The Twist Is in the Title (Oedipus Tyrannos, Part 1)

On this week's episode of the Norton Library Podcast, we welcome Emily Wilson, acclaimed translator of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad, to discuss her recent translation of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannos.

Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies and Graduate Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca.

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Oedipus Tyrannos,  go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/OT. 

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Oedipus Tyrannos: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4MD6ds83udqlbI8jvbR8ic?si=ea7aa9974f2e4fb1.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/oedipustyrannos/part1/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present part one of our interview devoted to Sophocles’ great tragedy, Oedipus Tyrannos, with its editor Emily Wilson. In this first episode, we'll discover who Sophocles was and how this great work came to be while also discussing its historical context, the challenges of translation, and much more. Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Among her many publications, she has translated Euripides, Homer, and Seneca, including three books available in Norton Library editions: Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Homer's “The Odyssey,” and, the topic of today's episode, Sophocles’ “Oedipus Tyrannos.” Emily Wilson, welcome to the Norton Library Podcast. 

[Emily:] Thank you for having me! 

[Mark:] So, maybe we can start by talking about how Oedipus Tyrannos came into being. 

[Emily:] It's a tragedy composed and, presumably, originally directed and choreographed by Sophocles, who was an ancient Athenian tragedian. Um, and it would have been put on in the late fifth century BCE, probably around the year 429, but there's debate and controversy about the exact year, um, as part of a tetralogy. So, every – every ancient Athenian tragedy was performed as a sort of whole day activity, so it would have been starting at dawn, a set of four plays, and then you can leave the theater and go off and get drunk for the rest of the day. 

[Mark:] So, would this have been a narrative that the contemporary audience would have been familiar with? Or did Sophocles do something unusual with this idea? 

[Emily:] Both! As in the case of most Athenian tragedies, it's based on pre-existing myth. So, the audience of the play is expected already to know the outlines of the story, to know about the riddle of the Sphinx, for instance, which is never told directly in the play because you're assumed already to know the – know about the Sphinx. So, you'll already know that there was a sphinx that was cursing the city of Thebes and would only stop lurking there, um, eating people if somebody could solve the riddle, and Oedipus (EE-dipus) or Oedipus (EH-dipus) was the one who managed to solve the riddle. So, the Oedipus that we meet in Sophocles’ play is a know-it-all who's already solved the riddle and we know why he thinks he knows everything about Thebes already, because he's proved himself with that. So we don't – the audience doesn't need to be told that. Aeschylus and Euripides also wrote plays about Oedipus. Um, there are a couple of things that are probably distinctive about Sophocles' version, though, one of which is that, um, we – you know, there are other versions of the myth in which either he isn't blinded or he doesn't necessarily blind himself. So, we know that in the Euripides version, he was blinded by other people. He didn't blind himself. So the self-blinding is an important element in Sophocles’ treatment of the, of the myth. And also the focus that Sophocles has on the multiplicity of oracles, the multiplicity of riddles – it's not just one riddle in this play, there are many enigmas.  

[Mark:] Let's talk about Sophocles for a minute. In your introduction, you talk about him in a way that makes it seem like he was prolific. He was a real man of the theater. Where would you locate him in the history of Greek theater? 

[Emily:] He was very prolific, but then many of his contemporaries were also prolific and we don't have most Athenian tragedy. We don't have most of Sophocles, um, we only have seven plays out of an output of over a hundred. Um, but we also don't have most of Aeschylus or Euripides, and we don't have any of Agathon and the many other Athenian tragedians who are winning first prize against many of the ones that we know about. So, he live – Sophocles lived throughout most of the fifth century BCE. He was born in the 490s and died in, around 406, so right at the end of the fifth century. Oedipus Tyrannos was composed early on during the Peloponnesian War, the big war between Athens and Sparta that dominated the last decades of the fifth century. 

[Mark:] So, in addition to the war, what's useful to know about the fifth century BC that contributed to Sophocles' career and would have been known to the theatergoers? 

