Sophocles, Oedipus, and the Fallacy of Free Will

More Winter cleaning. I’m going to be posting a lot of scholarly essays from my college years on these pages so I can toss the paper copies. Paper’s a bear to box and ship when you live the global vagabond’s life.

I took a Greek tragedy and comedy class in college. We studied, among other works, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. The professor had a point of view – and a smugness about it – with which I strongly disagreed. He wanted to defend Sophocles as a believer in Free Will. I didn’t see it, and didn’t like his refusal (or inability) to see beyond his own interpretation. So this paper – a 14-page effort for a 5-page assignment, which was typical of me in college – takes it to him.

I haven’t read it since writing it in 1994, so the argument will be as new to me as to anybody else who likes this sort of thing. And that professor? He asked if he could keep a copy for his files. So maybe I managed to put a chink or two in his armor-plated head. [I just finished typing it. I like it, the academic Latinate notwithstanding, and the "sheer tedium," as I acknowledged in the essay, of cataloguing the millions of textual details supporting that Sophocles emphatically pushed his pen against Free Will in the play. My favorite part is the end, which goes into the political and intellectual context in which Sophocles wrote the play: the rise of humanism and atheism in classical Athens.]

I also went to great pains to link, using Apture, to Wikipedia articles that will pop up on the page for anyone wanting further reading about any of the characters, ideas, books, or scholars named. I did it as a demonstration of how much richer academic writing can be online than in print form. (Which is an interesting counterpoint to the Slow Blogging post from earlier today.)

Here’s the start, after which I’ll fold the rest into the permalink:

Of Kings and Strings:
Sophocles Contra Free Will in the Oedipus Tyrannus

Clay Burell
7 December 1994

Did Sophocles intend for his audience to understand the Oedipus Tyrannus [OT] as a “tragedy of fate”? Did he mean to demonstrate through Oedipus that freely-willed and self-determined actions are illusory through and through, that in reality they are the pulls of fate so softly on our puppet-strings that we don’t sense them?

To humanistic and Christian sensibilities, such a total denial of human freedom in the face of destiny is abhorrent. Very tellingly on this point, E. R. Dodds labels the fatalistic interpretation of the OT nothing less than a “heresy.” While admitting that “certain of Oedipus’ past actions [ie, his parricide and incest] were fate-bound,” here he draws the line: “everything [Oedipus] does on stage from first to last he does as a free agent.”¹ But when Dodds substantiates this claim with a list of Oedipus’ allegedly free actions, the very language he uses to describe each of these actions paradoxically undercuts his own argument: Oedipus freely chose to consult Delphi, Dodds asserts, because pity for the Thebans “compelled” him to; he freely chose to act on the Delphic response because piety and justice “required” him to; he made the free choice to extort the damning truth from the herdsman because he “cannot rest content with a lie, he must tear away the last veil from the illusion”; finally, he freely decides not to heed the advice of Teiresias, Jocasta, and the herdsman to stop the investigation because “he must read the . . . riddle of his own life.”² The compulsory adverbs – “compelled,” “required,” “cannot,” “must,” “must” – while not pointing to divine fatalism, suggest at least that Oedipus was determined by his own character. Being who he was, he could not act any differently than he did.

[Read the rest below the fold - especially if you want to argue about Free Will, about which I'm still a strong skeptic....]

This notion of character as a determining force in Oedipus’ tragedy is part of Sir Maurice Bowra’s interpretation. With Dodds, Bowra agrees that the parricide and incest were fixed in Oedipus’ fate before he was born. The oracle to Lauius shows that. But, contrary to Dodds, Bowra asserts that all of Oedipus’ other actions both before and during the action on stage were the work of a daimon carrying out Apollo’s will.³ In Bowra’s view, the gods “force” on Oedipus the discovery of his monstrous identity.⁴ It could not be otherwise.

On the Daimonic

Obviously, at this point some clarification is needed concerning this concept of the daimonic. The daimonic was an ill-defined entity even among the Greeks. At bottom, it was used in two senses, one internal to the individual, and the other, external. In the external sense, a daimon was held to be “the veiled countenance of divine activity, . . . the driving power of events around us, unpredictable and not of our own enacting – something like fate, but without any person who plans and ordains being visible.”⁵ Pindar writes of the “daimon active about me” in this external sense, and in describing it as “steered by an all-powerful mind of Zeus,” underlines its subordination to the divine will.⁶ Plato reports a customary belief in the assignment by lot of an individual daimon to each person at birth.⁷ Additionally, daimons were held responsible for human happiness (eudaimon) and unhappiness (kakodaimon).⁸ All of this is very in keeping with Bowra’s notion that the events unfolding around Oedipus were unfolded by a daimon doing Apollo’s bidding.

