motion. That is not to say that it is a naturalistic play. That the palace servant who
saved the infant Oedipus by giving him to a Corinthian servant should also have been
the witness to the murder of Laius and that the same Corinthian servant should also
be the bearer of the news of the death of Polybus are coincidences that might stretch
the imagination if we were forced to reflect upon them. The legend or story of
Oedipus is full of absurdities that are concealed or disguised by a Sophoclean sleight
of hand in the plotting of the play. When the prophet Tiresias in anger tells Oedipus
that the killer of his father Laius is present and will be found to be the son and husband
to the mother who bore him (ll. 447–460) we do not know at this stage that Oedipus
has been given an oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Such
knowledge at this point would have made the scene incredible. We only learn of the
king’s knowledge of this oracle much later in the play, when he tells Jocasta of his
reasons for leaving his supposed parents Polybus and Merope in Corinth. Here it may
be noted that Oedipus did not suffer from the complex to which he has given his name
since he did all in his power to remove himself from his supposed parents.
The interweaving of the three oracles in the play (all truly Delphic in being
difficult to interpret and only partial truths) is most skilfully done. That Jocasta should
seek to deny the validity of oracles by telling another oracle (true, unbeknown to her)
that Laius would die by the hand of his own child, because she supposes that the child
of Laius has been exposed at birth and because it is believed in Thebes that Laius had
been killed by robbers (in the plural), is one of the many powerful ironies of the plot.
The denouement is singled out for praise by Aristotle in a notable passage in the
Poetics:
Some plots are simple and some complex.. .. Acomplex action is one in which
the change [of fortune] is accompanied by a discovery (anagnoresis) or a reversal
(peripeteia), or both. These should develop out of the very structure of the plot
... a reversal is a change from one state of affairs to its opposite, one which
conforms, as I have said, to probability or necessity. In Oedipus, for example, the
Messenger who came to cheer Oedipus and relieve him of his fear about his
mother did the very opposite by revealing to him who he was ... a discovery is a
change from ignorance to knowledge.... The most effective form of discovery is
that which is accompanied by reversals like the one in Oedipus. ..a discovery of
this kind in combination with a reversal will carry with it either pity or fear.
(Poetics, 9, 10)The Corinthian messenger comes to give Oedipus news that Polybus is dead and that
the Corinthians may make him king of all the isthmus (ll. 939–941). In this news both
Jocasta and Oedipus see the defeat of the oracles but, when Oedipus is still fearful
that his mother is still alive, the messenger reveals that he had received the infant
156 THE GREEKS