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Antigone at Colonus and the End(s) of Tragedy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Brooke Holmes
Brooke Holmes*
Affiliation:
Princeton University

Extract

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Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, it would seem, is an exercise in closure. In the opening scene, Oedipus, worn down by years of wandering blind and hungry, arrives at the borders of Athens. Here is where his legendary sufferings—his murder of his father, his incestuous marriage to his mother, his betrayal by his sons, his exile from Thebes—are fated to end. Following his miraculous death, his body will become a sacred gift to the city that receives him, protecting it against future attack. In the closing moments of the play, everything unfolds according to plan. Oedipus disappears offstage and mysteriously descends into the earth. The king of Athens, Theseus, alone marks the spot of his disappearance, knowledge he will pass down to his sons as part of his responsibility to the city. By the end of the tragedy, then, Oedipus has made his way home to the gods in a land capable of honouring his awesome, singular fate.

The concept of ‘coming home’ is integral, as this précis suggests, to the play's logic of closure. Yet, crucially, it governs only one of the two planes on which the drama unfolds, that of the gods. Oedipus' life has been in the hands of the gods since before he was born. That they reclaim him at the end of his life gives his exit the feel of a return. By contrast, the path to Athens, for all its meandering, is not circular but linear. Athens is definitively not Thebes, as the tragedy demonstrates over and over (nor is it Corinth, Oedipus' other point of origin). Thebes is, rather, the home that Oedipus rejects, most spectacularly through his resistance to Creon's demand that he return to the city of his birth. What is more, he repudiates any relationship to the Theban throne. When Polyneices arrives to ask his father to support his bid to reclaim the kingship from his brother Eteocles, Oedipus does not simply refuse to intervene but drives his son away with curses. His refusal is a refusal not just of Thebes but of the Labdacid line altogether (he goes so far as to call Polyneices ἀπάτωϱ, ‘fatherless’, 1383; see also 1369: ὑμεῖς δ' ἀπ' ἄλλον ϰοὐϰ ἐμοῦ πεϕύϰατον, ‘you are from another and not born from me’); his pact with Theseus creates an alternate genealogy of fathers and sons. Seen in this light, Oedipus' arrival at Colonus and, ultimately, his dramatic exit become the final stages of a process not of coming home but of leaving Thebes behind and with it ‘the radical tragic terrain where there can be no escape from the tragic in the resolution of conflict or in the institutional provision of a civic future beyond the world of the play’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 42 , Issue 1-2: The Enigmatic Context: Approaches to Greek Drama , 2013 , pp. 23 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 2013

References

NOTES

1. For the importance of a concept of home to Oedipus' story, see Zeitlin (1990b), 132; see also 155-58 on Oedipus at Colonus.

2. Zeitlin (1990b), 131.

3. The contrast between closure and openness is strong enough for some critics to complain that Sophocles should have ended the play with the messenger speech. See, e.g., the comments of Waldock (1956), 271: ‘…Sophocles unduly spins out the ending. Antigone and Ismene have really nothing to say and they say it to the tune of too many verses.’

4. Lacan (1992), 243-87; Irigaray (1974), 214-26; Irigaray (2010); Butler (2000). For an overview of these readings, see Burian (2010). On the contemporary reception of Antigone, see also Holmes (2012), 150-80, with further bibliography.

5. See, e.g., Winnington-Ingram (1954), 24; Taplin (1983), 162f.; Zeitlin (1990b), 161-63; Alaux (1992), 228f.; Markantonatos (2002), 147-60; Markantonatos (2007), 118; Dunn (2012), 273f.

6. Saxonhouse (2005) offers an ‘Antigone becoming Antigone’ reading of Euripides' Phoenissae, although the Euripidean Antigone represents a different endpoint than the hero of Sophocles' Antigone. For a sketchy ‘prequel’ reading, see also O'Connell (1967). On the unity of Antigone across the three Theban plays, see Johnson (1997); Griffith (2005b), 94f.

7. For the tradition of Oedipus' death at Thebes, see also Il. 23.677-80; Aesch. Sept. 914-1004. But we should also be wary of presuming a univocal archaic tradition of myths surrounding Oedipus and his family: see Mastronarde (2004), 17f.

