Oedipus at Colonus

The spine is a man who arrives as a polluted beggar and leaves as a power the gods summon, and each visitor is a step in the change. Ismene brings the oracle that makes his body valuable; Theseus receives him; Creon tries to take him by force and Athens refuses; Polynices asks and is cursed. Remove Theseus and the gift has no recipient; remove Polynices and the new power is never used. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, level with The Encompassed, is the length and where it goes: Ismene’s exposition of the oracles is heavy; the argument with Creon goes back over the old guilt at a length the first defence had already covered; the seizure, the rescue and the battle ode run the suppliant mechanism in full. About a tenth could go with little loss.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. First, that a deed done in ignorance is suffered more than done: “peponthot’ esti mallon ē dedrakota”
“my deeds are things suffered rather than done” (266 to 267). Second, that the man a city casts out may carry what it most needs, and that a city is judged by whether it receives him; Theseus, once an exile himself, does. Third, and hardest, that the wronged do not forgive because forgiveness would be good for them: Oedipus refuses his son, and the play neither excuses nor condemns him, while Antigone’s plea stands beside the curse. Over all of it lies the old man’s knowledge of “all-mastering time”. Held off the top because the case on guilt is argued more than discovered, and the hero cult it ends in is a religious claim as much as a human truth.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Height comes often in the second half and twice in the first. The Colonus ode, “euippou, xene, tasde chōras”
“Of this land of fine horses, stranger, you have come to the best of dwellings” (668), praises nightingale, ivy, narcissus and crocus, the olive no enemy can destroy and Poseidon’s gifts of bit and oar, sung by old men to a dying man about the place where he will lie. Its dreadful twin is the third ode: “mē phynai ton hapanta nikai logon”
“not to be born surpasses every reckoning” (1224 to 1225). Then the thunder; the blind man rising to lead the sighted out without a hand; the voice that calls him; and Theseus seen afterwards shading his eyes. Held below the top because the middle third, Creon and the battle ode, runs flat.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Myth built. The polluted king becomes a hero whose buried body protects the land that received him and harms the land that drove him out; the whole action converts the curse into a blessing, and the play stages it as a fact of cult, with a secret grave known only to Theseus and handed down. The place is load-bearing. He rests in the grove of the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, who are the Furies: the powers that pursued the kin-killer of the Oresteia receive the parricide, and the oracle had named their seat as his end. The curse on the sons, spoken here, is the engine of the Theban myth. And the man stays particular: querulous, proud, wily about his rights, tender to his daughters and terrible to his son. Held a step from the top because religion gave Sophocles the hero cult; he built it whole, but did not invent it.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The inheritance is plain: the suppliant play of Aeschylus’ Suppliants and Euripides’ Children of Heracles and Suppliants, with its pattern of arrival, threat and Athenian defence, and the Theban saga. The turn is to take that shape and end it in neither rescue nor catastrophe but in a passing that is a summons: a tragedy whose hero’s death is his apotheosis and the city’s gain, told by a messenger who did not see the end. It returns, from an author near ninety, to the man of his most famous play, and reverses its verdict. The stake was real: the longest and most static tragedy of the corpus, a blind man held in one place for some 1,779 lines. Held below the top because the Eumenides had already ended a tragedy in Athenian cult, and the frame is inherited whole.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The suppliant form sets the hero at a boundary he must not cross, the grove’s edge marked by a rock, and makes him wait while the world comes to him: the stillness is the argument, since a man who could once move nothing proves to be the thing every party must move. Then the form breaks at the thunder. The blind man who has been led by the hand for the whole play stands and leads, and the drama of sight that was Oedipus Tyrannus is answered in staging, not in words. The end is told, not shown, by a messenger who did not see it: the play knows that death cannot be witnessed, and only Theseus saw, and he cannot say. Held off the top by the middle, where the suppliant mechanism is a container rather than an instrument.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: some twenty-four centuries, and a modern critical tradition that runs from Jebb’s commentary through Reinhardt, Knox’s The Heroic Temper (1964) and Winnington-Ingram, still arguing. The questions stay open. Whether the curse on Polynices is justice, rage or the voice of the gods through a man about to become one; whether Oedipus is innocent, as he argues, or only beyond punishment; what the passing is, death, translation or apotheosis, since the messenger cannot say; what the play meant to an Athens near defeat. Formal depth yields too, in the play’s many unspoken answers to the Tyrannus. Held a step below the highest return because its tradition is narrower and its centre, the hero cult, is less open to those outside the religion.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is Attic tragedy and the Greek literature of its century and after. The force is high and bounded. The play made the end of a life its whole action, joined tragedy to cult as no surviving play had at this length, and set the pattern of the late work that returns to its maker’s first matter and transfigures it. But it came at the end of the form, written as Athens neared defeat and produced only after its author’s death, and it closed a tradition more than it opened one. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is modest beside the Tyrannus or Antigone, since Aristotle builds on the Tyrannus and not on this; and the later reach is real and thin: the “not to be born” ode, a commonplace with Theognis behind it and a long life after; Mendelssohn’s incidental music (1845); Yeats’s version (1934); Eliot’s The Elder Statesman (1958), which rewrites it; and The Gospel at Colonus (1983).

