1. Communitarian thinkers who have questioned the universal epistemological assumptions of the Enlightenment include Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel. Feminist thinkers such as Carol Gilligan, Carole Pateman, Susan Moller Okin, Virginia Held, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, Drucilla Cornell, and Joan Tronto have all challenged abstract conceptions of the self that result in a subjectivity blind to the constraints of gender. The most radical criticism of the Enlightenment’s universal epistemological assumptions comes, of course, from “poststructuralist” thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard.

2. I have used R. C. Jebb’s edition, The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897), with its invaluable commentary. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by David Grene, from Oedipus the King, in Sophocles, vol. 1 of The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

3. This is part direct citation and part paraphrase of Timothy Reiss, Tragedy and Truth: Studies in the Development of a Renaissance and Neoclassical Discourse (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 21.

4. See Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), esp. “Homer’s View of Man,” pp. 1–22. The association of truth and clarity is “characteristic of all ages of enlightenment,” writes Bernard Knox (Oedipus at Thebes [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957], p. 133).

5. On the savage nature of the Sphinx, see Charles Segal, “The Music of the Sphinx,” in Contemporary Literary Hermeneutics, ed. Stephanus Kresic (Ottawa: Ottawa University Press, 1981), p. 154. The Sphinx is a chresmodos, a singer of oracles (1200). But her song is harsh (36), tricky (130), and that of a rhapsode dog (391), a “hook-taloned maiden singer of riddling oracles” (1199–1200). Euripides describes her song as “unmusic” (Phoenissae 807), and in a lost play he describes the riddle as a horrible shrieking whistle. Segal cites this as evidence that the Sphinx symbolizes the reverse of civilization: “Her song enables her to prey upon and destroy human community.”

6. On the theme of emancipation from tradition, the past, and one’s origins and birth, see Arlene Saxonhouse, “The Tyranny of Reason in the World of the Polis,” APSR 82, 4 (Dec. 1988): 1261–75.

7. Charles Segal, “Sophocles’ Praise of Man and the Conflicts of the Antigone,” Arion 3, 2 (Summer 1964): 46–66; Seth Benardete, “A Reading of Sophocles’ Antigone I,” Interpretation 4, 3 (Spring 1975): 148–96; J. T. Sheppard, The Wisdom of Sophocles (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1947), 46–48; R. F. Goheen, The Imagery of Sophocles’ Antigone: A Study of Poetic Language and Structure (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 97, 141; Laszlo Versenyi, Man’s Measure: A Study of the Greek Image of Man from Homer to Sophocles (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), pp. 208–13.

8. The juxtapositions of resourceful (pantoporos, 360) and resourceless (aporos), and highest in the city (hypsipolis) and cityless (apolis), also point up the ambiguous meaning of deinos.

9. I paraphrase this line from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum Books, 1969), p. 3, in anticipation of chapter 6.

10. For this quotation and on the theme of civilization and savagery, see Charles Segal Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of Sophocles (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 232, and esp. ch. 8.

11. On paradox in Oedipus, see W. C. Helmbold, “The Paradox of Oedipus,” American Journal of Philology 72, 3 (1951): 293–300.

12. Brian Vickers, Towards Greek Tragedy: Drama, Myth, Society (1973; New York: Longman, 1979), p. 425

13. Charles Segal, “Sophocles,” in Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982), p. 196, notes that of the three plays in Aeschylus’s trilogy, Laius,Oedipus, and Seven against Thebes, only the last survives, and it is from the Seven and a few fragments that we are able to reconstruct the general outlines of the trilogy.

14. On this point, see Versenyi, Man’s Measure, p. 214 and passim.

15. Segal, “Sophocles,” p. 196. See also R. P. Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 178, for a discussion of Apollo’s role in the enlightenment of Oedipus.

16. Saxonhouse, “Tyranny of Reason,” p. 1261. This formulation is perhaps idiosyncratic to Sophocles’ play, although Thucydides does make a similar distinction between hereditary kingship (basileia) and tyranny, the latter characterized by rule whose privilege suffers no limits, hereditary, constitutional, or otherwise (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.13.1–17). The word tyrannos did not originally appear in the title of the play, but was assigned to it by tradition, perhaps as early as Aristotle; see Segal, “Sophocles.” In any case, tyrannos underwent a series of transformations from its (probably) non-Greek origins in the seventh century, and it was not until the fourth century that it acquired a distinctly negative connotation; see A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants, 4th ed. (1956; New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 28–30.

17. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977; New York: Vintage Books, 1979), “The Carceral Archipelago.”

18. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, p. 107.

19. Ibid., p. 105.

20. Ibid, p. 99.

21. Ibid, p. 106. Allusion to the plague that struck Athens (and claimed the life of Pericles) shortly before Sophocles’ play was produced must also be counted along with references to Pericles, Athens, and empire as evidence that Sophocles was commenting on contemporary Athens. On the relation of history to Sophoclean tragedy, see, too, Victor Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954).

22. The quotation and the characterization of Oedipus come from Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, p. 232.

23. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities in Greek Tragedy,” in id. and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 38.

24. On the paradox of sight and blindness in the Oedipus, see R. G. A. Buxton, “Blindness and Limits: Sophokles and the Logic of Myth,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980): 22–37

25. I have consulted Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, pp. 182–84, on the significance of Oedipus’s foot. All translations are his, except for line 130, where I have adopted Grene’s “induced” for Knox’s “forced” as a rendering of prosēgeto.

26. Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, ed. M. L. Earle (New York: American Book Co., 1901), p. 40.

27. Both Snell and Heidegger discuss the relation between verbs of sight and verbs of knowledge: Snell, Discovery of the Mind, pp. 1–22; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 214–17.

28. On the puns on Oedipus’s name at lines 924–26, see Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, pp. 183–84.

29. Here I follow Simon Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 218.

30. On etymologies of and puns on Oedipus’s name, see Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, p. 207; Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex,” in Myth and Tragedy, pp. 123–24; Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy, pp. 216–18.

31. Although we also learn that no one has more of a right to rule than Laius’s son.

32. A. J. A. Waldock, Sophocles the Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951) suggests, on the contrary, that Oedipus “does not possess, as far as we can make out, an intelligence of piercing quickness or very remarkable reach” (p. 144) and thus finds it odd that Oedipus solved the riddle.

33. Froma I. Zeitlin, “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama,” in Greek Tragedy and Political Theory, ed. J. Peter Euben (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 111.

34. Cf. Aristotle Politics 1253a9: a man without a city is either a god or a beast. Oedipus seems to oscillate between these two poles, denying the possibility of a third, mediating term.

35. See Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, pp. 209, 213–14, for this discussion of equality.

36. Ibid., p. 214.

37. Seth Benardete, “Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos,” in Sophocles: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Thomas Woodward (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 107ff., has some suggestive remarks concerning the political and family crime.

38. Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, p. 243.

39. See David Seale, Vision and Stagecraft in Sophocles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), esp. ch. 8.

40. On the significance of this exchange, see Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, p. 215.

41. Ibid., 214.

42. On the problems of identity in Oedipus, see also Zeitlin, “Thebes: Theater of Self and Society,” pp. 103–6, 111–13.

43. Segal, “Music of the Sphinx,” pp. 151–52.

44. All tragedy rests on a double reading of Heraclitus’s famous dictum “Ēthos anthrōpou daimōn” (“Human character is destiny”) (Hermann Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Griechisch und Deutsch [1934; Dublin and Zurich: Weidmann, 1972– 73], fr. 119), R. P. Winnington-Ingram aptly remarks (Sophocles: An Interpretation [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], p. 177). Both character and destiny constitute the space in which tragic action occurs. In Antigone, for example, the same word takes on multiple and contradictory meanings in the mouths of different characters. Thus, for Antigone, nomos designates the opposite of what Creon means by the word. In Agamemnon, Clytemnestra uses ambiguous language to deceive her husband, fooling him even as she reveals her sinister purpose to the spectators.

45. On the human and divine aspects of Sophocles’ drama, see H. D. F. Kitto, Sophocles, Dramatist and Philosopher (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981).

46. Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex,” in Myth and Tragedy, p. 116.

47. Sheldon Wolin, “Political Theory as a Vocation,” APSR 63, 4 (Dec. 1969): 1078.

48. “It is not the question that is difficult; it is the rigidity of the questioner,” says Cedric Whitman (The Heroic Paradox: Essays on Homer, Sophocles and Aristophanes [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980], p. 26). Few questioners in Greek tragedy are as rigid as Oedipus.

49. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, p. 117. On the medical, legal, forensic, and scientific terminology current at the time, see ibid., pp. 107–46.