In its other usage, the daimon was active inside the individual, especially during the performance of a “peculiar activity.”⁹ It was “an occult power, a force that drives man forward where no agent can be named.”¹⁰ Socrates named the famous inner voice that at unpredictable times commanded him not to do or say something his daimon.¹¹ Heraclitus, at the vanguard of Greece’s emergent philosophical enlightenment, perhaps defines the daimon most comfortably for us in his peremptory denial of its very existence: “Character is for a man his life and daimon.”¹²

One could argue that Heraclitus’ explanation of a religious term with a scientific one is no explanation at all, but merely a substitution that leaves the mystery – and the apparent fatality – of human will intact. Paris’ argument with Hector in the Iliad (III:50-70) – that Hector’s blaming him for being a lady’s man was unjust because he was helpless to refuse “the gifts the gods bestow on mortals at birth” (in his case, the gifts of Aphrodite) – is very adequate to meet Heraclitus’ challenge. Likewise, Oedipus certainly did not will his own natural gift of intellect, curiosity, and the will to command.

But the question at hand is how Sophocles implicitly answers the question in the OT. And it is one of the two crucial questions of the tragedy (more on the other one later). For if Sophocles meant to imply, as Dodds asserts, that Oedipus, while unavoidably fated to fulfill the prophecy of parricide and incest from the oracle at Delphi, was nonetheless free to escape Teiresias’ prophecy that he would discover his pollution, blind and banish himself from Thebes – then one very simple conclusion follows from this: namely, that humans may hope for a margin of freedom in the face of divinely-willed fate.

Sophocles did not want his audience to walk away from this tragedy with any such hope. There is ample evidence both within and outside of the play to support the contrary case: that Sophocles meant for Oedipus to be seen as utterly powerless to circumvent the will of the gods – as pronounced to him not only by the Pythian, but also by Teiresias.

In Sophocles’ text, as Bowra asserts, Apollo and his daimonic agents hover invisibly around every event in Oedipus’ life, both before and – contrary to Dodds – during the action on the stage.

Fate Before the Action on Stage

Apollo’s oracle to Laius determined Oedipus’ mountainside exposure, of course, before he was ever born. Mount Cithaeron, the site of Oedipus’ rescue is, the chorus states, a sacred precinct of none other than Apollo (ll. 1103-4). That the drunk’s accusation of bastardy sent Oedipus to Apollo’s oracle at Delphi at precisely the time that Oedipus’ true father, Laius, “decides” to travel to Delphi himself is too coincidental to be mere “chance” – Apollo hovers around this event too.

Again, Apollo’s priestess, by refusing to answer Oedipus’ question regarding his true parentage and instead informing him that he will kill his father and marry his mother, leaves him in the ignorance that will compel him never to return to his supposed parents in Corinth – and leads him straight to his true mother in Thebes. Furthermore, as Stephen Halliwell notes, the “threeway” at which Oedipus is provoked to slay Laius is another sacred precinct of Apollo.¹³ (and Halliwell further notes that Sophocles altered the location of this crossroads, which in the traditional myth joined Plataea, Potnaie, and Thebes, by making it the juncture connecting Corinth, Delphi, and Thebes. This strongly suggests that Sophocles intended, with this alteration, to implicate Apollo in the entirety of Oedipus’ fate).¹⁴

Also too coincidental to be anything but divine design: Oedipus arrives at Thebes precisely when the Sphinx was afflicting the land with its riddle – a test of intelligence irresistible to Oedipus. Too coincidental, furthermore, is Oedipus’ arrival to unriddle the Sphinx at precisely the right time to win Jocasta’s hand as his reward – neither before Creon announced this prize, nor after someone else had won it.

And how explain the inexplicable delay of the plague until Oedipus’ children had reached adulthood and the clues to Laius’ murder had grown very cold? Oedipus’ triple pollution should have incurred the plague immediately. Apollo, bringer of plague, obviously delayed it to fulfill his own design.