[Emily:] So, Sophocles would have been known as a sort of public figure as well as as a tragedian. Um, theater wasn't a sort of marginal thing that old people go to in their retirement in the way that it is nowadays. It was something that most adult male citizens would have wanted to show up at the civic and religious festival that included the multiple-day drama festivals in, um, in Athens. I think – and there are several important things to know about the world of Athens during the time of this play’s composition. One is that it was this – it was the start of a huge imperial war between Athens and Sparta that came as the aftermath of Athens building up more and more and more economic and social, political, cultural, capital over the course of the previous decades after, um, when Sophocles was a teenager, the Athenians had fought off attempts by the Persians to invade Attica and take over. So, the Persian Empire was obviously a much bigger, a much bigger deal, um, in the fifth century than anything in the Greek-speaking world. But the Athenians had got richer and richer in the, um, in their part of the Mediterranean and had begun colonizing more and more neighboring areas. And then, also, both through the process of imperialism, colonization, and also through trade, there was a lot of movement of peoples back and forth. And Athens had already become a sort of hub for education and the spread of ideas, the new ideas represented by the “sophists,” the wisdom teachers, who were guys from other Greek-speaking cities who flocked to Athens because the Athenians were rich enough – they could pay these, um, immigrants to educate their sons in new ideas and to spread new ideas about “what is wisdom,” “what is language,” “what is truth,” “what are the gods?” This – it was an intellectual center as well as a trade center. Um, and so I think the play, the context of the play in terms of, um, how Oedipus thinks he's an immigrant, he thinks he's a wise guy who's come to a new place, almost like a sophist, but in fact, of course, he's not an immigrant at all, he's a native born Theban. But he doesn't know that. So, I think mixed feelings in Athens about the movements of peoples from one place to another are really important in this play, as well as the sort of political paranoia that you see in the Creon and Tiresias scenes of this play about, um – Oedipus sort of meditating on who, “who are all these other guys who want to take power over me?” and also what kind of system, what kind of political system, does Athens have? Athens was very much conscious of being, um, in a sense a democracy, priding itself on calling itself a “demokratia,” place where the “demos,” the people who aren't necessarily aristocratic by birth, share power together, in contrast to other Greek-speaking cities where it might be one man rule, the rule of a “tyrannos,” or tyrant, or it might be oligarchy, the rule of several guys – presumably aristocratic guys sharing power.  

[Mark:] Uh, the play also starts with mention of a plague. Where does that fit in, in terms of the historical context of this play? 

[Emily:] Absolutely, yes. I was thinking of going to, going there first, but I think— [Laughter] I was sort of bracketing it, but I'm glad we're going to it by itself. Some people say, “This play must have been first performed in 429, couldn't have been later, because we know that in 430 there was an absolutely devastating plague in the city of Athens.” And so some scholars say Athenian tragedy was never quite as on the nose as that – that you wouldn't compose a play that's so directly about what's going on right now, which is, everyone is dying of plague. And that's what's happening at the start of Oedipus. It seems to me that it's actually quite possible that it was composed either in the year or the year after the plague. I don't think there's any sort of a priori reason to think Sophocles couldn't have been writing about current events. Um, it's also possible that if it wasn't directly related to the plague of 430, that wasn't the only plague that had ever struck the Greek-speaking world. So, plague, as well as war, would have been – and as well as immigration – all three of those things would have been direct parts of the audience’s experience. 

[Mark:] So, do you see Sophocles as a writer who is dealing in classic themes and also contemporary events? He's making comments that are sociopolitical and contemporary as well as they might be, uh, mythical and, uh, historical? 

[Emily:] The received wisdom is that Euripides is the tragedian who's always writing about current events, that the Trojan War in Euripides is *always* the Peloponnesian War. Um, he's always sort of drawing direct parallels between the world of myth and the world of whatever is happening right now in Athens, the city of the veterations who always have their eye on the main chance, all that kind of thing. In Sophocles, it's much more subtle and it's – there's never quite so direct a parallel to be drawn, at least many people think there isn't quite so direct a parallel to be drawn. But, of course, Sophocles was living through the same socio-historical life events that Euripides was living through, and he was, if anything, even more directly engaged with those events, in that he was also – he served as a general for the city, he took on civic offices, he played a direct part in the political life of Athens. Um, it's never a sort of one to one thing. It's never that Sophocles – no chorus in Sophocles says, “Power, oh my goodness! Power is so, so dangerous, especially in this particular year of 429!” or whatever it may be. Um, so it's never sort of spelled out. But I think it's always there in the background, that there are particular themes that he's interested in in terms of community and who's inside and who's outside. Those are not irrelevant themes for the zeitgeist of Athens in the 430s or 420s, but they're also, of course, present in myth, too. So, it can be both. 

