Oedipus the King by Sophocles

18:03Jeff O'Neal:I think that most of the folks I I know, who tend to be on the nerdy side. Yeah. Let's set the context.

18:09Rebecca Schinsky:That's what I said. We are who we are.

18:10Jeff O'Neal:Would recognize Oedipus or Oedipus Complex from the Freud and would probably be like, doesn't this have something to do with wanting to sleep with your mom? And that's probably about as far as we would get. Some of them, there's a couple history majors, would have read it in college. I mean, I read it in college, and this was a very different experience than what I remembered from 20 years ago. So I also wouldn't count on folks remembering much more than, doesn't he sleep with his mom and isn't it bad somehow?

18:39Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, the answer to that is yes, for sure. It's bad. And yes, he does. But the wanting to is very much a, we can get into this. That is not what happens here. That's not what happens here.

18:51Jeff O'Neal:I mean, as we said, Freud was doing a lot of coke. Yeah.

18:54Rebecca Schinsky:At one point, Jocasta, when Oedipus is like, oh my God. She's like, you know, it's a dream. Everyone has a dream with their mom. And I was like, do they? But even having said that, at least there is this idea that it's a dream, like it's something that's out there, but that everyone wants to. That Oedipal complex is a real psychological phenomenon is not a thing to my understanding. I did a very little bit of Googling. It's like, I don't think that's a thing.

19:17Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, Freud claimed it was unconscious, but still.

19:20Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. So anyway, tell us what it's really, what's the real story? At least this story of Oedipus, which is important. Yes.

19:26Jeff O'Neal:So this is set in ancient Greece. It was first performed in 425 BC. So many, many, many years ago.

19:34Rebecca Schinsky:I'm so bad with BC. Because like, what's older than, is 490 older than 510? It drives me nuts.

19:41Jeff O'Neal:No, 510 is older.

19:42Rebecca Schinsky:I know. It makes me nuts. I'm reading Sophocles' biography. This guy is aging backward like Mork. It's driving me, I can't do it.

19:49Jeff O'Neal:The first time Mork and Sophocles have appeared in the same sentence.

19:53Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, half-baked idea. Can we start at zero and just, let's just pick zero. Like when the meteors hit, this BCE stuff is not, this is for the chickens. I don't like it. Go ahead.

20:02Jeff O'Neal:Okay. So a plague is ravaging Thebes, which is where the play is set. And an oracle has revealed that the plague is punishment that's being wrought on the city because someone murdered the former king, Laos. The current king, Oedipus, sets out to find out who murdered Laos so that he can end the plague and save the city. There's bad news for Oedipus though, because the call is coming from inside the house. has unknowingly fulfilled a prophecy that he would kill his mother, sorry, kill his father and marry his mother. And the play follows Oedipus as he uncovers the truth. And if it sounds to you like I have just spoiled the whole thing, like chill out, because the play was written for an audience that was already familiar with the story of Oedipus, and they knew where it was driving.

20:44Jeff O'Neal:The action of the play doesn't show how he kills his father and marries his mother. It knows that he has already done those things. And we, the audience, are supposed to know that he has already done those things. The tension of the play is about what happens when he finds out and what it means to him as he goes on the search for truth that begins as this search for Laeus' murderer and ends as his discovery that it's him.

21:12Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, and they would have been familiar with the idea of Oedipus as someone who had this prophecy and then fulfilled it unknowingly. But there are key differences that we're not going to go into all of them here, but I want to say that is an adaptation of a story. And this is something the ancient Greeks did where they were telling different versions of it. Even Aeschylus, who is the inventor of tragedy and a older but contemporary peer of Sophocles had his own version. And I think that's also something that's hard to remember in these cases is these figures. I wish I could feel what it felt like for a audience, member in this play, what their reaction to this kind of story would be.

21:59Rebecca Schinsky:Because here's another thing that's super hard to remember, and I have this for takeaways later. It's like, this is a political, cultural, and artistic and religious experience all wrapped up into one. So in part and parcel, these are real figures, but also subject to artistic creation by these playwrights. There's no artistic moment like it in our experience. It's very hard to find any kind of analogy, but part of it is knowing the story, knowing what's going to happen, the inevitability of it, but also seeing how this particular playwright and this particular interpretation, adaptation is going to tweak it a little and give us a little difference here.

22:37Rebecca Schinsky:And the signal difference in my reading about how this version of Oedipus is different from others is that there's much more of Oedipus's own will that brings about his, like his search for truth, his self-revelation is the thing. Like, I need to know the truth. I need to find what's going out. Jocasta, his wife slash mother says, just turn away from this. Don't look at it. And we'll get to my quotes a little bit later. One of the key ones is like, I don't care what's going to happen. I have to know the truth. And it's truth-seeking. Rather than Odysseus' pride, we're going to talk about hubris and fatal flaws.

23:15Rebecca Schinsky:That is the thing that leads him towards his own destruction. But the plot itself has a switch watch like perfection and the prophecy that he gets as a kid and he's told so that he leaves his home was the same one his biological parents got that got them to get rid of him. And so everyone is trying to get around this prophecy and in doing so they bring it about. And so, you know, when I've taught this before, the students are tempted to be like, well, if they just hadn't have done that, then this problem is like, well, that's it. But you see, they did. And they're like, wait a minute. Like, and you get into that cycle.

23:57Rebecca Schinsky:So I would just encourage people to leave all of that. Just push all of your, like what people should have done. Just push that to the side, Rebecca. Don't you think? Like, I don't think that's fun or helpful.

24:06Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, it's not fun or helpful. And then we don't get to do any of the other things that we get to do with this work of art. But if Oedipus never leaves home and if his family never, if his original parents never try to get rid of him. Also, that doesn't resonate with human nature. Like what kind of new parent gets a prophecy that like this terrible thing is going to happen with your child? And what kind of person grows up hearing that they're going to do a terrible thing and doesn't attempt to do something to avoid it or control it? Like, this seems a very fundamental part of human nature to me that if we are told, it's likely that this thing is going to happen to you, or in Oedipus's case, it is foreseen, like the gods have declared, this is your fate.

24:49We're not great, as a species at being like, okay, at just accepting it, of course, there's going to be some kind of resistance.

24:58Jeff O'Neal:This is a really extreme example of both what the prophecy is and what the response would be. But it makes sense to me that everybody we meet here was trying to avoid it in some way. They did really extreme things to try to avoid it. But then they were trying to avoid a very extreme thing. Right.

25:15Rebecca Schinsky:I think if there's anything to, if you can get outside of it just for a second, I think one interesting perspective to think about in this regard is not what they should have done with their prophecy. But the, again, I'm going to use post-Christian language here. If there is an original sin here, it's the desire to ask the oracles about the future, right? The desire to go beyond their contemporaneous, limited human and saying to have a kind of access, to dip their cup briefly into a well that they don't really get to have access to in a full way. It's funny. I was showing my kids back to the future the first time the other day.

25:55Rebecca Schinsky:And I think the closest thing to the danger of prophecy in contemporary culture is, you know, sort of this mythology we built around time travel is like, you don't want to know too much about the future because you can get yourself erased. Your photograph is going to get erased in the past. It's a similar kind of idea that knowing, having a little access to knowledge that is normally outside the realm of human understanding is more unwinding than buttressing. Like it's going to go bad more often than it's going to go well. But in each case, we see people trying to intervene on their own behalf.

