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TYCHE & OEDIPUS
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Featured May 21 , 2005
 Head of Tyche/Fortuna, end of 1st century AD. Photo © Maicar Forlag - GML WHAT RULES OUR LIVES? CHANCE or DIVINE LAW? "I am a child of Tyche" -- Oedipus, in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos I THE BACKGROUND DEBATE OF SOPHOCLES' OEDIPUS TYRANNOS As in the Book of Job, the main problem debated in Sophocles’ Oedipus The King is a religious and metaphysical one: the question whether the world, and especially the human world, is ruled by a transcendent world order, or whether every man’s life is subject instead to an utterly capricious and chaotic universe. In the Book of Job, however, the question is not so much whether there is any world order at all, but rather whether that order is a morally just system, one in which goodness is rewarded by happiness and only wickedness is punished by unhappiness. By contrast, the question posed by Sophocles in his version of the Oedipus myth is not whether the world order is a morally just one, but whether there is any world order at all. This may not strike us as a particularly religious question: We tend to think of it as a strictly factual or scientific question, and one with which questions of value, morality, justice and religion need not be especially concerned. But for the ancient Greeks, and especially for the Athenians of Sophocles’ time, this was one of the most perplexing and burning issues of the day. They were much worried about whether organized religion has any validity or relevance for the life of man; and this was inseparable from the question whether human life is predictable. This was partly an existential question that we can still understand: Is human existence meaningful, does it add up to anything worthwhile or exhibit any kind of intelligible and valuable pattern? This question is at the core of the Oedipus Tyrannos, and its final chorus ends with that question -- and perhaps with a terrribly gloomy reply to it. But for Sophocles and his contemporaries this question of the meaningfulness or value of our lives was inseparably bound up with a specific religious question, and one that caused them the keenest anguish at that time. Because for them, if the course of natural events, and especially human events, is not foreseeable by the gods, then it is not predictable by the priests. And if the predictions of priests and oracles are not reliable, then the organized worship and reverence of the gods seems to have no real value or point. Three centuries earlier Homer had dared express some doubts about the reliability of oracles and priests. In the last book of the Iliad, when Hecuba pleads with her aged husband not to risk a perilous trip into the enemy camp to ransom his son’s body from the raging Achilles, Priam replies: Do not hold me back when I would be going, neither yourself be a bird of bad omen in my palace. You will not persuade me. If it had been some other who ordered me, one of the mortals, one of those who are soothsayers, or priests, or diviners, I might have called it a lie and we might rather have rejected it. But no, for I myself heard the god [Iris, sent by Zeus] and looked straight upon her, I am going, and this word shall not be in vain. (XXIV, 218-23; trans. Richmond Lattimore) So Priam has far more faith in his own direct religious experience or revelation from God than he does in the official interpreters of God’s will. What caused Priam, or Homer, to mistrust them? I do not know. But we do know why, three centuries later, the faith of the 5th century Athenians in such soothsayers must have been profoundly shaken. In 431 B.C., during the first year of the disastrous Peloponnesian war with Sparta, the Athenians sent an embassy to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi to find out whether the gods might send them an omen or oracle favorable to their cause. Imagine their shock to learn directly from his own oracle that Apollo promised to help their enemies, the Spartans! It was in the very next year of that fateful war with Sparta, in 430 B.C., that Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos was first performed in the Theater of Dionysos before some 17,000 Athenian citizens. Imagine, then, the sympathy the spectators must have felt for the rage expressed by Oedipus when, without