Table Of ContentOEDIPUS, KING OF
THEBES BY SOPHOCLES
by GILBERT MURRAY
Classic Literature Collection
World Public Library.org
Title: OEDIPUS, KING OF THEBES BY SOPHOCLES
Author: GILBERT MURRAY
Language: English
Subject: Fiction, Literature
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KING OF THEBES
OEDIPUS,
THE ATHENIAN DRAMA
FOR ENGLISH READERS
A
Series of Verse Translations of the Greek
Dramatic Poets, with Commentaries and
Explanatory Notes.
Crown 8T0, cloth, gilt top, 7s. 6d. each net.
Each Volume lUustrated from ancient
Sculptures and Vase-Painting.
AESCHYLUS: The Orestean Trilogy. By Prof.
G. C. Warr. With an Introduction On The
Rise of Greek Tragedy, and 1 3 Illustrations.
SOPHOCLES:
(Edipus Tyrannus and Coloneus,
and Antigone. By Prof. J. S. Phillimore.
With an Introduction on Sophocles and his
Treatment of Tragedy, and 16 Illustrations.
EURIPIDES:
Hippolytus; Bacchae ; Aristo-
phanes' ' Frogs.' By Prof. Gilbert Murray.
With an Appendix on The Lost Tragedies of
Euripides, and an Introduction on The Signi-
ficance of the Bacchae in Athenian History, and
1 2 Illustrations. \_Fifth Edition.
ALSO UNIFORM WITH THE ABOVE
THE HOMERIC HYMNS. A New
Prose
Rendering by Andrew Lang, with Essays
Critical and Explanatory, and 14 Illustrations.
THE PLAYS OF EURIPIDES
Translated into English Rhyming Verse, with
Explanatory Notes, by Prof. Gilbert Murray.
Hippolytus. 4th Thousand.
1
Bacchae. loth Thousand.
The Trojan Women. 9th Th. Paper Covers, is.
Electra. 1 1 th Thousand. each net.
Medea. 8th Thousand.
Also crown 8vo,
Iphigenia in Tauris. 4th Th.
cloth, gilt top,
The Frogs ofAristophanes.
2s. each net.
1 th Thousand.
(EdipusTyrannusofSophocles.
OEDIPUS
KING OF THEBES
BV
SOPHOCLES
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE
WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY
MURRAY
GILBERT
LL.D., D.Ll^Sr., F.B.A.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OP OXFORD
FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
SIXTH THOUSAND
LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN & COMPANY, LTD.
& RATHBONE PLACE
44 45
1912
[All rights reserved]
i
Performed at Covent Garden Opera House, London
January 1912
Puilishei February 1911
Kefrinted January 1912
PREFACE
If I have turned aside from Euripides for a moment
and attempted a translation of the great stage master-
my
piece of Sophocles, excuse must be the fascination
of this play, which has thrown its spell on me as on
many other translators. Yet I may plead also that
as a rule every diligent student of these great works
can add something to the discoveries of his prede-
cessors, and I think. I have been able to bring out
a few new points in the old and much-studied
Oedipus, chiefly points connected with the dramatic
technique and the religious atmosphere.
Mythologists tell us that Oedipus was originally
a daemon haunting Mount Kithairon, and Jocasta a
form of that Earth-Mother who, as Aeschylus puts
it, " bringeth all things to being, and when she hath
reared them receiveth again their seed into her body"
{Choephori, 127 cf. Crusius, Beitrdge z. Gr, Myth,
:
21). That stage of the story lies very far behind
the consciousness of Sophocles. But there does cling
about both his hero and his heroine a great deal of
very primitive atmosphere. There are traces in
Oedipus of the pre-hellenic Medicine King, the
Basileus who is also a Theos, and can make rain or
blue sky, pestilence or fertility. This explains many
things in the Priest's first speech, in the attitude
of the Chorus, and in Oedipus' own language after
PREFACE
the discovery. It partly explains the hostility of
Apollo, who is not a mere motiveless Destroyer but a
And
true Olympian crushing his Earth-born rival.
in the same way the peculiar royalty of Jocasta,
King
which makes Oedipus at times seem not the
but the Consort of the Queen, brings her near to
that class of consecrated queens described in Dr.
Frazer's Lectures on the Kingship, who are " honoured
as no woman now living on the earth."
The story itself, and the whole spirit in which
Sophocles has treated it, belong not to the fifth cen-
tury but to that terrible and romantic past from
which the fifth century poets usually drew their
material. The atmosphere of brooding dread, the
pollution, the curses the " insane and beastlike
;
cruelty," as an ancient Greek commentator calls it,
of piercing the exposed child's feet in order to ensure
its death and yet avoid having actually murdered it
{Schol. Eur. Phoen., 26) ; the whole treatment of the
parricide and incest, not as moral offences capable of
being rationally judged or even excused as uninten-
tional, but as monstrous and inhuman pollutions, the
last limit of imaginable horror all these things take
:
us back to dark regions of pre-classical and even pre-
We
homeric belief. have no right to suppose that
Sophocles thought of the involuntary parricide and
metrogamy as the people in his play do. Indeed, con-
sidering the general tone of his contemporaries and
friends, we may safely assume that he did not. But
at any rate he has allowed no breath of later en-
lightenment to disturb the primaeval gloom of his
atmosphere.
Does this in any way make the tragedy insincere
?
Description:and Antigone. By Prof. J. S. Phillimore. \_Fifth Edition in other plays also
opens at times like a sudden abyss . feel to my old master, Francis Storr, whose.
