Monday Minute #10: Sophocles
A 1-minute read on Oedipus Rex
Even taken out of the context of the bloody play, which was likely first performed in ~429 B.C. (just after the start of the Peloponnesian War), this excerpt is so profound:
Shall we lose faith in Delphi’s obscurities,
We who have heard the world’s core
Discredited, and the sacred wood
Of Zeus at Elis praised no more?
The deeds and the strange prophecies
Must make a pattern yet to be understood.
Zeus, if indeed you are lord of all,
Throned in light over night and day,
Mirror this in your endless mind:
Our masters call the oracle
Words on the wind, and the Delphic vision blind!
Their hearts no longer know Apollo,
And reverence for the gods has died away. (Oedipus Rex II.2)
It was the beginning of total war, and the poet was wondering if the people would really give up on faith in their god and their prophet? Imagine “hearing the world’s core discredited.” Think about how Sophocles wrote that, what his audience must have understood by that phrase. It helps to have read Thucydides, of course. The practical problems of politics made the gods seem distant and unreal. Survival meant making more triremes, raising up a generation of fighting men as quickly as possible.
And who—it’s worth asking—who might Sophocles have meant by “Our masters,” and why was that set calling the sacred words of the oracle “blind?” I assume these were the politicians and military leadership. Faith was lost from the top down, it seems. The king goes blind first.
