603. Greek Myths: The Riddle of the Sphinx (Part 2)

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1:47Then I saw the mother of Oedipus, the beautiful Epikaste, the enormity she committed. Though she knew not what she did, she married her own son, while he, after slaying his father, married her. But soon enough the gods made it known to the people. Now he, in beautiful Thebes, suffered agonies as he ruled the Cadmeans as lord, all through the gods' dire plan. While she went off to the house of Hades, that stern gatekeeper, after hanging a noose straight down from a rafter high in the roof, possessed as she was by her anguish for him she left so many woes behind so that was homer in the odyssey uh translation is by daniel mendelson who was in one of our recent rest is history bonus episodes so our club members will know all about him and tom this is the earliest account that we have greek literature of how oedipus the king of the cadmeans which means the thebans how he slew his own father and married his mother and she then hanged herself and descended to the house of hades which means the underworld now oedipus he's not one of the greek heroes that you read about children's books for obvious reasons yeah even so he is one of the most influential famous celebrated damned characters in all human culture because of course he's given his name among other things to a very famous complex.

3:19And this is partly because the story seems so horrific to us, doesn't it? Murdering your father and marrying your mother. It seems to speak to something in the human condition. So unpack it a little bit for us. Well, this notion that the story of Oedipus has a kind of universal resonance, that it embodies something about the tragic destiny of the whole of humanity, I think is quite widely believed, perhaps in part because of the Oedipus complex, which we will be coming to in due course in this episode. But I think it's also due to the starring role that Oedipus has as the hero of the most famous of all Greek tragedies, which was written some three centuries after the age of Homer and Hesiod in Athens.

4:20And the life of its author, a man called Sophocles, spanned pretty much the whole of the 5th century BC. And this is really when people in their mind's eye conjure up an image of the golden age of Greece. This is probably what they see, the Parthenon, Pericles, and so on. But it is also an age that witnesses Athens embroiled in terrible and ultimately disastrous war against its great rival, the city of Sparta. And this play is written against the backdrop of that war. And it massively elaborates on Homer's account, but it also kind of tweaks it. so when we tend to think of the story of Oedipus it's the story as told by Sophocles that we think of yeah not by Homer yeah absolutely and the story that Oedipus tells I mean let's let's let's give it to people so as with Homer so with Sophocles we are in Thebes seven gated Thebes as it's known from its seven gates.

5:26And this is a city 30 miles north of Athens, and it is the dominant power, so the kind of the supreme city in the region of central Greece that is called Boeotia. And Thebes is ruled by a king called Laos, and his wife, the queen of Thebes, is called not Epicaste as in Homer, but according to Sophocles, her name was Jocasta. And Laos and Jocasta have a son and laus consults an oracle to find out what the fortune of this young boy will be and the news that comes back isn't brilliant because the oracle reveals and i quote sophocles here that laus was doomed to perish at the hands of his own child which isn't at all the kind of prognosis that you want if you're father of a young baby and so laus understandably wants to try and foil the oracle.

6:24And so he takes the baby from its cot and he gets a skewer and he drives the skewer through the ankles of the baby. And then he hands him over to his wife, Jocasta, and says, get rid of this child. Jocasta, she's obedient to her husband to the degree that she gives the baby over to a household slave and orders the slave to cast the child away on the trackless mountain. So neither Laos nor Jocasta are ready personally to kill their child, but it's going down the food chain, down the chain of command. The slave himself can't, he's got this little baby, he can't bring himself to obey his mistress's orders.

7:12And so he takes the baby up onto the slopes of the nearby mountain, Kitharon, which is a very kind of haunted kind of sinister place in Greek myth. And there he meets with a shepherd and he hands the baby over. And the shepherd removes the skewer from the baby's ankles. But of course, if you're a baby and you have a skewer driven through your ankles, that gives a lasting injury. And so the baby is given the name by the shepherd of Oedipus, which means in Greek, swollen foot. And the shepherd, for a reason that is never explained, we just have to accept on trust that this is what happens, travels with the baby Oedipus to the city of Corinth, which is just beyond the narrow isthmus that joins the Peloponnese, the southern part of Greece, to mainland Greece.

