Sofocle
Edipo Re

Oedipus Rex, first performed around 425 B.C., is one of the highest products of that complex and layered social institution that is ancient tragic theater. From the 6th century B.C. until the Hellenistic age, this type of performance essentially represented the physical mirror of all the impulses and tensions that animated the polis of Athens from within, which is the cradle of Western but also Middle-Eastern civilization. The tragic drama is, in every respect, a melting pot of human feelings, and among the three great tragedians, Sophocles is perhaps the one who best represented the finitude, the smallness, and the fallibility of human strength in the face of the power of the divine and, more generally, of fate. Oedipus Rex was already considered in antiquity the epitome of tragedy, exemplary in its stylistic construction, infallible in its powerful climax of the protagonist's annihilation, characterized by the reversal of fate and the recognition that for Aristotle are two of the ingredients that guarantee perfection.

The tragedy narrates the fate of Oedipus, son of Polybus and prince of Corinth, to whom the oracle of Delphi has predicted a terrible fate, namely to kill his father and marry his mother. Believing he can outsmart his destiny, he flees from Corinth and those he believes to be his parents, who, as it will be discovered, actually found him in the fields and raised him as their son. During this flight, he meets his real father, Laius, king of Thebes, and kills him after an altercation; fate then brings him precisely to Thebes, where his intelligence and logical ability allow him to defeat the Sphinx, a killer monster that besieged the city, of which he is proclaimed king. Queen Jocasta, widowed and unaware, does not hesitate to welcome the victor over the Sphinx, her son, and makes him her husband. From their foul union, four very unfortunate children will be born: Eteocles, Polyneices, Ismene, and Antigone, protagonist of another masterful Sophoclean drama.

The story of Oedipus Rex focuses on the moment when the genealogical truth and the protagonist's guilt are brought to light. The plague infests Thebes, and the oracle has foretold that only by punishing the assassin of the old king Laius will this plague be driven from the city: from this assumption begins the complex mechanism that will lead to the final conflagration. The complicated plot unfolds among oracular responses, curses, recognitions, accusations, dispelled doubts, and creeping suspicions, creating a masterful escalation, an atmosphere of ever-growing anguish until the final annihilation of the protagonist; upon discovering the truth of the facts, Oedipus chooses to blind himself, while the mother-wife hangs herself in horror.

The physical impairment of the unfortunate hero is, moreover, the key that allows us to understand his true guilt, his, to put it in Aristotle's terms, tragic error. It is not indeed the murder and incest that attracted ruin upon him, but rather the fact that he, trusting in the power of man and his logic, sought to outwit the oracle, and thus the gods and therefore the destiny that governs every action of man. Doomed to ruin, Oedipus tried in every way to escape it; the irony is that with all his efforts to avoid committing the misdeeds that were prophesied for him, he created his own ruin with his own hands, fleeing from Corinth, which he believed to be his homeland, and from his parents, who were indeed adoptive. This is Oedipus's true blindness: triumphant over the divine riddles of the Sphinx, puffed up with his certainty of having avoided a monstrous destiny, he does not see the reality, the misdeed he had already committed, and in the tragedy, the sense of dismay emerges vividly from all those around him who slowly grasp the truth, while he, until the very end, refuses to believe. Therefore, by blinding himself, the hero merely gives physicality to his human condition of "non-seeing."

In this sense, Oedipus Rex is the drama of man, whose arrogance makes him believe he can keep the inscrutable divine power in check, and who, above all, is convinced, in his fallibility, that he can govern a destiny of freedom that in reality does not belong to him. Additionally, the human claim to fully decipher the divine language of the oracles is here completely refuted, and, Sophocles seems to tell us, life is actually based on the greatest of enigmas, to which religion can only give ambiguous answers that can also disastrously deceive us.

In this tragedy, Sophocles develops a balance hard to match of suspicion, doubt, exultation, resignation, relief, and annihilation, managing to create a shocking cultural masterpiece. Oedipus Rex remains an indispensable testament not only to Greek sensibility but to all of Western man, and one of the greatest legacies of world culture. Our intellectual history begins here as well.

For those who have never approached ancient tragedy or theater in general, this can be a great start, keeping in mind that we are facing one of the greatest masterpieces of literature of all time.