[Mark:] Emily, let's talk for a minute about translating the play. I know that you've, uh, you've translated many works, including the Odyssey and the Iliad. Is there something about translating Oedipus that presents particular challenges or makes it unique? 

[Emily:] With all of my translations from metrical verse texts, I very much wanted to use metric verse in English. Um, but the particular styles of Homeric verse versus Euripidean or versus Sophoclean verse, each of those have a very, very different texture in the Greek. Um, so I'd done some translations of some Euripidean plays before I did this one of Sophocles, and so I was conscious already of just how fun it can be to do verse drama as opposed to epic, where it's all the same meter, whereas with verse drama you get to play around with lyric meter as well and make sure that you can use different rhythms for the chorus versus the dialogue, which I use – which I do iambic meter as the original does. Um, but with Sophocles, I very much wanted to do something to show how dense the verse is. It's much, much denser than the Odyssey, where – or the Iliad – where there are extended similes, metaphors are spelt out, and you get several lines to explain what the metaphor is or what the simile is. Whereas in Sophocles, there are going to be multiple metaphors packed together and you have to just make them getable within a line or two, but you can't spell everything out because that destroys the way that Sophocles is always setting a – setting a riddle for you. Um, so the denseness as well as the fluency, it has to be dense but not feel forced or crabbed. And that's a very difficult stylistic feat to pull off, I think. 

[Mark:] You feel conscious about trying to capture Sophocles' idiosyncrasies and his particular style as a writer? 

[Emily:] That's what I want to do. I mean, it's not that I want to just make this sound like “ye oldie ancient greeky.” [Laughter] Because I, you know, ye oldie ancient greeky is very different depending on which of the ancient greeky authors you're reading. And I think a lot of my job as a translator is to, to be disguised in different styles. 

[Mark:] One of the challenges that you talk about in your introduction, Emily, is that Sophocles seems to have a lot of puns and humor in his tragedy. And how did you go about translating that into English? 

[Emily:] Yes, so I – one of the big sequences of puns is all the different words that have to do with feet. Um, and Oedipus’ name, oida-pus, um, he himself puns on that name. Not necessarily as a joke, but one can laugh or not laugh – a pun doesn't have to be funny, right? [Laughter] Very often they’re unfunny. But, so, oida-pus – a “pus” is a foot, um, as in “podietry,” and oida (οἶδα) can mean “I know” but then the verb oideo (οἰδέω) can also can mean “I swell.” So, does he have swollen feet because, because of the injuries to his feet as a baby when he was exposed? Or does he know about feet – he's the riddle solver, the Sphinx solver. So there's a sort of pun that's inherent in Oedipus’ name, that he himself draws attention to when he calls himself, um, “know-nothing Oedipus.” In the Greek, there's a sort of pun on the language, which is more or less impossible to get in English because our verb “to know” doesn't sound like oeda or oida, so I felt like I couldn't do that one and it was very frustrating! But there were a whole lot of other puns on feet and falling down or getting up again that I felt I could do things with. I mean, for instance, I – and I think the reader might or might not get this – but I use the word “impediment”— 

[Mark:] Yes! 

[Emily:] —which comes from – which is cognitively related to the Latin for “foot.” So, if I can insert a little bit of extra word play – even if some readers might get it, some readers might not – I want there to be a possibility of layers, of word play, especially in those sort of crucial areas of – this play is very concerned with standing and with feet and and how many feet do people have, as well as with hands, eyes, all these other body parts, which is so crucial. 

[Mark:] So, you have to be judicious about how literal you're going to be and how mindful you are of the contemporary reader? 

[Emily:] Mhmm! I'm not writing – I can't write for the ancient Greek reader, because she's dead. You know, I can only write for the readers who are alive. So, it has to be a text that works for whoever might conceivably be reading it, and ideally, I – I don't think Sophocles' puns, in most cases, are meant to be ridiculous. I think they’re word play that – there might be some element of black humor, for instance, in these most obvious elements early on, when Oedipus is saying he'll fight for Laius “as if he was his own father.” It's almost funny, because we're laughing at him for not knowing what he's done. But it's also, you know, becomes increasingly horrifying that you can say things you don't know how many different meanings they have. So puns are actually serious, too. 