8:01And in Corinth, there is a king called Polybus and his wife, the queen of Corinth, Merope, and they are childless and they are desperate for a son. And the shepherd presents this baby, is foundling to Polybus and Merope and they bring Oedipus up as their own child and Oedipus grows up never doubting that he is indeed the son of the king and queen of Corinth. Okay, but then there's a twist, isn't there? Because when, by the way, I saw a really weird production of Oedipus earlier this year with Rami Malek as Oedipus. Did you see that? Oh, really? Freddie Mercury. Freddie Mercury or the Bond villain in the last No Time to Die.

8:42He was much better as Freddie Mercury, I thought. He was a bit of a weird, kind of unsettling, slightly stiff Oedipus. But Indira Vama played Jocasta, and she was brilliant, I have to say. Anyway, by the way, Oedipus grows up. He's a young man, and he's out messing around in Corinth or whatever, and some drunkard comes up to him and says, you know you're not really their son, don't you? And Oedipus is shocked by this, and he goes to see them, doesn't he, and says, what's going on? And they're all very upset, and it's all very, you know it's a real sort of family drama well they deny it very indignantly yeah very indignantly so again edipus still has no reason to doubt that they are truly his parents but he is upset and so he does what any hero in such a situation would do he goes to delphi to consult the oracle and he asks apollo well you know who are my parents i just want to absolutely nail this down but apollo doesn't answer the question instead what apollo says is you are doomed to kill your father and to marry your mother.

9:43No one wants to hear that. No. And so Oedipus, again, to quote Sophocles, at this I took to the road, putting the stars between me and Corinth, determined never to see my home again. Right. So he takes the road that leads from Delphi and instead of heading southwards to Corinth, he reaches the fork in the road that leads northwards towards Thebes. Because he assumes that the prophecy is about what we know are his adoptive parents. Yes, exactly. and at this fork in the road he runs into an old man in a chariot who is escorted by a herald he's got various servants in attendance and they're coming the opposite direction from thieves and they get into a massive argument about who has the right of way and the result is the most infamous explosion of road rage in the entire history of world literature the old man lashes at Oedipus with his whip.

10:38Oedipus hits the old man with his staff and kills him. He then attacks the old man's servants. He kills them all, or so Oedipus thinks. But in fact, another twist, one of the attendants does escape. Listeners should remember this because this is key to what will happen in due course. There is one witness to what happened at this fork in the road. So Oedipus has killed this old man, doesn't know who he is. listeners can probably guess who he was, continues on his travels, and in due course, he approaches seven-gated Thebes. And the city is in a state of absolute turmoil, and it's been hit by twin disasters.

11:21And the first of these is that the city's king, Laos, has been murdered. And he was murdered while traveling to Delphi. Wow. Being attacked by robbers. What a coincidence. Or so it is reported by the only surviving witness to what had happened. The second disaster is the fact that, as tends to happen in Greek myth, a terrifying monster has appeared on the high road that leads into the city. And this is a female monster called the Sphinx. And just to say, in Sophocles' play, in his tragedy, Oedipus, this is only kind of alluded to very elliptically. The Sphinx herself is only mentioned once. And Sophocles is clearly presuming that the people in the audience will know the story of the Sphinx.

12:09And this often happens in tragedy. It's assumed by the writers that this is a kind of common stock of stories that people are familiar with. And the story of the Sphinx is basically that she is part of these terrible monsters that Hesiod had written about in the Theogony. Hesiod says that she was a sibling of Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the underworld, and the Nemean lion, which Heracles had killed. She had come from Ethiopia, sent to Thebes by the goddess Hera. She had the head and breasts of a woman, the body of a lion, the wings of a giant predatory bird. And anyone who walks by the rock on which she is crouched has to answer a riddle.

12:54and if they can't answer it then they will be devoured and so as she sits on the rock she is surrounded by the bones and the skulls of the hapless wayfarers who've been unable to answer her riddle and the riddle she asks is very famous it's so famous that soficies doesn't tell us what the riddle is but we know what it was because it was again it was obviously part of the the story that everyone knew. And it was written down about 600 years after Sophocles wrote his tragedy in around kind of AD 200 in a sort of posh almanac. And the riddle is, there walks on land a creature of two feet and four feet, which has a single voice.

13:40And it also has three feet. Alone of the animals on earth, it changes its nature. Of animals on the earth, in the sky and in the sea. when it walks propped on the most feet then is the speed of its limbs least and again in sophocles tragedy we are not told what happens next but again from hence in the play it's clearly common knowledge so dominic the answer to that riddle is is it man tom it is Would you like to explain why it's man? Well, because you have a single voice and you have two feet when you start. No, you have four feet when you start. You're a baby. Yeah, because you're walking on.