Score: 8.4 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over some twenty-four centuries, and the text survives whole. It came down in the medieval selection of seven plays, with the tenth-century Laurentian manuscript (Laur. 32.9) as the principal witness, and was first printed by Aldus in 1502; it has been edited, translated and taught since, and is staged in the modern repertory. Its lyrics are corrupt in places, as every tragedy’s are, but its form is complete. Charged against it: its presence has been narrower than that of its two Theban companions. It stood outside the Byzantine school selection of Ajax, Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus and was copied less; it is performed less; and it is read more often as the third of the Theban plays than for itself. That bears on presence, not on form or fabric, and the text is neither fragmentary nor long unread.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Sophocles at full command. The first line sets the play’s situation in five words: “teknon typhlou gerontos Antigonē”
“child of a blind old man, Antigone” (1): who he is, who guides him, what he has become. The sung entry is a lyric dialogue in which the chorus learn his name against his will. The entrances are timed so that each arrival is announced, seen and argued: Ismene on a Sicilian colt, Creon with his men, Polynices weeping. The rhetoric is fitted to the speaker, in Creon’s plausible piety, Polynices’ appeal and Oedipus’ curse. The messenger’s speech is a masterpiece of what it does not tell. Charged: the Creon debate repeats; the battle ode is conventional; some stretches of the first episode are exposition, not drama.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the Colonus ode’s nightingale and olive, sung in gentleness, and the curse on Polynices, the most savage speech in Sophocles. One law governs both: the sanctity of a place, and of a dying man at the edge of the gods’ power, which blesses those who receive and destroys those who expel. The grove of the Eumenides is that law in one image, since the same goddesses are Furies and Kindly Ones. The old oracle and the new one Ismene brings work by the same physics: the gods who cast him down now raise him up, as she tells him on her arrival. Charged: Creon’s episode, half melodrama, runs to a lower law than the rest, and the praise of Athens, though built in, is at moments a civic hymn more than a dramatic necessity.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged as one tragedy, it holds many orders, and joins them. The sacred is there in the grove, in the rite of purification given in detail, and in the gods below; the city in Athens and its law of suppliants, set against Thebes and its use of force; war in the coming of the Seven; the family in a father, two daughters who are also his sisters, two sons who are also his brothers, and the curse that passes down; old age and death, which are the whole action; and the land itself, horse, olive, sea and river. All of it passes through one man in one place on one day. What holds it at the foot of the twelve, level with The Inevitable, is that form: history is a ground, labour and the common life are absent, and the city appears as an ideal more than as a polity.

Score: 8.3 / 10