26:30Rebecca Schinsky:And that's something that struck me this time, that it's much more collective, right? It's not just Oedipus. It's also Jocasta and Laeus. It's also the king and queen of Corinth. It's also the shepherd who gives the kid away. And like several people take pity on this child that's been left to die on the hillside, which is a superhuman emotion. That is not seen in this book, in this play. as lamentable, it's natural, right? So this conflict between human emotion and experience and knowledge with supra-human knowledge. And when those two things come together, and when you mistake one for the other, that's when everything goes sideways in a real fundamental way.

27:08Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, it resonates for me with that question people ask today sometimes of like, if you could know when you're going to die, would you want to know? And if you would want to know what is it that you think you could do with that information, would it give you a greater sense of control? Maybe. But would you actually have more control? No. You're still going to die. You still don't have control. and that fundamental like that's i think the deep fear the deep truth in this work is like we don't have control that's i think one of the things freud is drawn to here we're afraid of death we're afraid of all of the things we can't control and we will go to pretty extreme lengths in service of helping ourselves feel like we have some kind of control and this is and it's great hubris and very risky to think that we can control almost anything in the universe.

28:04Jeff O'Neal:And, you know, as you were saying, like, the audiences would have been familiar with a bunch of different versions of this one. And it is this like trying to exercise free will and that Oedipus goes on the search for truth and that differentiates this performance. Like, that's the thing that Fagel says makes this version of Oedipus universally recognized as the dramatic masterpiece of the Greek theater. Like, that's a huge deal. And when it debuts in 425 BC, that's in this moment of intellectual revolution, like knowing what's happening in the culture, then was really powerful to me as I was reading up for this, that this is right as the idea of history, like history as a thing is developing, like people are just becoming conscious of history.

28:52Rebecca Schinsky:Like Herodotus had just invented the word history basically yeah in that century like someone had to invent the idea of

28:59Jeff O'Neal:theater someone had to invent history political theory is new democracy is new philosophy is just developing like aristotle has read and seen this play and these ideas and questions of the play like also might seem kind of basic or fundamental but it's because these are the very first questions humans were asking about what the hell we're all doing here when they figured out that we could do these things, that we could track history, that we could ask philosophical questions about what it all means, that we could use art to explore things and to have a collective catharsis. And the plays were also highly political.

29:42Jeff O'Neal:They were, like, in many instances, plays in this era were used to criticize government officials and public figures in ways that were super sharp, that we would even like Jimmy Kimmel would shy away from, you know, from like how sharp the critique was. But it's like this moment of intellectual revolution is important, but that it's kind of the first moment of intellectual revolution is also an important piece of grounding information.

30:09Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, at least in the West. And it's so hard to, I've thought my dad and I have played this game of like, if you could be in like five concerts of all time, which concerts do you go to? And I've since expanded that to cultural moments, right? And I think I would use one of my five picks on going to see the, well, we haven't talked about this, how the scene of these plays performed once.

30:35Jeff O'Neal:Yes.

30:36Rebecca Schinsky:Yes. Sophocle, these plays were part of this Dionysian festival that happened in late March or early April. There was a very formal competition. and three playwrights each submitted a suite of plays, a comedy, a tragedy, and a sadder play. The tragedies were first in the morning, which is you really got to get your coffee and wake up. Darling, we're going to a 9 a.m. showing of Oedipus. I hope you're ready.

30:59Jeff O'Neal:Well, this is how you get your catharsis. You get all the big feelings out, and then you have a comedy.

31:04Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, and this may be obvious, except it's so obvious that it's worth saying is that they didn't have electric light. So if you're going to get nine plays in a day, you got to start at daybreak because the thing is going down. You may have torches and something, but very difficult for 15 ,000 people to see. Three playwrights were invited, and then it was judged. There was a panel of judges who were elected. There was first, second, and third. And this was the big deal in the cultural life of Athens, which was the center of Greek development at this particular time. We have seven extant plays from Sophocles, though there's historical record of at least 123 of them having been produced.

31:46Rebecca Schinsky:Even how we have the text that we do have as a story and worth its own multi-part miniseries on PBS. But suffice it to say, the transitory nature of this were part of what made this powerful because these plays came out of earlier rights of singing and dancing, like very basic singing and dancing stuff. The chorus, the Greek word means dancer, right so that's choreography is where we get the root for that um there's gonna be a lot of roots like thespis who invented acting essentially like let's have one person stand outside the course and do some talking at us and like that's an actor oh so what should we call actors thespians he

32:24Jeff O'Neal:invented that craft a guy invented acting like yes invented the idea of acting this was one of my intrusive thoughts while going back to this was like right we haven't always had these things someone had to invent. Like, what if we added to this singing and dancing a person delivering performed lines? And then we could call it a thing. And then now that we have this form, what do we do with it? How new and exciting this must have felt. What can it do? Yeah, very exciting.

32:50Rebecca Schinsky:And Aeschylus added a second actor. He's like, well, we have two people that we can talk to in a song. He's like, wait a minute. I'm going to be like Gillette adding blades to the razor. What about three? And suddenly you get into the three body problem where that three actors, usually only two of which were on stage at the same time but sometimes they were all because as you imagine there's more than three characters so you've got to go behind this skein s-k-e-n-e which we call scene they'd go behind it to change their outfits they would wear masks that were heightened but not grotesques because you've got to play to the 11 ,000th person up there and your facial facial expression acting wasn't a thing because most people couldn't see it So he had these masks.

33:31Rebecca Schinsky:So when Oedipus, spoiler alert, no, we're not doing that. What am I doing? When Oedipus hears and learns the horrible truth about his existence and blinds himself, that happens behind the skein and all the violence of these plays happens offstage. Some of that is thought to have been, we don't know exactly why apparently, some of it's thought to have been like that sacrilege to show violence in this cultural, historical, religious setting. And some of it I think is frankly practical because you don't have that many people. You got to switch your masks, right? So you got to go from sighted Odysseus to bleeding eyes, not Odysseus, pardon me, Oedipus.

34:09Rebecca Schinsky:And then you could move people around and they could do costume changes. Men were playing all the roles here. The other thing that I looked up is the great amphitheater of Athens was rebuilt after a fire and it was expanded with stone seating. 15 ,000 people. There were only 50 ,000 people living in Athens at the time. So a third of the, they would release people from prison on bail so they could go see the play. Like it's remarkable. It's really remarkable. There's really nothing like it. I'll give away one of my takeaways. I was like, this would be like if the Superbowl and the 4th of July and Christmas were all the same thing.

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36:11Rebecca Schinsky:That's really important. Sophocles himself, this is not a Homer. It's weird that we have more, well, we. Some people have more faith that Sophocles existed than Shakespeare, which kind of blows my mind given the historical record. But he was seemingly a normal participant in Athenian life. This is another thing that's kind of hard to wrap your head around too. Because the worlds were so small, and certainly democracy was not available to anyone in a really serious way. Sophocles was also the greatest playwright, but also served in the military as a 15-year-old, and then also was in political life to help sort some things out.

36:50Rebecca Schinsky:But just a really enormous figure in the cultural life of the day. There's not a lot else to know about. I think it's also helpful to remember when you're reading really any text, but certainly texts from the ancient world, that our contemporary formulations of cultural categories break down in a serious way. Race breaks down. Gender breaks down. Sexuality breaks down. Sophocles had at least some interest in. having romantic relationships with men. Just was the case. You know, that's one of the, rightly or wrongly, that's sort of one of the Cliff Notes thing people remember from ancient Greece is that homosexual relationships, especially among men, were not frowned upon, really, in any way that I understand.