14:25You have four feet when you start because you're walking on hands and you're kind of crawling. Then you have two feet. Then you have three feet because you have a stick or something of that kind, surely. And then when you're slowest when you're. When you're a baby. Yeah, exactly. What an amazing riddle that is. It's an amazing riddle. Oedipus, because he's a hero, he susses it, gives the right answer to the Sphinx. The Sphinx is so depressed that her riddle's been answered that she hurls herself off a cliff. Right. And that's the end of her. And a reward has been kind of proclaimed that anyone who can get rid of the Sphinx will get to marry Laos' widow, Jocasta.

15:02And so Oedipus has got rid of the Sphinx. And so he duly marries Jocasta and he rules in Laos' place as kind of the king, kind of the king, but we'll come to exactly what his status is in due course. I'll tell you what's very unfortunate for Oedipus is that he clearly doesn't resemble either Laos or Jocasta because it doesn't occur to anybody, but they might be in any way related. But why would they? They might look similar. Yeah, well, kind of particularly long chin or something. Yeah, like a Habsburg inheritance or something. Yeah, maybe. Anyway, I think that the plot of this is something you don't want to look at too closely.

15:36It progresses with a terrible inexorability if you don't look too closely at the joins. So, Oedipus has become king and he rules very, very well. And the people of Thebes are very grateful to him, not just because he's got rid of the Sphinx, but also because he's a just ruler. He wins the loyalty of the foremost men of Thebes, which includes Jocasta's brother, Crayon, the city's elders. They salute him as the first of men, whether in the daily affairs of mortal life or in the dealings of mortals with the more than mortal. He and Jocasta have a very happy marriage. They have four children. So two sons, Etiocles and Polyneses, and two daughters, Antigone and Ismene.

16:20And everything seems to be going brilliantly. But then Dominic, disaster in the form of a terrible plague, which sweeps Thebes. And it's evident that this can only mean that the gods are angry with Thebes, with someone in Thebes, perhaps, that some terrible crime has been committed. This is where the play starts, isn't it? And the rest is flashbacks. It begins, so Oedipus sends his brother-in-law, Crayon, to Delphi to try and find out why the gods are angry. And Crayon returns with the report of what is wrong. And this is where the play starts. So Crayon's report of what Apollo has revealed is that Thebes is polluted by the murderer of King Laos, who had never been caught.

17:07And specifically, Apollo has declared, this unclean creature, the murderer, must be driven into exile before he destroys us all. And so Oedipus says, fine, it is my duty as king to play the detective and to track down Laos's murderer. So as well as being a tragedy, Sophocles' play is also the first great detective story. And that's a huge part of what makes it so gripping. So how is he going to investigate what's been going on? Well, there is a top intelligence source in Thieves. And this is a man, although he hasn't always been a man, called Tiresias. And Tiresias had a very, very eventful life.

17:53so as a young man he'd been strolling um in the environ beyond thebes um and he'd come across two copulating snakes and he'd hit them with his staff unfortunately um these snakes turn out to have been sacred to hera the queen of the gods and so she punishes him and i'm using the word there that the greeks would have used uh by turning him into a woman for seven years so for seven years he lives as a woman and then he gets turned back into a man so that's very contemporary isn't it but at the end of these years he now has the opportunity to solve a question that i think is playing on you know has often played on people's minds so um Hera and Zeus have been having one of their domestics one of their rows and the argument is about whether men or women enjoy sex more and And Hera says, well, obviously men enjoy it more.

18:47And Zeus says, no, no, the ladies enjoy it more. They get all the blood. He's speaking from experience. So Irecius uniquely can pronounce on this. And he says, the ladies do enjoy it more. You know? And Hera doesn't want to hear this at all, does she? She's outraged by this. And she now punishes him again. Oh, my God. By striking him blind. Yeah. Yeah. So he's having a very bad deal from Hera. But Zeus compensates him by making him, he's a prophet. He can see into the, you know, he's got second sides or whatever. Yes, exactly. He can see into the future and all kinds of things. He understands things that most mortals don't.

19:25So he seems ideal to solve the crime. And so this is why Oedipus sends for him. And Oedipus says, okay, Tiresias, you know, you're so smart. You know things that are hidden from the rest of us. who is the murderer? And Tiresias, for understandable reasons, refuses to answer. Oedipus loses his temper and says, well, the only reason you're not telling me must be because you are complicit in the murder. To which Tiresias responds in one of the most chilling lines in the whole of drama, you yourself are the killer you seek. And Oedipus doesn't understand what he's saying. And Tiresias then says, blind though I am, you are blinder still.