8. Seidensticker (1972); Markantonatos (2007), 203-16.

9. See E. Ph. 1650-1746. Antigone first declares she will bury her brother at whatever cost but then seems to decide instead to accompany her father in exile to Colonus, where he is fated to die ‘after wandering’ (1744-46 remain difficult to accommodate here and may be interpolated): see Mastronarde (2004), 592f., 638f. A similar problem lingers in straightforward interpretations of the Antigone as the sequel to the Oedipus at Colonus, insofar as it is hard to reconcile Antigone's many years of wandering and lost maidenhood with her characterisation in the Antigone as ‘girl’ (ϰóϱη, e.g., 395, 769) and ‘child’ (παῖς, e.g., 378, 561, 654) or Oedipus' own marking of time passed in exile at OC 395. We know little about Euripides' lost Antigone except that it involved the marriage of Antigone and Haemon. But it is clearly marked by Euripidean inventiveness.

10. ‘…although the tangle of unmanageable forces with which Antigone is implicated at Colonus prompts the audience to recall relevant Theban disasters, the frustratingly replicated sequences end on a positive note. It is therefore hard to escape the conclusion that an indispensable part of the intertextual strategy of Oedipus at Colonus is the decisive inversion of those previous tragedies intimately connected with the legend of Thebes': Markantonatos (2007), 216. See also Markantonatos (2002), 161-65. Yet Markantonatos does not doubt that the events at Thebes will unfold in their tragically fated terms. He argues that the fact that the audience has this knowledge gives them a less positive perspective on Theseus, who fails to protect Antigone and Ismene: Markantonatos (2007), 221.

11. Markantonatos (2007), 223. On an ‘Athenian’ or democratic Antigone (in the Antigone), see Foley (1995); Patterson (2006), 35-39. Cf. Honig (2009), who argues that Antigone takes a stand that is political but not democratic.

12. See, e.g., Ant. 988-90, 1087; OT 444, 1292; Pho. 834. On similarities between Oedipus and Teiresias, see Ahrensdorf (2009), 51-55.

13. I am not arguing that the end of the Oedipus Tyrannus deliberately anticipates the plot of the Oedipus at Colonus. Such a suspicion has led to a prolonged debate about whether the ending of the Oris genuine or, rather, interpolated by someone aware of the OC. Rather, I see the OT closing with an openendedness that is not in itself suspect nor unlike the openendedness of the OC (discussed further below). The case for interpolation is made most forcefully by Dawe (2001). For arguments in favour of the authenticity of the final scene, see Davies (1982 and 1991a), where he defends the idea that the OT ends ‘with a carefully contrived uncertainty and suspension’ that is ‘extremely Sophoclean’ (1991a, 9); Budelmann (2006), 57-59; Finglass (2009); on the non-closure of the final scene in the OT, see further Burian (2009). These debates do not prevent us from recognising that the events of the OC can be retrospectively seen as a realisation of Oedipus' ambiguous remarks about his future in the OT (and probably were seen this way).

14. The bibliography on Oedipus' political status is considerable. See esp. Easterling (1997), 276; Vidal-Naquet (1996).

15. The importance of the grove and its boundaries to expressing the tragedy's major themes has been stressed by a number of critics (without the specific relationship between Oedipus and Antigone being analysed): see esp. Dunn (1992); Edmunds (1996); Markantonatos (2007), 72-80.

16. Taplin (1985), 118 n.6, observes that Antigone's lines here are ‘the nearest Sophocles comes to Euripidean monody’.

17. Ancient scholiasts recognised the clear contrast of genres here: see ∑ on 237 de Marco (cited at Markantonatos [2002], 35 n.7), comparing the ‘pity-speech’ (ἐλεεινολογία) of Antigone to her father's appeal to reason (τò διϰαιολογιϰόν).

18. On the Athenian values invoked here and the interest of the play in ‘the evolution of the Athenian community's moral perspective’, see Slatkin (1986).