37:35Rebecca Schinsky:Maybe it wasn't the same as having a family and everything, but you weren't persecuted for it.

37:40Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, there wasn't the stigma that has been attached in contemporary Western cultures.

37:44Rebecca Schinsky:And you know, ancient Greece, we used to describe a melange of city-states, Athens being predominant, that sort of dotted the Aegean Sea, and that includes cities off Asia Minor. Ilium or Troy was on the coast of Turkey, and so that really evades our east-west, black-white, colored, non-colored constructions that we have today that are real, but also temporary and culturally determined and other things like that. And I think that's one of the great pleasures of reading things that are very different in a very different time, is it helps give some perspective on the contingency. It doesn't say they're not impactful, but the contingency and malleability of these categories that feel to us so fixed at certain times.

38:28Jeff O'Neal:Yes. And while you're talking about, you know, having perspective on the context of this work, I really can't say enough how important it is to go into this knowing that the audience would have been familiar with the story that the play is drawing on. So you as a reader or you as a viewer, if you've managed to find a performance of Oedipus the King to go see, it's expected of you that you know that this was the prophecy. He has already done it. What he's about to find out about himself is not the surprise. How he finds it out is what the play is all about. And read the intro material. The Fagal's one is very good.

39:07Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, the Fagal's one is great. But with the Hamlet translations that we were using in that episode, like read the intro material to this stuff that is not contemporary to our time, because we don't have we don't share cultural context with the people who created this work, or the people that were the intended audience for it. And it is not just helpful, but I think really necessary. Like if you're going to invest your time in doing this kind of reading, give the extra hour to reading all of the introductory material. It's it is super helpful to be reminded of, here's what was happening. Here's who Sophocles was.

39:40Jeff O'Neal:Here's how people would have encountered this story. And it really does enrich the reading of the play as well, because that's the stuff where somebody delivers a line and you're like, oh, that's foreshadowing. And the audience would have known it was foreshadowing. And there's real pleasure in being like, oh, I know where this is going. And because we all know where this is going. And so everybody's leaning forward on their seats at the same time. And when you have that experience, and can imagine these ancient audiences having the same experience, I think that's very helpful for encountering this as closely as we can get to what the intended experience was, but it's still very far away.

40:21Rebecca Schinsky:Still very far away. And, you know, I think this is a case where you can get something from just reading the text, you know, downloading a PDF of Project Gutenberg and just reading the play as it is. Again, that's always going to be a subject of translation unless you're reading some ancient Greek. But the more context you give, the more depth there is to your experience, right? It becomes a historical inquiry and investigation as much as it is a cultural and artistic one, which has its, I certainly find, helpful. I think they reinforce each other, right? Because in reading this Fagal's introduction, one thing that I was either, I either learned for the first time or was reminded of, is that the oracle at Delphi, the source of these prophecies, was still in business in 425 BC.

41:04Rebecca Schinsky:You could go there.

41:05Jeff O'Neal:The oracle is open.

41:06Rebecca Schinsky:Yes, it's open. And the priest there would, you know, scrawl out some stuff for you. If you asked it a question, super influential, it might be said, probably something that would be taken over by the state pretty quickly in today's political environment. You can't have, it's kind of like the press or the fourth estate subject, the bridge between the divine and the human. But in the moment of the play, the idea of getting prophets through the oracle and taking them seriously was not a, it was not a conceit, right? It was not sort of a suspension of disbelief proposition that you needed to enter into.

41:38Rebecca Schinsky:Like it was there. And in this century, as the Greeks are working on political democracy and philosophy and history, the tension between human understanding and non-human reality is very much up for grabs. What can we create? How can we, are we subject to the Olympians? Are we subject to anything that isn't us? And if so, what is it? And if not, then what do you do? Those questions were very much fomenting at the time. And the answers that have come out and still get asked are very much like, you know, have a little bit more been parlayed into the realm of sort of nature versus nurture. We're not wondering if it's Aphrodite and Dionysus.

42:19Rebecca Schinsky:We're wondering if it's neurons and DNA. But the idea is similar. of like, am I me and just a collection of whatever and subject to the whims or just a bunch of neurons firing? Or is there a core consciousness and free will that is independent, autonomous, flawed, and consequential and still resonates in many different ways?

42:39Jeff O'Neal:It does, it does. Yeah, these ancient playwrights were often wrestling with humans' relationship to the gods and to fate. Like they are, as you said, they're consulting oracles and they're doing that in the plays because people are doing that like in real life. In real life. Like, fates are fulfilled. Like, prophecies are given. And it's notable that in Oedipus the King, there are no supernatural events. Someone goes and talks to the oracle, but there is no intervention by the gods. There is no, like, deus ex machina kind of moment. This is all human stuff. And that was a pretty significant shift that's also happening at this time of cultural revolution in ancient Greece, where it's not just like public life is not just centered around religious life anymore.

43:26Jeff O'Neal:This like rise of philosophical thought and history and individual inquiry is leading people to question whether the gods are a thing. And if they are a thing, how influential are they? How influential should we allow them to be in our lives? And here this play is one man entirely dealing with what if it's all on me and I can't help but fuck it up no matter how hard I try.

43:52Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. And then the primacy of the city-state too, right? There's a lot of talk in the play Oedipus the King about the king's responsibility to the city, the primacy of the city as the political unit, an unusual political arrangement between Jocasta Creon and Oedipus that I didn't do. I should have done some follow-up reading around where there's sort of this tripartite thing, but not really, because Creon is accused by Oedipus of like fomenting discord by soliciting this prophecy that, you know, there's this plague because of who killed Laos. And Creon's like, why would I do that? I've got a good baby.

44:27Rebecca Schinsky:I've got all the rewards of being king, but I'm also not the one that wears the crown.

44:32Jeff O'Neal:Some of my favorite quotes there.

44:34Rebecca Schinsky:So that's also very much at play. Let's see, what else is worth pointing out about the actual scene of it?

44:42Jeff O'Neal:This is either the first or the middle of these three Theban plays, which is important to talk about. They were historically presented in the order in which the events happened, which is Oedipus the King, then Oedipus at Colonus, then Antigone. But Fagels and a lot of contemporary translators actually encourage breaking them into the order in which they were written, which is Antigone, then Oedipus the King, and then Oedipus at Colonus, because that prevents readers from viewing them as a trilogy. They're not intended to be a trilogy. The best analogy I have for this is that you can watch all the Marvel movies in the order that they came out in theatrical release, or you can watch them in the order of like how the storylines unfold.

45:27Jeff O'Neal:And he's saying, read these or engage with them in the order that they were written, because that allows you to see how the questions Sophocles was asking and the ways that he was approaching the stories evolved over time.

45:39Rebecca Schinsky:yeah and i think the three of them are best thought of like three character stories orbiting around a central myth which is a cool way antigone is amazing too by the way if anyone's

45:51Jeff O'Neal:i think that was the first one that i read when did you first read this i you know i i wrote down

45:58Rebecca Schinsky:in our notes that i think it was for western civ and i read it right before taking a test on it i actually think i read it in high school as part of a western literature course i don't i don't remember. It's lost to the sands of time. I've taught it a couple times. But yeah, I don't, I think, I think either Western, but again, I was either 17 or 19. So it's pretty close either way.

