Sight and Blindness Imagery in the "Oedipus Coloneus"

Abstract

SOPHOCLES wrote the Oedipus Coloneus at the close of his long life, about thirty-five years after the Antigone and twenty years after the Tyrannus. In doing so, he bridged the gap between the two parts of the Theban legend dramatized in these earlier plays. We can well imagine, observes Kitto, Oedipus, Sophocles' most splendid symbol of humanity, must have been a close companion of his thoughts ever since he had finished his Tyrannus.' And surely the same can be said of Antigone, the most burning and vivid of his heroines. No doubt he long contemplated a middle play to link, in a sense, the other two. But would be a gross error to look upon the Coloneus as a kind of dramatic interlude, such as could perhaps be expected in the middle play of a trilogy of the Aeschylean type. For one thing, its magnitude, in Aristotle's sense, is greater than that of either of the other two plays; secondly, its majesty, its grandeur, and its power are quite unlike anything else we have of Sophocles. Granted, then, that the Coloneus is artistically complete in itself and dramatically independent of the other plays, does not follow that is imaginatively or conceptually severed from them. If Oedipus and Antigone really were the close companions of Sophocles' thoughts before he wrote the Coloneus, we may reasonably expect at least a basic identity between those characters as they are portrayed in this play and the same characters as they appeared in the two earlier ones. Naturally, since the dramatic exigencies of the Tyrannus are not those of the Coloneus, the actions and hence the characterization of the hero are bound to be modified to suit those exigencies. The same holds for Antigone. As for Creon, Jebb is quite right in saying that it is idle to look for the Creon of the Tyrannus in the Creon of the Coloneus: they are different men, and Sophocles has not cared to preserve even a semblance of identity.2 The reason is, of course, that Creon stands outside the central dramatic conflict of the earlier play; his r6le did not call for any great degree of characterization. But in the Antigone he is, if not the central figure, at least the antagonist, as in the Coloneus he is one of the two antagonists. Between the well-meaning but wrong-headed martinet of the Antigone