20:11And in that, there is a kind of ominous portending of what is to come. So Oedipus is furious. Jocasta, his wife, tries to calm him down. And she does this by saying, look, you can't rely on prophets. you know sometimes they get things wrong and as an example of this she cites the prophecy that she and laos have been given and which she says obviously hadn't come true um you know i was laos was told that he would be killed by his son but he wasn't killed by his son he was killed by bandits at a fork in the road and at the mention of the fork in the road edu does a double take so So presumably, this has never been mentioned before to Oedipus.

20:57It's the first he's heard of it. And so he then asked Jocasta to describe Laos, which Jocasta does. And her description of her dead husband throws Oedipus into a massive panic. And when he's told that actually a witness to the attack had survived and that this is how the news had come back, he orders this witness to be sent for. and Oedipus then tells Jocasta about his road rage incident at the T-junction the old man the chariot all of that and Jocasta turns completely white and looks at him in absolute horror I'm just to say if you ever get a chance to see Oedipus to the listeners this scene is absolutely I mean it is absolutely hypnotic this sort of sense of dread as the two of them start to realize the reality of their relationship.

21:50I mean, if it's a good production, it is a brilliant, brilliant scene. It's like a kind of machine of torture pressing in closer and closer, getting the victim tighter and tighter in its coils. It's terrifying. So both of them are kind of on the cusp of arriving at an understanding of what has happened. And then there is another twist. a messenger arrives from Corinth with news that Polybus, the man, the king, who Oedipus believes is his father, has died. And to everyone's surprise, Oedipus isn't upset about this at all. He's delighted. And when people say, well, what's going on? Why are you delighted that your father's died?

22:31He explains about the prophecy he'd had from Delphi and says, well, now at least I don't have to worry about killing my father. There is though still the possibility that he might, as the prophecy is true, end up sleeping with Merope, the queen of Corinth, who he thinks is his mother. But the messenger then says, oh, you don't need to worry about that. It's fine. Merope, the queen of Corinth, she's not your mother. And each of us again goes completely pale and says, well, you know, what do you mean? How do you know this? And the messenger reveals that he is the very same shepherd who'd been given the infant Oedipus on the slopes of Mount Citharon by Jocasta's slave and had then given the baby to Polybus and Merope to be fostered by them.

23:17What are the chances? Yeah, massive chance. Yeah. And now that the twists and the coincidences are coming fast and furious because when the man that Oedipus had sent for, the guy who had, you know, the sole survivor of the road rage incident at the fork in the road. When he turns up, he turns out to be Jocasta's slave, the man who'd been given the baby boy with the skewer through his ankles to take up onto Mount Kitharon. And again, people may think, well, this is a bit too much of a coincidence. Actually, this is less of a coincidence. It's pointed out by Edith Hall in a brilliant essay that as a slave, the man would have been constantly in attendance on his royal owners.

23:59So it's perfectly plausible, if I could use that word in connection with this story, that if he's a trusted slave, he would have been given the task of disposing of the baby and he would have been on attendance on Laos as he's traveling to Delphi. So that bit, perhaps, more credible. Oedipus is saying to the slave, tell me what happened. And like Tiresias, the slave doesn't want to talk. He can't bring himself to reveal it. Oedipus then threatens him with torture. And at this point, the truth comes out. And the slave reveals that he'd been given this baby by Jocasta. So this is the point when there's no escaping the reality.

24:40Anagnorisis, the Greeks called it. It's kind of the moment of recognition. The old man Oedipus' stain at the fork in the road was Laos, Oedipus' own father. jocasta his queen the mother of his four children is his own mother and as in the count that you opened with but from homer in the odyssey so in sophocles jocasta hangs herself and oedipus and this is a detail that's not in homer goes to see the hanging body of his wife stroke mother and she's wearing two golden brooches that are kind of pinning up her dress and he removes these brooches and he stabs the points into his eyes. And so that's where the, you know, Tiresias had warned him, you are blinder than I am.