46:18Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, I was, mine was in a, this honors seminar, my freshman year of college that you got credit for literature, philosophy, history, and theology. And it was six hours a week, like three hours of lecture, three hours of discussion per week. This was, I think the first semester was like antiquity to the middle ages. And then the second semester was the middle just up into more contemporary work. It was unbeknownst to me in 2001, like the signal experience of my college education, formative in ways that continue to have impact on me. Shout out to the Jesuits for putting together a class like that.

46:56Jeff O'Neal:But also this work makes so much sense in that context because you can encounter it as literature, philosophy, history, and theology all rolled into one. And I hadn't touched it since then.

47:06Rebecca Schinsky:Interesting. So speaking of, what was it like to encounter? Describe your own reading experience of eyes going over the words.

47:12Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, this was a lot more fluid and compelling than I expected it to be or than I remembered. I think this felt challenging and hard and weird when I read it in college because I had never read anything like this before. I was new to reading stuff by the ancient Greeks. I have no idea which translation we read. And that probably matters quite a bit, how difficult someone wants to make the language. I found Robert Fagel's translation to be very readable, very straightforward, especially coming off of our recent read of Hamlet. Like this is shorter, first of all, like you can do this in basically one sitting.

47:47Jeff O'Neal:But I found this to be easier. Like there were no I didn't have to go, you know, trying to figure out what the language meant. You're not having to do your own acts of translation the way that you often need to do with Shakespeare. Like, what is that a reference to? And what is the joke here? Like the language is not working on multiple levels. This is very straightforward. And I really enjoyed it. It was exciting. I was telling my husband, Sophocles is really hitting for me this week. And that's a thing I didn't expect to be saying. What about you? We hadn't talked about this.

48:22Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I said its straightforwardness is almost shocking. And some of it's a translation, but some of it's a plot and character are bold, coloring, painting with really bold strokes. There's not a lot of shading here. I think both in spirit form and effect, it is playing to an amphitheater of 15 ,000 citizens. And you want to use brighter colors with more delineated elements because that shows up at a distance. You aren't left wondering about, wait, what actually happened? There's no ambiguity about motivation. All the things that come with modernity that sort of post Shakespeare, frankly, when we talked about Hamlet, we got into some of the stuff that Hamlet was creating.

49:05Rebecca Schinsky:You get none of that here. So you're left with something more directly and simply powerful and odd and disconcerting. And I say question mark satisfying. And I guess that we have the word cathartic because that's the right word for it. It is cathartic in a way. And it describes a tension as satisfying a displeasure all wrapped up into one that's unlike other kinds of artistic or really emotional experience you're likely to have.

49:31Jeff O'Neal:Yeah. And I'm just realizing this as you're talking about it, but this is one of my favorite ways to encounter a story where it opens with either here's the thing, like, here's whodunit. I love a, this is how it happened. Or we're not trying to find out like, oh my God, he married his mother. But where the whole point is how. how did this happen and how do we figure it out like we will have an upcoming episode as a preview for folks on the secret history by donna tart which is one of my favorite contemporary examples of this on page one you find out who's dead and who did it and then you spend 500 and some odd pages getting to like doing the rewind of but how i i find that to be so much more satisfying and And like, there's just more depth to that experience than a straightforward, like, okay, something bad is going to happen to Oedipus.

50:25Jeff O'Neal:What's the bad thing going to be? And how does it unwind? I liked that the audience knows and we're supposed to know when we begin what the thing is that happened and that you get to dwell more in the process of uncovering and his trying to make sense of it. I really appreciated that. Like, I was kind of like, am I going to read the other two just for fun now?

50:45Rebecca Schinsky:You might. Right. I mean, Oedipus is a colonist that's after he's blinded himself and has been exiled and sort of wandering around. Yeah, I think the pleasures of different art is, of course, different and none is better than the other. But like the mystery where you're trying to figure out what happened has sort of the pleasure of a jigsaw puzzle. This is going to sound very strange and I apologize, but it's real and authentic. And I'll say it here. The thing I was thinking about when I got to the end of this and what I was feeling reminded me of a recent trip. my family took to the zoo and we were watching deer carcass to get fed to the condors there and rowan my daughter was like looking at it and she was like this is terrible and interesting and i can't look away and it's like feels very i was like yeah i get that very elemental it's very very elemental and it's it's hard to describe kind of a feeling and i find it frankly when we're looking at read-alikes down the way i didn't have a lot that weren't ancient tragedies.

51:39Rebecca Schinsky:I guess Romeo and Juliet, frankly, has a similar kind of feeling.

51:43Jeff O'Neal:There are moments in this, like just to what does it feel like to read it, where Oedipus is talking to someone and he's trying to get information from them about what happened in his past or what they know about how all of this came to be. And the person starts to tell the story and then pauses and is like, oh my God, I can't believe I'm going to tell you this. I said I was never going to do it.

52:03Rebecca Schinsky:I fear I'm on the brink of frightful speech. That's one of the quotes I say. Yeah. That's from my old translation. I fear like I'm about to say something terrible.

52:09Jeff O'Neal:That stuff is right. That stuff is so elemental. They're like, oh, my God, I never thought I would have this conversation. I can't believe I'm going to tell you this. But are you sure that you want to know? Because once I say it, I can't unsay it. Like once you know this, you can't unknow it. And they're, you know, that's not the exact language they're using, but that's what they're saying to each other. And that stuff was so recognizable. That's what made one of the things that made this an exciting thing that still felt fresh. And to go back to that catharsis feeling for me was like, yeah, this is what it is like when you have found out that something bad has happened and you just have this unshakable need to know how it happened or what the details were or something.

52:50Jeff O'Neal:And I think we've all had the experience of being on both sides of those equations of either you're the asker and you've got to brace yourself or you're the one who's going, I cannot believe I'm actually going to like say this thing. and then we're going to be in the moment where I've said the thing and you're going to know it. Yeah. Yeah.

53:07Rebecca Schinsky:And that, that human personal understanding and human understanding is a one way street. You can't go back.

53:14Jeff O'Neal:Right.

53:14Rebecca Schinsky:Um, I think that's true both on the individual level for Oedipus, but it's very much at stake in the development of Greek philosophy and intellectual life. It's like, once we figured out the Pythagorean theorem, there's no going back from there. Like we now have to live with this particular knowledge. And so Jocasta keeps saying, don't turn away, turn away. Even as that is sort of practically right, it would work if you could do it. We also know it's impossible at the same time. One thing that's hard to remember for me as well, we were joking about spoilers before. This is an artistic world in which spoilers were impossible because all of these stories were known already.

53:51Rebecca Schinsky:Every single one of these plays functioned under an element of dramatic irony, which is when the audience knows more about what's happened and is going to happen than the characters do. Because they already know, they have heard in whatever the equivalent of kindergarten was for Athenians, they're just always already in circulation. So the how and why and the permutations and combinations that get us to the place where no we're going is what's interesting at stake, rather than the creation of a novel, I mean, literally novel story, right? Which is, I can understand that in my head, but I sort of can't feel that in my heart.

54:27Rebecca Schinsky:I don't know what that would be like to encounter stories like that. This episode is brought to you by State Farm.