50. On these lines, see ibid., p. 107.

51. Vernant summarizes tragic ambiguity this way: “But perhaps the essential feature that defines it is that the drama brought to the stage unfolds both at the level of everyday existence, in a human, opaque time made up of successive and limited present moments, and also beyond this earthly life, in a divine, omnipresent time that at every instant encompasses the totality of events, sometimes to conceal them and sometimes to make them plain but always so that nothing escapes it or is lost in oblivion” (“Tensions and Ambiguities,” pp. 43–44).

52. Knox, Oedipus at Thebes, p. 105. E. R. Dodds, “On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex,” in Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticsm, ed. Erich Segal (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p. 186, argues against what he believes to be the overly allegorical interpretations of Knox and of Ehrenberg in Sophocles and Pericles, pp. 141 ff., who contends that the character of Oedipus reflects that of Pericles. Although I agree with Dodds that Ehrenberg goes too far in conflating Oedipus with the historical Pericles, if only for the reason that their characters differ too substantially to sustain such a comparison, I am sympathetic to Knox’s view that Oedipus and Athens share a similar character, especially if we accept the Corinthians’ description of the Athenians in Thucydides’ History, bk. 1.

53. This is C. M. Bowra’s interpretation in Sophoclean Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), p. 175: “The gods have contrived an awful fate for Oedipus in order to display their power to man and to teach him a salutary lesson.” As will become clear below, I do not think such a reading does justice to the ambivalence of the play. In Sophocles the Dramatist, p. 168, Waldock, on the other hand, finds no meaning in the play, merely terrible coincidence.

54. Charles Segal, “Greek Tragedy and Society: A Structuralist Perspective,” in Interpreting Greek Tragedy: Myth, Poetry, Text (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 37.

55. In The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), pp. 146–47, Bernard Knox argues that Oedipus is the paradigmatic hero who cannot be assimilated to familiar categories, but fails to recognize the presence of that same heroic impulse in the structure of the play itself.

56. Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities,” p. 33.

57. Segal, “Greek Tragedy and Society,” pp. 36–39.

58. Ibid., p. 47. My interpretation does not only differ from a poststructuralist reading by virtue of its extratextuality. Where Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), and Franco Tonelli, Sophocles’ Oedipus and the Tale of the Theatre (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1983), for example, interpret the play as a continuous process of loss—the dissolution of meaning into nonmeaning, of identity into nonidentity, of transparency into nontransparency—I take the view that the “text” not only “deconstructs” itself but pushes back and against that deconstruction.

59. On festivals and the ritual aspects of tragic performance, see A. PickardCambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). For an opposing interpretation that discounts the importance of the ritual, religious and institutional context of tragedy, see Oliver Taplin, “Emotion and Meaning in Greek Tragedy,” in Greek Tragedy: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Erich Segal (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).

60. Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities,” p. 10.

61. Cf. Albert Cook, Enactment: Greek Tragedy (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971), pp. 34–35.

62. Vernant, “Tensions and Ambiguities,” p. 34. On the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy, see G. M. Kirkwood, Sophoclean Drama (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957); R. W. B. Burton, The Chorus in Sophocles’ Tragedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); C. P. Gardiner, The Sophoclean Chorus (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987).

63. John Jones, Aristotle and Greek Tragedy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), p. 265, disagrees: “The word exemplar is inadmissible because it declares a distinct moralising intent and a way of looking at the stage figure which Sophocles’ play is without.” This seems to stem more from a failure to extend an ambiguous reading of Oedipus to the play as a whole than from any confusion about Oedipus himself.

64. Winnington-Ingram recognizes this when he says that Sophocles was no prophet of sōphrosunē: “All we have to do is contemplate a world of Creons and wonder whether it would be any place for a tragic poet” (Sophocles, p. 204).

65. Seale, Vision and Stagecraft, ch. 8.

66. Ruth Scodel, Sophocles (Boston: Twayne, 1984), p. 72. Tonelli, Sophocles’ Oedipus, p. 165, calls the final exodus a non-ending.

67. In the ways we have seen: tragedy reshaped the archaic myths, juxtaposed myth to enlightened thought, and embodied reason in the very structure of the dramatic performance.

68. Segal, “Greek Tragedy and Society,” p. 29.

69. J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 126.

70. Segal, “Greek Tragedy and Society,” p. 47.