25:26Oedipus is now literally blind. And Crayon, his brother-in-law stroke uncle, tells Oedipus, your reign is over. I am now going to rule in Thebes. And the play ends with, so every tragedy has a chorus and the chorus at the end of Oedipus's tragedy laments the horror of what has happened none can truly be called happy they say until that day when he bears his happiness down to the grave in peace and i noticed in your notes you you talk about you know not just that it's an emotionally kind of devastating story but you talk about how how taut and compressed it is and that's actually the thing that really struck me about it seeing the recent production i think it was the the old vic this sort of sense of claustrophobia it's one of these classic examples of a play that is set in over a very short space of time because it's just a series of conversations it's in the same place a very small group of characters and you just have the sense from the very outset of the walls beginning to close in you know there's there's no escape from it it's there's an intensity to it and a sort of a terrifying kind of hypnotic quality to what unfolds yeah and it was these qualities that led aristotle the great philosopher who wrote a lost book about comedy, which Umberto Eco fans will recognize that.

26:50It's in the name of the rose. But also a famous work on tragedy. And he praised Oedipus as being the greatest of all tragedies and providing the model of what a tragedy should be. And in the 16th century, Renaissance theorists kind of summed up what Aristotle admired about Oedipus as the three unities. So unity of place, it's in one location. unity of time, so you're not jumping around all over the place. The plot of Oedipus is compressed within, you know, what you see is what you get. And unity of action, i.e. there shouldn't be loads of kind of mad subplots taking you off. Yeah. So it's the model of a tragedy, but it is, you know, as we said, it's the first great detective story and the twist, you know, it's worthy of Agatha Christie, the detective investigating a crime who discovers that he himself is the criminal.

27:43And the mad thing is is that these tragedies were staged as part of a competition. Sophocles only won second prize. Imagine how good that top play must have been. It might have been brilliant. It didn't survive. And I would say that the classicists today agree with Aristotle that it's number one. So again, to quote Edith Hall, who is an excellent critic, Dominic. She once complimented you on something. Possibly. Oh, come on. Yeah. She described Sophocles as this definitive tragedy. Well, people can discount that if she's been dissing out praise to lesser authors. Anyway, it is a great tragedy.

28:20She may have mentioned that my translation for Rodotus was excellent. Oh, come on. I can't believe you said that explicitly. You hinted at it, and then that wasn't enough for you. Why don't you just read it out? Why don't you read out the review? Well, it's in the spirit of Oedipus. It's the bombshell revelation. People often let themselves down in this podcast, but nobody's let themselves down as badly as you have there. Right, on that bombshell, we will explore what it all means. Because Sophocles, of course, is not the only writer to have talked about Oedipus. The most famous writer, probably even more famous than Sophocles, Tom, because I guess a lot of people today are not experts in Greek tragedy, don't know about Sophocles.

28:57The most famous writer was a psychoanalyst from Vienna. And after the break, we'll be exploring what that gentleman had to say. Come back after the break.

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29:49as with my patience so with myself i have identified love of the mother and jealousy of the father, and I believe it now to be a general phenomenon of early childhood. So that was Sigmund Freud writing on the 15th of October, 1897. And at that point, he had been working for two years on his most groundbreaking book, which was called The Interpretation of Dreams. And Freud was pondering the mysteries of the subconscious. He believed that people had in the attic, in the cupboard, all kinds of unacknowledged fears and anxieties and desires, including sexual desires. And Freud had come to believe that in the story of Oedipus, he had found a key to unlocking some of the darkest secrets of the human mind.

30:40Two years later, when he published The Interpretation of Dreams, Oedipus's story featured very prominently in it, didn't it, Tom? It did. So to quote him, Oedipus' destiny moves us only because it might have been ours, because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous fish against our father. our dreams convince us that this is so now personally i feel that the word perhaps in that has done quite a lot of heavy lifting yeah but but this was not the opinion of freud's admirers so on on his 50th birthday which was the 6th of may 1906 his fans presented him with um this kind of medallion and on one side there was uh an image of freud in profile and on the other there was an image of Oedipus with the Sphinx.

31:44That's such a strange present to receive, isn't it? No, not if you're Freud. Because beneath Oedipus, they had put a quotation from Sophocles' play, he who knew the famed riddle and was a man most mighty. So aligning Oedipus with Freud. And in 1910, Freud coined the most famous phrase in the whole of psychoanalysis. I mean, one of the most famous phrases to have emerged from the 20th century, the Oedipus complex. And it remains part of pop culture to this day, all this, tell me about your mother kind of stuff. So that takes us to the question about this story of Oedipus. Is it specific? Is it distinctively Greek?