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54:57Rebecca Schinsky:Let's see. What's it all about? The big ideas. We talked about a lot of these. It's interesting that we haven't talked about hubris or tragic flaws really yet because I think in a high school reading, that's the thing that's really brought about. But it's certainly at stake here, which is the classic sort of—I don't want to be simplistic because it's certainly true. but the drive by reading is that Oedipus's tragic flaw is his hubris, which is an overconfidence, right? Like he thinks he can contend with divine knowledge and master it. And that way lies disaster. Disaster comes from the Greek for against the stars.

55:29Rebecca Schinsky:So there you go. We're all going to go to Greeks all the way around. And then knowing thyself, it's so, one of the delicious, I don't know if it's a contradiction, but sort of Ouroboros is, the snake eating its tail of the Oracle of Delphi is the know thyself as the inscription at the Oracle, but also knowing thyself leads to the disaster. And like, you can't get away from it, right? There is no getting outside of this snow globe. It's built in and sort of the trap doors are all around and self-referential. It's like kind of dizzying to think about it in that way. Yeah.

56:07Jeff O'Neal:Dizzying is a really good word for it, I think. I'm just like, there are a lot of levels to this. And there's certainly, there's stuff about the hubris and his tragic flaws that feels really present and relatable today. There are moments where Oedipus is making declarations about, I'm going to save the city and I'm the great man who's going to do it and you're all going to thank me. And I thought, boy, I saw that on the news last night.

56:28Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah. It doesn't feel that old. Very much about good kings and bad kings, even in a proto-emergent democracy, the acknowledgement that whoever we elect still has an awful lot of power, and the goodness or badness of their actions will have, you know, I mean, it's obvious to say now, but serious ramifications for the Bali politic. And here it's metaphorized into this idea of the plague, right? I guess if there's one supernatural element that is in the background, like literally in the background here, is it's this plague that's been brought about by the gods because of the sin of Laos having been killed and we need to figure this thing out.

57:05Rebecca Schinsky:A very quick overview of Aristotle's six elements of tragedy. They are in rough descending order, plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, or scenic effect and song. Plot and character being the most important. Less emphasis on the diction or ideas, but I think to have a big spectacular cathartic moment, you need dramatic plots and big bold characters that you care about. and then those other things are secondary. The idea of the plot being, this is one of the things that struck me. It's like, we just don't get plots like this where the plot is just on rails and it isn't even really subject to scrutiny.

57:45Rebecca Schinsky:It's so tightly wound.

57:47Jeff O'Neal:I mean, I read the whole thing in an hour. Yes. And it just goes. Like you jump right in. Page one, someone is telling him, this is why the plague has happened. And then he's off. of like well we better figure out who killed laos and then i can stop the plague and i'm the great man who can do it even as everyone he encounters along the way is like buddy you are not gonna like what you find out here i mean just insists on proceeding he can do it and it really does like on rails is the right way to put it it's it just remains wild to me remembering that somebody had to invent theater as a form and that this is one of the earliest expressions of it yeah

58:27Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, Fagels makes the point, you have the note here of fate versus free will, and that's clearly at stake here. But Fagels does a good job in the introduction that I read, saying that the Greeks didn't have a term for free will, but they sort of defined it negatively by, well, if it's all fate, that's one thing. But if it's fate plus something else, what is that something else?

58:46Jeff O'Neal:And how can it be fate plus something else?

58:49Rebecca Schinsky:And it's a helpful formulation. Heraclitus only had fragments of his work from the ancient world, but one of them is character equals fate or character is fate. So the idea that who you are and what happens to you are intertwined. Like this only happens to Oedipus because of who Oedipus is. It's not so much written in the stars as written into who he is. Like he is going to get this prophecy and because Oedipus is who he is, he will bring about his own fate. So it's like not a script that's written that you can't avoid. It's almost like a personality DNA where you are going to, You are going to respond to these things in this way because of who you are?

59:28And the great question of liberal education, and frankly, the great question of, you know, Aristotelian thought and Plato is, can you do anything about that?

59:36Jeff O'Neal:Can you change it?

59:37Rebecca Schinsky:Can you get outside of yourself to change even who you are enough? And it's the great warrant of liberal education that sometimes I wonder about. Like, can you get around yourself enough to get around yourself? Which is hard to formulate as well. What else I'm curious about, Rebecca, before we go into our specific topic? You know, I think we nailed it all.

59:56Jeff O'Neal:Tell me about your intrusive thoughts.

59:58Rebecca Schinsky:I was trying to imagine. You read what I put here? I did. I was trying to imagine what an equivalent cultural moment to the first performance of Sophocles' new tragedy at the Dionysian Festival, like at the height of Sophocles fame, right? The most important Greek tragedian of its age at the most important venue, telling one of the great stories. and I did people know what the plays were that they would get titles I don't know what kind of that's a great show up and you didn't know is it gonna be just esophically is on first let's see what it's or is it gonna be you know something else here's what I here's what I could come up with imagine that we got word that in March Taylor Swift was going to performing her new album only once live at I don't know I don't what's the biggest stadium Wembley what can fit I don't knowing how many people to be the equivalent of Athens, I'd be a three million person stadium in London.

1:00:54Rebecca Schinsky:And that was it.

1:00:55Jeff O'Neal:Those big Asian arenas where BTS performs. That's what we're talking about.

1:00:59Rebecca Schinsky:Think of what the energy would be like. Yeah.

1:01:02Jeff O'Neal:Bananas.

1:01:02Rebecca Schinsky:We've never seen anything like it. We've never seen anything like it. So that's my interest. I appreciate that. That's a good one. And should we do that?

1:01:13Jeff O'Neal:Would that be more?

1:01:14Rebecca Schinsky:Talk about monoculture. Wow. Wow.

1:01:17Jeff O'Neal:Oh, the Ticketmaster possibilities are really stunning there.

1:01:20Rebecca Schinsky:Wow. Oh, my God. Yeah, I was trying to do some research about the economics of this. Like, you didn't get rich writing these plays because there was only one performance, and they had to be affordable enough that it sounds...

1:01:33Jeff O'Neal:None of them are professional playwrights here, as you were saying. Like, they've all served in the military. They're involved in public life. This is just like the side hustle, the thing they're doing for fun somewhere in there. Yeah.

1:01:43Rebecca Schinsky:It sounds like some of the rich citizens of Athens underwrote these productions. It was a form of de facto altruistic taxation of some kind, but sort of expected that if you were the great wine merchant or whatever, that you were going to—brought to you by Cleonesis' red wines, that you mixed one part to three or whatever. I don't know if they had branding or whatever. it's like that that's what the reality it was so embedded into the cultural life that it wasn't even extricable from it like it just it just seems like it was put together that way uh is it for you

1:02:11Jeff O'Neal:Rebecca is it it's for you if what this is the hardest episode for me to answer these on yet because like it's kind of hard to make a pitch to anybody in 2025 about just go spend an hour reading Sophocles at the same time that like there are so many worse ways to spend an hour This was really enjoyable. So I have a lot of like, man, just go give it a shot. Like, I think a lot of folks probably have a ton of reasons for just not being interested. And, you know, if you're interested in the history of this kind of stuff, if you want to have your mind blown a little bit by right, drama was new at some point, this is what it looked like when it was new.

