Disauthorizing Prophecy: The Ideological Mapping of Oedipus Tyrannus

Abstract

Our starting point is the story of how Themistocles tried, at first without success, to convince his fellow Athenians that victory against the Persians lay in sea power. In Plutarch's life (10.1), we are told that he lost hope of bringing them over by rational arguments (&AvOpcoivoit Xoyiagoi?), and resorted to signs from heaven and prophecies (arlgeixc 8ugo6vux wi c xpqtoFo), contriving machinery as someone would in performing a tragedy (&$)airp ?V tpoycp&a Flxvi v pa). The statesman, frustrated by the failure of rational discourse, finds success in theatrical smoke and mirrors, Themistocles probably not the first and certainly not the last. The story illustrates the power of non-rational over rational representation and uses theater as its most apt metaphor. I invite you to imagine, if you will, a sophist-someone like Critias or Gorgias or even, perhaps, Protagoras or Socrates-sitting in the theater of Dionysus during a not altogether dissimilar representation: the enactment of Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus. Imagine his sense of futility in the face of this powerful anti-sophist statement. Imagine his frustration at lacking the chance to respond in a social context equally inclusive, equally compelling. I should like to take that frustrated sophist's part today, respectfully disregarding, for the while, the many other valid ways there may be to read Oedipus Tyrannus. I shall, of course, be adding a particular contemporary perspective. That is inevitable. But in this case it is also deliberate. Deliberate, for two reasons. First, because when I reflect on the particular contemporary perspective I am least uncomfortable with, and look for something like it in the age of Sophocles, I find myself sitting with that frustrated sophist in the theater of Dionysus. And second, because that play is of course still read, still held in highest esteem in the courts of aesthetic judgment, still firmly fixed in the canon of those texts we wish the well-schooled to have read, and that, not as historical museum piece merely, but because it still delivers a message we think it valuable to hear.