Fate During the Action on Stage

Within the play itself, Oedipus’ first action in response to the plague was to consult Apollo at Delphi. It was, furthermore, the oracle’s counsel that Oedipus curse with banishment the murderer of Laius.

Teiresias is said to share in Apollo’s knowledge by the chorus, and calls himself “Loxias’ slave” (411); his refusal to share his knowledge provoked Oedipus’ anger, which in turn provoked his politically valid charge of treason against Creon (who advised Oedipus to consult Teiresias in the first place) – which furthermore sets up Jocasta’s disclosure of the site of Laius’ murder in her ironic attempt to prove the impotence of oracles and seers. Moreover, Teiresias – “Loxias’ slave” – does predict Oedipus’ self-blinding and exile in Apollo’s name (and, significantly enough, “against [his, Teiresias'] will” (357-8) ). Teiresias furthermore affirms the inevitability of Oedipus’ fate in his explicit claim that “of themselves things will come, although I hide them and breathe not a word” (341-2).

Jocasta’s prayer to Apollo is immediately answered by the “chance” arrival of the Corinthian messenger with the news of Polybus’ “coincidental” death in Corinth. The chorus, in its deluded exultations over the Corinthian’s news, ironically speculates that Apollo might be Oedipus’ true father. Again, the Corinthian messenger arrives by “chance” at the same time the herdsman does, thus ensuring that the mystery of Oedipus’ birth can be brought to its horrible light. And by daimonic “coincidence,” these same two men, the Corinthian messenger and the herdsman, who meet at the palace on the day of Oedipus’ ruin, are the same two men who met on Cithaeron to save the infant Oedipus from death by exposure. And what, furthermore, is Jocasta’s plea – “God save you, Oedipus, from the knowledge of who you are” (1068) – but an ironically precise quote of Apollo’s injunction from the temple at Delphi, “Know thyself”? – and another piece of evidence that Sophocles intended to emphasize the invisible manipulations of the god?

More evidence of this is seen in the second messenger’s claim that Oedipus was uncannily “led by some invisible guide,” that “some daimon showed him the way” (1201) to Jocasta’s hanging corpse, and again when the chorus asks Oedipus what daimon led him to put out his eyes. Oedipus similarly addresses his daimon when he comes onstage after blinding himself, “Daimon, how far have you sprung?” (1312) (Hogan notes this line could just as validly be translated, “Daimon, from where have you leapt?”, which more strongly emphasizes the fatalistic interpretation). The chorus in the fourth and final stasimon sings, “Oedipus, you are my pattern of this” (i.e., of the inevitable mutability of happiness) – “You and your daimon” (1193-4). Similarly, it denies any freedom of will to Oedipus when it sings, “Time who sees all has found you out, / against your will, your marriage was accursed” 91213-4). Finally, Oedipus states that he put out his eyes so that they may not see “the crime I have committed or had done on me” (1271-2).

As the sheer tedium of such a long list of textual clues attests, it is clear that Sophocles overwhelmingly intended his audience to see Apollo and his daimon determining Oedipus’ every step. Most critics are in fact content to accept this as the case, in every respect but one: Oedipus’ self-blinding.

It was Apollo, friends, Apollo,
that brought this bitter bitterness, my sorrows to completion,
but the hand that struck me
was none but my own (1329-33).

That this explanation given by Oedipus is too ambiguous to settle the question is shown by the fact that Dodds cites it as proof that the act was freely done, whereas Bowra cites it as proof of the contrary, that Apollo willed and Oedipus’ hands obeyed. In my own view, three arguments support the claim that Apollo was responsible for the act.

First, the parallel to Teiresias’ fateful blindness, which Hera inflicted on him because of his transgression against the gods: Oedipus had similarly transgressed against Apollo in his “god-like” human intelligence that rivaled and, in the case of Teiresias’ inability to unriddle the Sphinx, surpassed the powers of Apollo’s seer. Likewise, the priest’s supplication of Oedipus and the chorus’ turning to him to dispel the plague in the beginning of the play transgress somewhat on Apollo’s domain. And Oedipus’ ultimate transgression, of course, was to try to outwit the fate the god pronounced to him.

The second argument comes from the hand imagery in the play. Jocasta was reported to have died “of her own hand” (1237), just as Oedipus claims to have been blinded by his. In both cases, the daimonically coincidental orchestration of events leading up to these actions were by no means random nor planned nor willed by them – they both did violence to themselves in response to Apollo’s set-up. And the third and final hand image of the play, in which the herdsman’s hands are twisted behind his back, not of his own but of Oedipus’ will, invites the parallel image of Apollo forcing Oedipus’ hands to his own eyes.