1:02:52Jeff O'Neal:What are the origins of how we think about dramatic theater? and all of the, you know, everything that we've spent the last hour talking about, it's worth reading. But this doesn't lend itself as easily to the like, who's it for, who's it not for recommendations, anti-recommendations as anything else. It's sort of beyond taste at this point.

1:03:12Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

1:03:14Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, this isn't about personal taste. If you're curious at all and you haven't read these since school, or if you've never read them, I do think it's a really good use of a couple of hours. It was fun.

1:03:27Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, I think you could make a night of it. Read the introduction, maybe jump on Wikipedia, read a little about the Greek theater. Like I found myself feeling very grateful to have a few hours to journey back and imagine myself and remind myself of these moments and these dynamics, these cultural, artistic, and historical forces colliding at this moment. there was a it was sort of a way of like artistically touching grass i feel like that

1:03:53Jeff O'Neal:was very very much yeah and we talked in the hamlet episode about how shakespeare was writing in a another big moment of cultural revolution and intellectual revolution and what was happening in shakespeare's moment was that a bunch of these ancient works were finally being widely disseminated And that they were the catalyst for this whole new level of thought and of creation. So I also, I do think that if you are interested in drawing those lines between the major forces of Western art, this is the starting place or one of the starting places. And it's really satisfying from that perspective.

1:04:35Rebecca Schinsky:It's time for Immortal Questions. but before that I realized that I should have, when I first introduced the immortal questions, I should have put in brackets at the front that most of these works that we're going to talk about have the question of who am I built into them. Very few of them don't have that built into them. So we'll take that as our RSTL &E of the immortal questions. Who am I? But that's very much the primary one here. But here's the thing I would also say is in these moments, this is when the idea of who am I is invented. Like for the first time, that's really at stake. Which that's bonkers.

1:05:13Rebecca Schinsky:I know, right? Yeah.

1:05:17Jeff O'Neal:Mind-blowing.

1:05:17Rebecca Schinsky:And the idea that you could ask that, but then also maybe create it, right? That you are not subject to the I that's been laid out for you, that maybe you can do something about it. But that humans have not just... Or we don't know.

1:05:27Jeff O'Neal:That we have not just always sat around wondering that is just a mind-blowing reminder.

1:05:34Rebecca Schinsky:A reminder of what the questions that we have here that we consider, what is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? And what's the deal of good and evil? Rebecca, let's jump out to you.

1:05:48Jeff O'Neal:Oh boy. I mean, how do I know what I know is the big one.

1:05:51Rebecca Schinsky:That's the big one. Yeah, I think. That's the big one.

1:05:53Jeff O'Neal:But there is some, what is the good life? There is some, what do I know? What do I owe my neighbor? Or in Oedipus's case, what do I owe these people that I'm leading?

1:06:02Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, what owe the city?

1:06:03Jeff O'Neal:what am i you know right is this all there is is kind of integrated into am i fated to something is there a bigger plan not so much on the certainty of death no not so much on what else might there be yeah a little bit with good and evil but i mean he's not just pretty good and evil it's like yeah it is because he's not deciding between doing good things and bad things when the play starts he has already done the bad things and he doesn't know the full context in which he's done them. He doesn't even know that one of them was bad. He knows that he killed a man. He doesn't know that that man was Laos.

1:06:35Jeff O'Neal:He doesn't know that the woman he's married to is also his mother. A lot of immortal questions. Count on the Greeks to be doing a lot of it.

1:06:43Rebecca Schinsky:If it's been a while since you've had a reason to think about Greek mythology, I think it's helpful to remember that unlike in sort of a Judeo-Christian worldview, which is one I know better than other religious systems, the gods are a source of power and you were supposed to honor them, but they're not paragons of behavior. They're not sort of like, here are the 10 commandments to do good things to please the gods. It's much more like they are, they are Mercurial, well, literally Mercurial because Mercurial is the Roman name for Hermes. They have quixotic, almost human-like characteristics. They are horny and deceitful and wrathful and jealous.

1:07:22Rebecca Schinsky:And so to please them is not to do right action by your fellow man or to fulfill these commandments. It is to pay obedience to them, you know, sort of sacrifice your oxes and pour out the wine and don't do things they don't want. But it's not about good and evil. I don't even know what the word, I don't know where evil comes from, like literally the entomology of that would be. Are we sure this isn't about art and writing?

1:07:49Jeff O'Neal:I'm pretty sure.

1:07:51Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah.

1:07:52Jeff O'Neal:Like Oedipus is not navel gazing here about, or and Sophocles is not navel gazing through Oedipus about like what it means to be a writer, what it means to create art. This is pre that stuff. I mean,

1:08:08Rebecca Schinsky:that's what Ares, this is the kind of thing that got people thinking about art and writing rather than thinking about art writing itself, which is a weird thing to say. Could you get most of the gist from watching the signal adaptation? Who knows? Were there one? I mean, if you want to go see a production, I'm sure like colleges and stuff do this from time to time. You would get it. You would get it. Maybe even more than just certainly more than just reading on the page. Yeah.

1:08:32Jeff O'Neal:Maybe Apple TV will do this since they're just investing in big, gorgeous adaptations of things that no one watches. Go for it. OK, let's go to your Muppet question.

1:08:43Rebecca Schinsky:Would this be watchable as a Muppet version where a human plays the main character? I have the most disturbing question of this yet.

1:08:50Jeff O'Neal:yeah this is upsetting but a muppet chorus would be the chickens chaotic the chickens be the chorus with like the guy who leads the chickens being the leader yeah a sub question would be okay i

1:09:01Rebecca Schinsky:know it's disturbing and it never gonna happen but were it to happen which muppet plays the main character or which human plays the main character i think gonzo as oedipus here would be i like that the most obliviously confident of the muppets is gonzo i was gonna run back my

1:09:17Jeff O'Neal:adam driver selection there are not many there are not many moments in which i don't want adam driver to be on stage with a bunch of muppets but i know gonzo as oedipus and then i guess you get to pick a human for something else so maybe like i don't know he's like what are you doing gonzo calm down anyway that would be funny um so let's see what's next uh miscellaneous trivia adaptations

1:09:43Rebecca Schinsky:rumors misattributed quotes etc i said a couple of mine already about 15 000 people attended these at the peak out of an athenian population of 50 000 that's wild i also have can be thought of as an adaptation of the oedipus story so maybe we can chill about a sexy withering heights or whatever we've been doing this for 3 000 years and not only is fine but sometimes the adaptation survives

1:10:06Jeff O'Neal:longer yeah it's gonna be okay yeah and then you just have so freud and the oedipal complex and like I just need to remind us all once again that Freud was doing a lot of coke and his like Freud's reading of the Oedipal Complex basically comes straight from what Jocasta says here it doesn't actually come from Oedipus's actions because Oedipus doesn't know that Jocasta is his mother he's not having some unconscious drive to have sex with the person he sees as his mother he just happens to have married the woman who is his mother but he doesn't know that she's his mother. And that's very different from what Jocasta claims most men have the experience of wanting and then what Freud bases the Oedipal complex on.

1:10:50Jeff O'Neal:So it's really like, if anything, it's Jocasta and Freud working together on what it should be called something other than the Oedipal complex, because it's really not about Oedipus's desire. Well, and I just didn't even know Jocasta was his mother.

1:11:02Rebecca Schinsky:I mean, not for nothing, like she kind of came with the throne that he got when he solved the riddle. It's the last thing he finds out.