any evidence whatsoever, the priest of Apollo, Tiresias, accuses him of having murdered the previous king! How those same spectators must have been on the edge of their seats waiting to hear which side Sophocles -- himself a priest of the healing god Asclepius and thereby linked to Apollo the Healer -- might take in the raging controversy over the trustworthiness of oracles and priests! Indeed, a question on everyone’s mind must have been: Were the priests of Apollo at Delphi not only untrustworthy, but actually in the pay and service of the Spartans, or of Athenian politicians who were secretly collaborating with the Spartans and plotting the overthrow of the Athenian democracy from within? To the spectators at its first performance, then, Sophocles’ play dramatised a burning topical issue that was nothing short of sensational. At the end of Sophocles' ANTIGONE, written perhaps a dozen years earlier, the Messenger had proclaimed: "Luck sets it straight and Luck she overturns the happy or unhappy day by day. No prophecy can deal with men's affairs." (trans. Elizabeth Wyckoff, 1158-60) Now in his Oedipus Tyrannos this question became more urgent: If Luck or Chance rules the world, how can the future be foretold? And if the future cannot be foreseen or fortold, then what good is religion and the whole system of oracles, soothsayers, diviners, prophets and priests? II HOW TYCHE IS WOVEN INTO THE OEDIPUS TYRANNOS (The translation quoted, unless otherwise noted, is by David Grene, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, University of Chicago Press) As the play opens, the Priest of Thebes begs Oedipus to save the city from the plague, just as he had saved them earlier by ridding them of the riddling Sphinx: "Once you have brought us luck (tyche) with happy omen, be no less now in fortune." (lines 52-3) Soon Creon, whom Oedipus has sent to consult Apollo's oracle at Delphi, returns with a prescription for ridding them of the plague. "Good news," he says -- provided that in the end Tyche proves good to them: "If in the final issue all is well (tyche) I count complete good fortune." (eutychein) (88-9) Oedipus, in obedience to the will of Apollo, then orders the killer of Laius to be expelled: "since he is our pollution, as the oracle of Pytho's God proclaimed him now to me. So I stand forth a champion of the God and of the man who died. " (242-5) Oedipus orders this punishment on behalf of Laius and his family, as if he himself were Laius' son -- the son he would have had, had he "not been unlucky (dustychesen)... Luck [Tyche] leaped upon his head." (262-3) It was, of course, not bad Luck, but a bad Fate, the decree of the Gods against Laius, that caused Laius to be murdered, and by his own son, Oedipus. Nor was this a capricious Fate. but a divine punishment, decreed by the Gods to punish Laius --and his family -- for raping and killing a young shepherd boy. Sophocles does not tell us this. But the myth did. And his audience knew well the myth. When Teiresias, a priest of Apollo, like Sophocles himself, arrives to warn and accuse Oedipus that he himself is the murderer of Laius, words fly in anger: Teiresias: "But it's in riddle answering you are strongest. " Oedipus: "Yes. Taunt me where you will find me great." Teiresias: "It is this very luck (tyche) that has destroyed you." (440-42) aute ge mentoi s'e tyche diolesen. In this dispute, the Chorus of townspeople, echoing the heated debates in Athens over Apollo's Delphic oracle prophesying their defeat by Sparta, wish to stick by Oedipus, who saved them from the Sphinx by solving her riddle. But they do not know how to handle these new riddles from Apollo's oracle: "The augur has spread confusion, terrible confusion. I do not approve what was said, nor do I deny it. I do not know what to say." Finally, Teiresias challenges Oedipus: "Prove what I say. Go to the oracle at Pytho and inquire about the answers, if they are as I told you." (603-5) Later, when the first messenger appears from Corinth to announce that Oedipus' presumed father, the king of Corinth, is dead, Oedipus is ecstatic, thinking Chance has spared him from a terrible fate: Oedipus: "Ha! Ha! O dear Jocasta, why should one look to the Pythian hearth? Why should one look to the birds screaming overhead? They prophesied that I should kill my father! But he's dead. .... But they, the oracles as they stand -- he's taken them