[Mark:] As you stated, it – the title itself presents a translation issue. Every time I've seen the play, or most of the time I see the play, it's “Oedipus Rex,” “Oedipus the King.” Why were you unwilling to go along with that? 

[Emily:] The political terms in general are so difficult to translate, because our our terms for political forms of government are, of course, different from ancient Greek terms for forms of government. And, and I considered calling him “Oedipus the President,” um, because— [laughter] — I think, which I kind of like! And I was, I was talked out of it. But I think, in a way, it would be good because it suggests as “tyrannos” does, um, a one-man or a one-person ruler who has executive privilege, executive power, but does, to some extent, share power – Oedipus seems to share power with Jocasta and his brother-in-law Creon, and he – and it's also a non-inherited role, as a president is. So a tyrannos is not necessarily a bad thing. Some Greek city-states were proud to be ruled by tyrannoi – a tyrannos, who might very well have presented himself as appealing to the populace and then a… a tyrannos might have driven out an earlier oligarchic regime, where it could have been a group of aristocrats and then some single guy comes on and says, “I'm going to rule for the people, as a president is supposed to do. And I'm going to save you from whatever's been going on.” In Oedipus’ case, it's a mythical sphinx, but, of course, in the real life cases of real, a real-life tyrannos, it wouldn't be a mythical sphinx. It would be, “these aristocrats are treating the peasants very badly,” and, “I'm going to share things out a little bit more equally and not charge you as much, um, in terms of how much you have to give me.” So, a tyrannos is a non-elected and non-inherited kind of ruler. Well, and there's another word in ancient Greek for a ruler who rules by, um, which is used for a ruler who might have had, his father might previously have been a king, a “basileus,” or in Latin, a “rex.” So if you call the play “Oedipus Rex,” you suggest Oedipus is a person whose father was a king. So in a way, that title is a spoiler, right? 

[Mark:] Ahh, yes. 

[Emily:] That title is saying Oedipus’ father is Laius. But Oedipus doesn't know that! So, I don't think we should come into the play sort of defining him as, “Here is Oedipus, the son of Laius.” I think we should come into the play defining him as he defines himself, as “the interloper who's now the ruler.” And that person is a tyrannos, not a basileus or a rex. 

[Mark:] That's fascinating. When you embark on translating this book, are you gathering as many English translations and previous translations as there have been? Because it seems like there would be just a trove of previous attempts for this. What's your process? 

[Emily:] I didn't do that. My process was really, um, a lot of rereading the Greek, and I also read, um, especially two different –  I read two different commentaries very closely. There was a new commentary that came out, um, fairly soon – fairly recently before I was working on the translation that was extremely useful to me. And there was a somewhat older commentary that I also worked with, and then a couple of other, even earlier, even older commentaries. So, I did a lot of work with commentaries and dictionaries to try and figure out what's the nuance of this? What's – what exactly might be going on in this line? What kinds of, um, debates are there about what's going on in this line and that line? But I didn't look at other translations. I didn't feel like that was going to be useful in terms of, um, if I learn that somebody else has solved this translation dilemma one way or the other then I have to decide, “Am I going to steal that?” And then I feel bad about that, and maybe I've just deprived myself of a solution I could otherwise have used if I didn't know somebody else already used it. One last question about the translation, Emily. Is there a moment in the play that is particularly controversial or might be – the meaning of it or the description of it might be wildly dependent on which way a translator goes? Was there such a moment for you during the translation? 

[Emily:] Um, I mean there were – there were several moments of textual, um, debate in the play, um, where the meaning might be different depending which, um, textual variant you adopt. And one of the most famous ones in this play is, um, is a line in the chorus, which – where it's either, um, “violence begets the tyrant” or “the tyrant begets violence.” And so, this sort of question of, where does it – if there is such a thing as the abuse of power – where does it start? Does it start with bad behavior? Or does it start with a particular political role?  

[Mark:] Maybe we can think further about the play by examining some of the major characters of the play. And, uh, you – just in your previous answer – just talked about the chorus. And one of the really conspicuous things for a modern reader might be to look at this and see how prominent the chorus is. Can you talk about the chorus's role, in general, in Greek theater, and also in this play? 