1:11:08Jeff O'Neal:He finds out that this man he killed was Laos. And then he finds out that Laos was his father. And that Jocasta, his wife, was his mother is the last one of the big discoveries.

1:11:19Rebecca Schinsky:It's helpful to remind yourself with Freud that he got the big thing right, which is there's more going on in there than we think. But literally everything else was wrong. Which is, you know, you could do worse, but the specifics are really tough. All right, let's do favorite notable lines. Rebecca, what do you want to share? Okay, I mean, I've said earlier in the show that I really love that you can imagine what the audience is experiencing here.

1:11:42Jeff O'Neal:And I like that you can tell that Sophocles is having fun with all of the foreshadowing. It does seem that way. Like there's a line, let the man drag out his life in agony, step by painful step. Oedipus says this, and the audience would have seen Oedipus limp on stage, that he has this chronic and pretty pronounced limp. Oedipus says, so I will fight for him as if he were my father. Stop at nothing. Search the world to lay my hands on the men. who shed his blood. And he says this to an audience of people who know that Laos was his father. That stuff is just fun. But then also all the moments with Tiresias, the seer, are great.

1:12:17Jeff O'Neal:Tiresias tells him, I say you are the murderer you hunt. I pity you flinging at me. The very insults each man here will fling at you soon. And that read to me like what we say today about certain presidents for whom every accusation is actually a confession. Creon has this moment of going I don't know and when I don't I keep quiet and that the italics on I keep quiet

1:12:41Rebecca Schinsky:did they have italics?

1:12:44Jeff O'Neal:mine was italicized no I'm like an ancient Greek

1:12:47Rebecca Schinsky:where did the italics come from?

1:12:49Jeff O'Neal:verbal italics at least I keep quiet

1:12:55Rebecca Schinsky:let's see I've got a couple here count no man happy until he is dead that's an end line from the chorus that's also something that Solon says in Herodotus' The Histories. And this was a big idea in the ancient Greek world. It's like, it's not over yet. So you do not count your chickens until you're dead because disaster could still find you here. And that itself, I think that you don't know you're happy until you're dead is this kind of contradiction that the Greeks were interested in. It feels like it might be a platitude, but it's so deep and weird and discomforting that it's hard to wrap your mind around.

1:13:35Rebecca Schinsky:The word strange comes up quite a bit in this book, in this text, and I don't know if it's the same Greek word that Fagels is interpreting, just using a strange. But I guess my intrusive thought here, like with Hamlet, I always kind of like to think about if there's like a breaking of the fourth wall at some point, where I have been saved for something terrible and great, something strange. the idea that in that moment that could speak for Oedipus, his story being the subject of other people's understanding. Like I've been saved to be a character in a play at some point is a fascinating idea to me.

1:14:08Rebecca Schinsky:I'm right at the end of horrible truth I've got to say at the shepherd. I believe that's where I got, I fear I'm at the brink of frightful speech from, which I say from time to time.

1:14:16Jeff O'Neal:I fear I'm at the brink of frightful speech is better.

1:14:18Rebecca Schinsky:It's more Shakespearean. Yeah. And I think one reason that the Fagel's translation reads so smoothly is I think that's intentional. I think there's a version of that that feels more stentorian, that feels more, I don't know, that amps up the floweriness or the complexity of the language. And there could be a virtue of that, but getting through it is one of them. And then Creon, what if you're wholly wrong? Oedipus says, no matter, I must rule. And I think there's something to that. And probably for the most sane response to the truth of you can't know everything and yet we must live is somewhere not no matter.

1:15:01Rebecca Schinsky:It's like, yes, I know I could be wrong, but I've got to do something anyway. And to walk into any situation or into your life with, well, could I attenuate if I am wrong? Is there a way to make it not as disastrous as it could be? because one of the things Oedipus does, as soon as you hear about the truth, he just goes full speed, 100 % into, I'm going to kill this guy. You can't believe how quickly I'm going to get this and how bad it's going to be. Like, is there a version of this where he had heeded Creon's warning and says, and Espes, you know, you're right. There's something else going on here.

1:15:37Rebecca Schinsky:Let's investigate, but tread carefully. But the truth is going to be the same whether he treads carefully or not. So it doesn't even really help you in that regard.

1:15:44Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, yeah. My last favorite is the chorus near the very end. And we were talking yesterday about, are we going to call this Oedipus the King or Oedipus Rex? And, you know, the connection between Rex and tyrant. Pride breeds the tyrant violent pride, gorging, crammed to bursting with all that is overripe and rich with ruin. Clawing up to the heights, headlong pride crashes down the abyss, sheer doom. No footing helps, all footholds lost and gone. And here's the kicker. But the healthy strife that makes the city strong, I pray that God will never end that wrestling. And like sitting here in 2025 with a six simper Tyrannus tattoo on my body and a protest to attend tomorrow.

1:16:27Jeff O'Neal:But the healthy strife that makes the city strong, I pray that God will never end that wrestling. Like this stuff is still relevant. And that's one of the reasons, I mean, that we're doing this show, but also one of the reasons to go back to these old works and to have these moments of like, yes, we have been doing this for thousands of years. Yeah.

1:16:48Rebecca Schinsky:My favorite line is the chorus trying to wrestle with the truth of Tiresias as a being, but also what kind of knowledge he represents, which is this imperfect, not access to imperfect knowledge. The chorus says, the skilled prophet scans the birds and shatters me with terror. I can't accept him, can't deny him, and don't know what to say. I mean, boy, that feels really, I just don't know. I don't know what you hear with that. But here we are. Here we are. You have any hot takes you want to get off?

1:17:18Jeff O'Neal:You know, I think these ancient works only seem hard when you're a kid, if you first encounter them as a young student, because they are totally different from anything you've seen before, or you don't have the grounded, like, full context of what's happening. Maybe you have one of the more stentorian translations. But my experience with this text was, I don't know, I don't even remember what made me think that this was intimidating. Like I had a little I don't think I told you I had a little hesitation when we were looking at the lineup for the season. And you were like, there's nothing, we don't have anything from antiquity in this first season, and we should find something.

1:17:53Jeff O'Neal:And I remembered kind of struggling with these. I was like, do I really want to do that? Maybe some of it too, is I've got 20 more years as a reader under my belt than I had at the time. But you've got skills you didn't have then. Right. But this was not not challenging at all. And I really felt like, OK, it was only that because I had never encountered anything this old and I didn't have the context. And so I read the introduction and give yourself the context. But man, this was it was so much more fun. And that's been my experience with almost everything that we've gone back, like the really old stuff that we've picked up for this season.

1:18:28Jeff O'Neal:Like, go back and read these old books. My hot take forever is some of the old stuff sticks around because it does stand the test of time for a reason.

1:18:38Rebecca Schinsky:I have a couple here. Boy, did they know how to plot. When you hadn't run through all the story possibilities, you could really just hit it hard.

1:18:45Jeff O'Neal:Nobody was on Goodreads marking down their favorite tropes and remixing things.

1:18:48Rebecca Schinsky:They didn't have 3 ,000 years of stories to contend with. We were just sort of inventing some of the great arcs of all time. I also agree with that Creon Rules. This is the one that struck me as a character. There's more complexity to Creon here. His, again, not a monologue because he's talking to Oedipus, but his long speech about why I wouldn't be, you know, trying to usurp the throne is because I have a good. It's really about the good life and proximity to power. Because one of the quotes you relayed before was about the more power you have, the more possibility there is to get over your skis about your confidence and your certainty.