The third argument involves what I referred to earlier as the “second central issue” of the play, which is namely that of the validity of prophecy. Dodds and others in the free will camp are willing enough to allow that Delphi pronounces nothing less than divinely willed fate, but they refuse to assign the same status to the pronouncements of Teiresias – that is, of seers. Yet the OT is in the end a vindication not only of Delphic priestess voicings from the Omphalos, but also of Teiresias’ readings of “the birds screaming overhead” (966). And if the guiding presence of the gods is confirmed in the flight of birds and the falling of lots, why should it be denied the same presence behind the actions of mortals? Sophocles’ intent in the OT is precisely to show that the gods leave nothing to chance – that chance is a notion stemming from the blindness of mortals to see the divine design that governs all. In this sense, the validity of seers is of more importance than that of oracles – because seers confirm  the presence of the divine behind the seemingly chance events in the natural world.

From the denial of the seers’ powers, the denial of this divine presence in the daily world is but a short step. From there, similar erosions of the old faith would logically terminate in atheism – or, in Sophocles’ terminology, the belief that “chance (tyche) is all in all” (977). It is just this process of religious erosion that Sophocles is combating in the OT. And since the institution of seers is the most vulnerable to attack, Sophocles defends it above all – through his vindication of Teiresias’ prophecy. And since Teiresias foresaw Oedipus’ self-blinding, it follows that Oedipus was destined to perform it and did not freely choose it.

Sophocles’ Assault on “Chance” (Tyche) in the OT

This explains the thematic refutation of tyche (i.e., “chance” or “luck”) that so strongly comes to the fore in the middle of the play. Teiresias taunts Oedipus that his “very luck (tyche)” with riddles was in actuality instrumental in bringing about his ruinous fate (422). Oedipus’ exultant claim to be the “child of lucky chance (tyche)” (1048) is soon transformed into the choral lament for “luckless Oedipus” (1195). And even Oedipus’ very name, which the Corinthian messenger explains is from the “tyche” (chance) event of his having been found with pierced ankles as an infant (1036), is implicitly a grim irony for the gods’ enjoyment – since its second meaning is that “seeing is knowing.”

In this way, the OT is nothing less than a dramatic demonstration that Apollo’s oracles and his seers are infallible, and that the gods steer all events. Further proof that Sophocles intended this is strongly suggested by Oedipus’ inquiry into the validity of oracles and seers in the mode of a legal trial – which ends, of course, in complete vindication of them both. A parallel pattern emerges in Jocasta’s glaringly sophistic – and ultimately invalid – manner of arguing against the validity of Apollo’s agents:

Human beings have no part in the craft of prophecy.
Of that I’ll show you short proof (708-10).

She proceeds to employ the rhetorical enthymeme (i.e., the argument by example), viz.: because the oracle to Laius proved groundless, that of Teiresias is probably groundless as well. Ironically, of course, this very refutation offers Oedipus his first hard proof that he may indeed be the pollution Teiresias proclaimed him to be – and compels the chorus, in the final stasimon, to echo Jocasta’s sophism with consummate irony by labeling Oedipus as an argument-clinching “example” (i.e., enthymeme) of human impotence in the face of the gods’ will (1193).

The Historical Context: Philosophy, Atheism, and Politics in Late 5th Century Athens

The historical context of the OT gives ample testimony to support the view that Sophocles intends the play as a defense of the gods’ omnipresence in human affairs. By the time of the tragedy’s performance around 428 BCE, Greek religion had been undergoing rapid erosion for a full century. The Milesian ontologists had since the mid-6th century explained the order and processes of the cosmos by principles having nothing to do with the gods.¹⁵ Around 500, Heraclitus had already ridiculed such central Greek religious practices as prayer, which he likened to “conversing with houses,” and expiation of blood with blood, which was “like washing off mud with mud.”¹⁶ Xenophanes had denied Olympian polytheism in the name of his transcendentally rational and non-anthropomorphic nous well before his death in 480.