[Emily:] Yeah! So, we're told by Aristotle, the philosopher who lived a sort of – in the following century, that, um, that tragedy developed out of the chorus when a particular actor sort of stepped away from the chorus and then there was a single person as well as the group of singers and dancers. So, the older form is imagined to be choral poetry, which involves both music, dancing, and a group of people, either a group of men or a group of women – it's always same sex choruses in ancient Greek poetry – who are singing, dancing… And the shape of an ancient Greek theater, um, is all around the “orchestra,” which means “the dancing area.” That's the area where the chorus is going to do their elaborate choreography, singing and dancing, and then at the backdrop of the theater will be the wooden stage, the “skene,” where the actors would do their thing. So you can see just architecturally that, in a way, the acting part – that we think of as the primary part – is sort of an afterthought, architecturally. The primary thing, the first thing, is the chorus. Um, we know that Sophocles made various adaptations and changes to the use of the chorus and that there was sort of debate among fellow Athenian tragedians about the way that one should use the chorus. Should the chorus be a character in their own right? Should they intervene in the action? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Sometimes the chorus has more or less of a, of a part. Sometimes the chorus seems to, sort of, be on the same side as the protagonist, sometimes less so. And, of course, in this play the chorus is a group of Theban elders, of Theban old men who seem, at first, to be very much supporters of Oedipus as the ruler but as Oedipus’ own role seems to change and shift once we find out new things, as he finds out new things, the role of the chorus also changes, I think, in the course of the play.  

[Mark:] So, does the chorus provide exposition, or judgment, or kind of, uh, like a conscience that the audience might be thinking of? 

[Emily:] I mean, I think the chorus *can* be closely allied with the audience, but it doesn't necessarily have to be, right? It can be very different from the audience, and if you think about comic choruses in Aristophanes, the chorus can be frogs or clouds, and the audience probably doesn't identify as frogs. Um, in this case, presumably the Athenian audience might well have seen Thebes as both similar and different. The tragic mirror of Thebes is, “this is this city which is both like and unlike us. It's like us in that they seem to have similar preoccupations, and yet they're also so much more incestuous and prone to destroying themselves than we are. And also they're not, they're not a democracy – unlike us.” 

[Mark:] Last question about the chorus. You said Sophocles… the – the role changes as the play evolves? Can you explain that? 

[Emily:] So, I mean, I think you were sort of asking about whether the chorus describes, comments, all that kind of thing. The relaying of new information in this play happens through the series of different messengers, right? So, there's a very dynamic usage of “how does exposition happen?” It's through multiple different characters coming on with new information. And then in the final sequence – after Oedipus has put out his own eyes with stabbing himself with the, um, the pins from his wife's dress – um, after that the chorus challenges him and says, “This is – this was not the right thing to do. You shouldn't have blinded yourself.” Right? So, the chorus takes on this adversarial and inherently dialogic, um, relationship with Oedipus, who then – And Oedipus himself is also speaking in – or singing, it would have been – in lyric choral meter. So he has a sort of choral role as there's a call and response element in Oedipus’ relationship with the chorus in that sequence, which is very different from the way that they're begging their ruler for help from the plague and then also doing, sort of, very self-contained odes about the nature of power and human suffering. 

[Mark:] You addressed this in the introduction: to what extent is Oedipus a hero? Do we admire him? Would they have admired him in contemporary Athens? 

[Emily:] So, the word “hero” comes from the ancient Greek word “herōs” (ἥρως). Um, within contemporary – contemporary to the late fifth century context – he was certainly a hero in that sense, in that there was a hero cult to him, um, just outside Athens in Sophocles’ birthplace, Colonus, which is the setting of his last play the “Oedipus at Colonus.” Um, there was a sense of Oedipus is somebody who'd become semi-divine, so the most polluted of all can become the most holy. There's a sort of sacredness about Oedipus. He was the subject of cult. There were many characters in myth who were either close to the gods, or demigods, who, all over the Greek speaking world, had sanctuaries or shrines that were a little bit like shrines to actual gods. Um, so in that sense, yes, he was a hero. In our sense of, “Was he a good guy in the way that Batman is a good guy? Is he sort of saving, um, Thebes/Gotham from enemies?” I mean, he comes on at the start of the play suggesting, “Yes, I am that kind of – I am that kind of, um, benevolent, um, savior figure.” But, of course, the play then very much complicates that, because he thinks of himself as a savior and his thought of – thinking of himself as a savior is part of what makes it so hard for him to understand what's wrong with his own history.  

[Mark:] If he does fall, or if he does meet a tragic fate, does he do it because of his own weakness or inadequacy, or does he do it because of some greater force? 