1:19:28Rebecca Schinsky:And the more you do that, you get over leveraged on your position. And that is something that can crumble quite quickly. Whereas Creon, because he's proximal to power, but doesn't wield it, sees it with greater clarity than Oedipus does. He's more careful because he has to negotiate Oedipus, where if Oedipus doesn't have to negotiate anyone, he can run into these titanic forces because the only thing between him and that kind of calamity is human nature, the reality of death, the limits of understanding. It's not sort of political or cultural. Also, I've just got to shoe prophecies. If you have a prophecy, just no Zoltars, no Chinese fortune cookies.

1:20:07Rebecca Schinsky:Like Han Solo says in Star Wars, never tell me the odds. Just never, I can't think of one story where someone got a prophecy, like, you know, that was a great idea. I'm so glad, let's run it back. Just get rid of prophecies. Don't want them.

1:20:20Jeff O'Neal:good life advice coming out of you today further reading i mean there's not really read-alikes i

1:20:25Rebecca Schinsky:don't think you can do more greek theater you could do the oristia you could do and i guess

1:20:30Jeff O'Neal:you could do like oedipus shows up in places of the odyssey right so you could go back and see some of that or just do this just read this one just do this yeah cocktail party crib sheet

1:20:41Rebecca Schinsky:um i already did mine about this is like the super bowl the fourth of july the oscars and christmas all rolled into one and it's also that thing that's being performed as taylor swift's new album that's going to perform.

1:20:51Jeff O'Neal:I think that's just the best way. But also like this is ancient and it's timeless. Like the dynamics from this moment when this was written, when politics was new, are all present in today's landscape. The characters are archetypes that are recognizable today that have probably been recognizable forever. And then I think the real cocktail party drop is just this is about the fact that we have been and will always be afraid of what free will means and equally afraid of not having any and of what the hell to do with it if we have it what are the consequences can we even know right at one point jacosta's like it's all chance we just live by

1:21:29Rebecca Schinsky:chance and everyone's like yeah but that's that's that's not right either right have it all be fate or all be chance both of those ends of the spectrum feel diminishing and also not they don't feel true i guess they don't feel true and most people doesn't feel true to but nor does it also see that it's all free will all faith it's somewhere in the messy middle i guess a dialectic if we're going to get all 19th century philosophical about it um the final beat a zero to well read score each one gets a score from one to ten with ten being the highest of five categories are historical importance readability current relevance of central questions book nerd read cred and oh damn factor historical importance obvious 10 a 10 yes yeah readability interesting

1:22:16Jeff O'Neal:what do you think this probably varies with translation but i found it to be in the nine to ten range it was very readable for me what about you i'd say nine or ten or maybe eight or

1:22:25Rebecca Schinsky:nine i mean let's give it a nine ten is like a real page turner where it's there's no friction

1:22:30Jeff O'Neal:at all for me but we'll give it a nine yeah we'll give it a nine the current relevance of central

1:22:35Rebecca Schinsky:questions for this one we could almost just strike out current yeah but like just

1:22:42Jeff O'Neal:forever permanent relevance.

1:22:44Rebecca Schinsky:It can't really be a 10, I don't think, because we have central questions that aren't at all at stake here, but the central questions have not gone away. So eight?

1:22:55Jeff O'Neal:I think an eight is fair there.

1:22:58Rebecca Schinsky:This one I have no sense of.

1:22:59Jeff O'Neal:For book nerd read cred. Yeah, it's so, this is, I think, more than anything else we're talking about this season. This is a work that if you encounter it, you probably only encounter it for school. Like how many copies of Sophocles are selling in a given year that people are just reading for fun? And so there's...

1:23:19Rebecca Schinsky:That's a great point.

1:23:20Jeff O'Neal:Like there's a way where this has high read cred because if you go out and seek it on your own, that's a pretty book nerd thing to do. But you're probably not doing it for engagement with book nerd read cred.

1:23:35Rebecca Schinsky:Which makes it even higher somehow.

1:23:37Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, maybe. So maybe we're just talking ourselves. Is this an 11?

1:23:40Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, right. This is a giraffe. It's off the scale. I'd say I'd give it at least an eight.

1:23:46Jeff O'Neal:All right. I'm going to give it a nine.

1:23:48Rebecca Schinsky:Okay. Oh, damn factor. This one is so hard to know because...

1:23:52Jeff O'Neal:It's impossible for me.

1:23:53Rebecca Schinsky:Well, say why it's impossible. I wonder if we're thinking along the same lines.

1:23:58Jeff O'Neal:Because we know basically how everything is going to unfold going through the story. There's not really an oh damn moment or like there's not an artistic surprise. And also we can't experience this the way that Sophocles' audience experienced it where they did know all of these other versions of the story. So I was trying to think about this for myself. Like what if like I grew up knowing, I don't know, Little Red Riding Hood and somebody took me to see a production of it.

1:24:32Rebecca Schinsky:That blew you away.

1:24:33Jeff O'Neal:Yeah, that blew my mind because they took this familiar story and they told it in a completely new way. What would that be like? And so it could be a 10.

1:24:44Rebecca Schinsky:And invented a whole new art form at the same time.

1:24:46Jeff O'Neal:Right. I guess this is theoretically a 10 on the oh damn factor to me.

1:24:51Rebecca Schinsky:But as a reader in 2025 who can't possibly engage with this, the way it was meant to be experienced 2400 years ago,

1:25:00Jeff O'Neal:So I don't even know how to put a number on this.

1:25:03Rebecca Schinsky:Yeah, it's hard. I mean, I think the only way for me, the oh damnness of it, because we know the story, we're not reading the original Greek. And the idea of theater is so baked into how we understand art and culture to work in the West. There's a version of this that's 10 when I get my mind blown about thinking about the actual scene of what this month. The whole scene is like a 10. but as an actual reading experience I think it's only like a six yeah I think that's fair Oedipus is not too dissimilar from other myths where you sort of know them it's hard to give you can give Sopholis of course much amazing credit for what he does what he already has but this is not Hamlet soliloquy a thing of almost pure invention right like he's he's moving around pieces but the Lego pieces he's selecting him and or deselecting them based on a relatively finite night set.

1:25:57Rebecca Schinsky:And it's always impossible for me to be as a person who a large part of what I read for is the language to not have access to the Greek. I don't know what I'm missing. And I guess there's a demerit for it. It's just hard for me to get super excited. And on the level of the line, it's not super exciting. There's some moments, clearly.

1:26:14Jeff O'Neal:There are some moments, but it's not super exciting. Yeah, it's not like, you're not reading this one for the pleasure of the sentences, certainly. Well, we still arrived at a 42 out of 50. That's respectable. I mean,

1:26:24Rebecca Schinsky:You should write. I mean, it should be extremely high. It should be extremely high. Let's see, Rebecca. Show notes are bookriot.com slash listen. You can email us at zerotowellread at bookriot.com. Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. And if you do have a moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts especially, this is behind the scenes stuff, but more than 80 % of our listens happen through Apple devices and software. That really helps people find the show. and we want to keep the good momentum going to find people who are willing and eager even, Rebecca, to listen to us to talk for 90 minutes about 3 ,000-year-old plays that everyone knows the end to.

1:27:04Rebecca Schinsky:Rebecca, thank you so much.