With the convergence of the sophists on Athens in mid-century, the erosion quickly intensified. Protagoras, in Athens by 450, scandalized the religious traditionalists with his rhetorician’s teaching that every assertion – including “The gods exist” – is subject to rational debate.¹⁷ Reason, not tradition, was his criterion for truth – much like Oedipus, when he rejects Teiresias’ seemingly irrational revelation. Protagoras’ book, On Gods, explicitly argued that knowledge of the gods’ existence was strictly impossible.¹⁸ Equally unsettling to the foundations of religious belief was his epistemological relativism, summed up in his famous maxim,

Man is the measure of all things, for things that are that they are, for things that are not that they are not.¹⁹

These philosophical speculations were complemented by a growing current of impiety and outright atheism in the following decades. One Diagoras, from the island of Melos, publicly revealed the sacrosanct secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries in order to “thus make them ordinary.”²⁰ Athens responded to this outrageous impiety by issuing an empire-wide indictment for his arrest.

Nor did seers escape the attacks of skepticism. Democritus’ explanation of such subjective religious experiences as visions, oracles and revelations as eidola – phantoms and illusions with natural psychological causes – although later than the OT, nonetheless indicates the atmosphere of intellectual religious doubt permeating the empire in the fifth century.²¹ And in 438, ten years before the OT was performed, the seer Diopethes apparently felt threatened enough to push a bill through the Athenian assembly outlawing all who engaged in atheistic or scientific speculation. This was enough to send Anaxagoras, Pericles’ favorite philosopher, in quick flight from Athens.

Finally, there were ample political reasons to doubt the gods – and most of all, Apollo and his oracle at Delphi. Ever since Delphi proclaimed its support for Sparta at the beginning of the Pelopponesian War, Athenian patriots were all too willing to discount its powers of prophecy. Had not the oracle been egregiously mistaken when, before the Persians invaded in 480, she predicated catastrophic defeat for the Greeks? Such mistakes were now recollected with all the fervor of wartime.²²

Likewise, worship at Apollo’s shrine in Athens suffered a radical decline in precisely the days during which Sophocles must have been composing the OT. As Thucydides reports, the Athenians actually ceased their sacrifices to the god to end the current plague in the city, because they noticed the pious and impious alike fell to it.²³

Sophocles served, it must be remembered, as a priest at Apollo’s shrine in Athens. As a tragedian, moreover, he served Dionysus. The wave of atheism and impiety breaking over the city could not but have filled him with foreboding: surely he felt he was witnessing the unraveling of common beliefs that had once culturally united the Greeks. In this atmosphere of crisis, it makes abundant sense to read the Oedipus Tyrannus as a Greek jeremiad, a cautionary tale teaching, through the fate and character of Oedipus, that such displeasure with the gods as was outlined above does nothing to dispel their power. As Athens was unhappy with Delphi for siding with her enemy, so it might be unhappy with Apollo for so cruelly destroying the great and noble Oedipus. Still, as with Oedipus – and, it would turn out, with Athens – Apollo would be vindicated. No matter how strong the will of a hero, or of a people, may be, the Oedipus Tyrannus aims to demonstrate that human will is nonetheless by no means free.

Bibliography

E. R. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex,” Greece and Rome 13: 37-49 (1966).

C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean Tragedy, (Oxford, 1944).

Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, (Harvard, 1985).

Stephen Halliwell, “Where Three Roads Meet: A Neglected Detail in the Oedipus Tyrannus,” Journal of Hellenistic Studies 100: 22-37 (1980).

1. Dodds, 42. [↩]
2. ibid., 43. [↩]
3. Bowra, 182. [↩]
4. ibid., 39. [↩]
5. Burkert, 180. [↩]
6. ibid., 181. [↩]
7. ibid., 181. [↩]
8. ibid., 181 [↩]
9. ibid., 180. [↩]
10. ibid., 181 [↩]
11. ibid., 181. [↩]
12. ibid., 181. [↩]
13. Halliwell, 188. [↩]
14. Burkert, 315. [↩]
15. ibid., 315. [↩]
16. ibid., 317 [↩]
17. ibid., 318 [↩]
18. ibid., 317 [↩]
19. ibid., 318 [↩]
20. ibid., 318 [↩]
21. ibid., 316 [↩]
22. ibid., 319 [↩]
23. ibid., 319 [↩]

1. Oedipus, the Wordle
2. Daily Diigo: Free Software for Macs and PCs
3. More Free Open Source Goodness: Celtx Media Pre-Production Suite
4. Good, Evil, Nature, and the Hero – Backwards: Unsucky English, Lecture 5 (Gilgamesh, cont’d)

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