have felt dishonored by the death of the previous king and would have tried to change the sacred custom just as he had previously done with the matrilineal succession of the kingdom, which happened to have patrilineal descent. This could have caused the queen to commit suicide by throwing herself from the top of a rock in protest and Thebes later fell victim to a plague. The Thebans, on the advice of an oracle, exiled Oedipus and he tried to reconquer his kingdom through war, later perishing in it.

The myth of Oedipus solving the enigma of the sphinx could be a mere interpretation of an illustration showing the sacred king offering his devotions to the winged Moon goddess of Thebes whose body composed of animals represented the two halves of the Theban year, the lion being the waxing period and the serpent half the waning year.