[Emily:] This is such a complicated question, right? I mean, our – our usual discourse about, um, the “tragic flaw” comes from a particular way of reading/translating Aristotle's “Poetics” from the early-20th century onwards. The word in Aristotle's Poetics, um, “hamartia” (ἁμαρτία), um, was translated as a, as a “flaw,” and tragedies are always being combed for, “Where's the tragic flaw in this? We got to, gotta find a tragic flaw!” [Laughter] And then, “We gotta 100% on the quiz!” So hamartia it comes from the verb “hamartano” (ἁμαρτάνω), and it means a mistake or missing the mark. So if you're firing an arrow and you fail to hit the bullseye, that's hamartia. It’s a – it's getting something wrong or failing to hit a mark, is the implicit metaphor of it. And in Aristotle’s account, um, tragedies should not be about, um, totally evil people, because that's kind of disgusting if they do well and it's also too, you know, too easy if they don't do well, and they shouldn't be about super great people who are so much better than us because then if they end up suffering that's kind of horrible and… It should be about people who are a little bit better than us, but not too much better than us. And his favorite is Oedipus because he thinks it fits all those criteria and also that the denouement, the peripeteia, the reversal, and the anagnorisis, the recognition, happened not through evil choices but through some kind of hamartia, some kind of mistake. So, I mean, one can debate, because Aristotle doesn't fully flesh out exactly what his reading of the play is and I can also debate whether or not he has a good reading of the play at all, which maybe he doesn't. Um, but, I mean, I think there's sort of separate questions about, was it – was it Oedipus’ fault that he got in a road rage incident with Laius and killed him? [Laughter] Was it his fault that he didn't ask enough questions when there was a beautiful woman old enough to be his mother just waiting there in Thebes? I mean, those questions are not raised in the play, I think. I mean, one can argue about whether his tendency to rage in the play itself – are we supposed to think this is echoing what happened at the place where the three roads met a long time ago? Or not. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's just that he has this [yearning] to learn things, to know more. He's very Athenian, he has a great deal of curiosity. 

[Mark:] Well, why would curiosity be punished? 

[Emily:] Is it punished? Or is it – is it rewarded? He gets to know, he gets to know the truth. Um, and— 

[Mark:] It's a painful truth though, right?  

[Emily:] It's a painful truth, of course. 

[Mark:] Yeah. Let's also, um, – what about Jocasta? 

[Emily:] Jocasta is a super interesting non-character in this play. Um, she's – there's, there's a sort of series of encounters. The play is structured around a series of encounters between Oedipus and these other characters. Um, first the priest with the children, um, Creon, Tiresias, and then Jocasta. And it's – it's through his conversation with Jocasta that Oedipus sort of starts to go back to the relevant period in his own recent history and find out what exactly was going on with the previous king. But what – how exactly does Jocasta feel about it all? We get some elements of characterization. We get some sense that she's both very proud of the – proud of her own position as the queen of Thebes, um, and able to see the ways that she has to kind of micromanage the men in her family because they were all going to fly off the handle at any excuse. Um, and that also she sees what the truth is much quicker – much more quickly than he does and therefore tries to shut him up about it because she knows that no good will come of him continuing to pursue the truth. But there are also ways that she's figured as an empty space, as a field to be plowed, as this sort of repetition compulsion. She's a space of an idea as much as a human being. 

[Mark:] And finally, Emily, can you talk to us a little bit about Tiresias?  

[Emily:] Yes. Tiresias is the blind old prophet of Thebes who is literally blind in a way that – and warns Oedipus that he is metaphorically blind before he literally blinds himself, as well. So, the play is trading on these paired metaphors about blindness and insight, knowledge and ignorance, as different forms of blindness, as well as about walking and falling. Um, so Tiresias actually spells out exactly what the truth is and yet Oedipus is unable to hear it. And I think the presence of Tiresias as the truth teller whom Oedipus can't hear tells us something about the ways that he's both driven by this desire to know the truth but also completely incapable of hearing it when it's spelled out to him by somebody who has more authority than he does in a sphere that he doesn't have authority in, which is religious knowledge. 

[Mark:] Emily Wilson, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast, and I look forward to talking to you more about Oedipus Tyrannos. 

[Emily:] Thank you! 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Oedipus Tyrannos, edited by Emily Wilson, is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description of this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

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