away with him, they're dead as he himself is, and worthless. " (964-73) Jocasta's wifely, and motherly, reply? I told you so! Oedipus: "But surely I must fear my mother's bed." (976) To which Jocasta replies with her famous -- her infamous! -- Tyche speech and Carpe diem, "Seize the day," philosophy: "Why should man fear since chance is all in all (de ta tes tyches) for him, and he can clearly foreknow nothing? Best to live lightly, as one can, unthinkingly." (977-9) After the first messenger, the survivor of the fateful encounter between Oedipus & Laius on the road to Thebes, brings the bad news that it was Oedipus himself who killed him, Jocasta clings to a last straw, that Oedipus is not Laius' son, thus disproving that part of the prophecy. And if so, "So far as prophecy goes, henceforward I shall not look to the right hand or the left." (856-9) The Chorus then sings: "May destiny (moira) ever find me pious in word and deed prescribed by the laws that live on high; (865-7) .... If a man walks with haughtiness of hand or word and gives no heed to Justice and the shrines of Gods despises - may an evil doom (moira) smite him for his ill-starred pride of heart! " (884-8) When the herdsman who saved Oedipus as an infant from being eaten by wolves reveals he was not the natural son of Polybus and Merope, Jocasta sees he is doomed. But Oedipus himself is ecstatic, filled with false hope & joy: "Perhaps she is ashamed of my low birth, for she has all a woman's high-flown pride. But I account myself a child of Fortune, beneficent Fortune." (1078-81) Literally: "A child of Luck, who gives good things" (paida tes Tyches, tes eu didouses). But of course this is the same Tyche or Chance, the same Lady Luck, who gives bad things as well as good. She (the noun is feminine in Greek and Latin) is the same fickle fate or Dame Fortune who will be depicted in the Middle Ages astride an enormous wheel or spinning ball, and holding, as in Albrecht Durer's "Large Fortune" engraving of 1502, a golden trophy cup in one hand and a barbed whip in the other.  Shakespeare's Hamlet and his deceitful college "friends," Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, knew how to mistrust her as a fickle whore. When Hamlet first greets them and asks them how they are, they reply: Rosencrantz: "As the indifferent children of the earth." Guildenstern: "Happy, in that we are not over-happy; On Fortune's cap we are not the very button." Hamlet: "Nor the soles of her shoe?" Rosencratz: "Neither, my lord." Hamlet: "Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favors?" Guildenstern: "Faith, her privates we." Hamlet: "In the secret parts of Fortune? Oh, most true; she is a strumpet." (Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, lines 223-32) So too will Oedipus discover he has been deceived -- self-deceived: "Now I am godless and a child of impurity." (1360) And in the end, the Chorus agrees: "Behold this Oedipus... see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him!" (1524, 1527) -- kai tychais epiblepon. With this image of a sinking ship or swimmer overwhelmed by Tyche's undulating waves, her unpredictable ups and downs, Sophocles ends his tragedy. |
Library
~ Table of Contents ~
A Valentine for Camille Flammarion The Met returns its Euphronios vase! Camille Flammarion: Romantic Astronomer The Fountains of Enceladus The Eye of God Is Ganymede the Boy from Marathon Bay? THE ANCIENT OLYMPIEIA FESTIVAL AT ATHENS Which satyr would you choose... The Marathon Boy and the Satyr Contrapossto from Praxiteles to Rubens and Playboy The Afternoon of a Faun The Dancing Satyr - A Lost Bronze of Praxiteles? Hermes, The Liar Who Invented the Lyre Inanna Adored: The Uruk Vase The Moon-God Nanna-Sin Visits his Ziggurat at Ur Apollo Sauroktonos, or How the Romans Killed the Lizard-Killer Jacob's Ladder Lilith: Wild Demon of Sex and Death DUMUZI FEEDS INANNA'S SHEEP The Sun God in his Dragon Boat Lassalle's Post-Modern Male Torso Brancusi's Torsos: Pure Platonic Forms? Brancusi on Men and Women: Take the Tate Test? Four Gods Greet the Rising Sun God Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo Culsu & Vanth Lead the Dead into Hades Aita, the Etruscan Hades Socrates' Apology: The Background THE GREEK SPHINX Hypnos & Thanatos, Sleep & Death The SPHINX and The ROBOT PYTHAGOREAN HARMONICS: FROM PYTHAGORAS TO NEWTON Orestes Pursued by Furies in The Eumenides |
