1 Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus Introduced and Translated by ...

his own destruction. There is the saying, “If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.”
Oedipus becomes a protective hero for Athens. Just before he dies, he claims time,
suffering, and his own nobility of character have been his teachers, and they have made
him strong.
In addition to "Know Thyself," the maxim just mentioned, the phrase "Nothing in
Excess" was also chiseled on the Delphic temple. Creon did everything in excess, and
Oedipus did not know himself. Yet these violations were what defined these heroes.
Oedipus is supposedly the man of knowledge, the one who solved the riddle of the
Sphinx. He knew what went on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the
evening: man. But he did not know who he was.
Freud, the father of psychology, wrote about the Oedipus complex (that everyone
has the impulse to kill his father and have a sexual relationship with his mother) and said
that myths like Sophocles’ had such power because they corresponded to deep hidden
drives within all of us. Nevertheless, Sophocles’ Oedipus did everything he possibly
could to avoid both this unholy murder and this incestuous marriage.
The poetic imagery in this play gives us a picture of the man. It talks about sight
and blindness, linking sight with knowledge and blindness with ignorance. If one sees
one knows, and if one does not see, one is ignorant. Tiresias calls Oedipus blind in his
eyes, ears, and mind, and yet he was the most intelligent of men. It is ironic in this play
that when Oedipus is blind, he finally gains knowledge and understands himself and his
relationship to the world about him. He was ignorant when he could see everything about
him, but had no insight or knowledge about who he was.
Another image is that of hunting and the hunted. Oedipus hunts for truth, but it is
fate that finally hunts him down.
People have interpreted Oedipus in many different ways. The philosopher
Nietzsche shows him as a type of superman. Some have said Sophocles wrote a drama of
fate, and that it shows that man does not have free will. But the Greeks did not have a
problem with seeing a person being ruled by destiny, and at the same time free and
responsible in his actions. Others say that this play illustrates a man with a tragic flaw
(what Aristotle called hamartia, “missing the mark”). In the New Testament hamartia
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