Oedipus and the plague

Abstract

No Greek drama is more instantly associated with plague, whether mythic or real, than Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus , and thus no Greek drama has received such scholarly attention in the context of the Athenian plague. But failing to discuss the Oedipus in some sustained manner, however brief, might cause confusion and leave my picture incomplete. I shall therefore limit my discussion to supplementing a summary of Bernard Knox's perspicuous examinations of the plague and of medical language in the Oedipus Tyrannus (Knox 1956; 1957: 139–47), and this discussion is intended as an introduction to my subsequent analysis of the Trachiniae as a plague drama. My contribution will consist mainly of an interpretation of the circulation of nosological discourse throughout the text and a consideration of whether Sophocles' innovation of a plague at Thebes during the Athenian plague might have contributed to the second-place finish of the program that included the Oedipus Tyrannus . Knox (1957) discusses the image of Oedipus as a doctor and shows the role of various Hippocratic terms in the Oedipus , but he leaves Sophocles' means of the representation of the plague itself relatively unexplored; thus, while there are many Greek words in the index to Knox's Oedipus at Thebes, nosos is not one of them, nor, for that matter, is loimos . And, as with the case of other dramas I examine in this book, the deployment of nosos through the dramatic text is central to its meaning.