19. On the restriction of touch between adult males in tragedy, see Kosak (1999), esp. 93-99.

20. See, for example, E. Ph. 1693f., 1699f. (Oedipus seeks to touch the corpses of his family members).

21. He is making specific reference to sharing meals with his young daughters. Johnson (1997), 377f., draws attention to how unusual this would have been, both in contemporary Athens and in an imagined heroic age. For a defence of the authenticity of these lines, see Davies (1991a), 10-12, and Finglass (2007), 46-54, esp. 46f., against Dawe (2001), 6-11; on the end of the play more generally, see n.13 above.

22. The verb ἐμφύω is Homeric, as Jebb notes: see, e.g., Il. 6.253 (another child-parent scene, with Hecuba greeting Hector on his return to the citadel), Od. 10.397.

23. Knox (1964), 152.

24. See Oedipodeia Fr. 1 in West (2003). Pausanias argues that the indication at Od. 11.274 that the gods revealed the incest ‘straightaway’ (ἂφαϱ) means that there was no time for Jocasta to bear Oedipus four children and concludes that Euryganeia was the mother of his offspring (9.5.10f.). See also Pherecydes FGrH 3 F 95 and Peisandros FGrH 16 F 10, with Lloyd-Jones (2002), 9f.; Mastronarde (2004), 20-22, 31 -38 (on the Peisander Scholion). On the basis of the extant evidence, March (1987), 138, 141-45, concludes that in pre-tragic versions of the Oedipus myth, Euryganeia was the mother to Oedipus' children (she credits Aeschylus with giving Jocasta this role and therefore heightening the horror of Oedipus' story). See also Jebb (1900), 92 ad 534.

25. See also 1639, the last time Oedipus touches (ψαύσας) his daughters before departing.

26. I am grateful to Bonnie Honig for pushing me to see this point.

27. For the association of burial and a ‘common bed’, see S. Ant. 71-74 (ϰεῖνον δ' ἐγὼ / θάψω. ϰαλόν μοι τοῦτο ποιούσῃ θανεῖν. / φίλη μετ' α ὐτοῦ ϰείσομα ι, φίλου μὲτα / ὅσια πανουϱγήσασ' [‘But I will bury him: for it would be honourable for me to die doing that. I will lie loved with him, loved, having dared a righteous crime’]); see also 524f. Antigone stresses in the Antigone that she and Polyneices came from the same womb (e.g., 466 and esp. 511: τοὺϛ όμοσπλχνουϛ).

28. On the tumultuous feel of the exodos, see Markantonatos (2002), 147-60.

29. For ἐϱῆμοϛ, see also S. Ant. 773, 919.

30. On the unnerving quality of Antigone (in the eponymous play), see Griffith (2005b). For a different take on Antigone's behaviour as a shock to the audience, see Sourvinou-Inwood (1990). On the disruptive force of female lament more generally in the Antigone, see Segal, (1995), 119–37Google Scholar.

31. See n.5 above.

32. Cf. Dawe (1967), who sees in Antigone's hopefulness an attempt by Sophocles ‘to diminish any feeling in the audience's mind that there is still something to come’ (18). (Dawe, it should be noted, is more interested in defending his views on the end of the Septem than in a reading of the OC.) The critical investment in Antigone as a paradigm of tragic futility can be seen in Davies' characterisation of Dawe's reading as ‘as wrong as is humanly possible’: Davies (1991b), 271 n.10.

33. Butler (2000), 65, also sees the Oedipus at Colonus as destabilising the father's curse but reads this curse in terms of kinship norms.

34. The use of δύο δ' ἄτα at 535 is anticipated by Creon's use of the same dual to refer to Antigone and Ismene at S. Ant. 533 as ‘vipers’ who lie in the house, secretly drinking the king's blood.

35. On its place in contemporary theory, see n.4 above. On the contemporary international performance tradition, see Goff and Simpson (2007); Wilmer and Žukauskaite (2010), esp. the essays in section IV; Mee and Foley (2011).

36. On uncertain endings as a peculiarly Sophoclean technique, see Roberts (1988), 188-94; Davies (1991a), 9f. See also Budelmann (2006), esp. 45f., on the concept of the ‘mediated ending’, and n.13 above on the handling of closure in the OT.

37. I am grateful to audiences at Duke, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, New York University and Princeton for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper. I am indebted, too, to the anonymous reviewers for Ramus and especially Nancy Worman, Froma Zeitlin and Bonnie Honig for their comments, criticisms and encouragement.