A Wise and Irascible Hero: Oedipus from Thebes to Colonus

The essay aims at foregrounding the opposite yet complementary dimensions which typify Oedipus’ character in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. On the one hand, he is introduced as a wise man, the old blind one – both blindness and old age being traditionally associated with wisdom – who has learnt from experience and is now able to grasp life’s deepest meaning. This wisdom is based upon religious piety, the awareness of fate’s superior and unfathomable power, but also of time as well as of the oracles’ truthful validity. Such a model of wisdom is radically different from the one young Oedipus exhibited in Oedipus the King, where he sported a knowledge through which he wished to measure and dominate time in contrast with the word of oracles and prophecies. On the other hand, in Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus is often prone to uncontrollable outbursts of anger, in that he retains a tendency towards ὀργή (anger, wrath, irritation), which, in the previous drama, was an essential component of his character and whose most manifest expression dwells here in his repeated curses against his two sons. Wisdom and impulsiveness are therefore the two main aspects which characterise Oedipus’ identity in Sophocles’ last play. They intertwine continually and set the rhythm of the play by creating a tension between two identities: a more human one, dominated by impulsiveness and connected with the protagonist’s familial history and his own past crimes (i.e. parricide and incest) of which he cannot get rid, even though he pleads innocent, and one that tends towards divinity, eventually transforming him into a cult hero and the protector of the Attic land.