Oedipus at Colonus

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 401

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Choral Song 1

Scene 2-Choral Song 4

Scenes 5-6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Scenes 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Scene 5 Summary

Seeing Theseus approach with Antigone and Ismene, the Choral leader announces that their prophecies are sound. Antigone calls out to her father, and they embrace. He asks to hear her story, but she defers to Theseus to tell it. Oedipus addresses Theseus, expressing his joy and appreciation for the restoration of his daughters. He asks for Theseus’s hand, then immediately withdraws the request, saying he is stained by evil and cannot permit himself to touch the king.

In response, Theseus states that he is neither surprised nor offended by Oedipus’s joyful response to being reunited with his daughters. Feeling no need to boast of his victory, Theseus tells Oedipus that Antigone will tell him the details of their recapture later. He then reveals that a Theban citizen and kinsman of Oedipus is waiting at Poseidon’s altar and wishes to speak with him. Oedipus realizes that it must be his son, whose words he does not want to hear as they will “cause [him] excruciating pain” (Line 1174).

Asking Oedipus rhetorically whether they must honor suppliants, Theseus warns him not to disrespect gods. Antigone agrees, saying that Oedipus should hear what her brother has to say. It would be wrong “to seek revenge by doing further wrong” (Line 1191). Oedipus has been paid a kindness and should repay it in kind. Oedipus consents to speak with Polyneices but asks for Theseus’s protection if he tries to overpower him. Theseus pledges his support.

Choral Song 5 Summary

The Chorus sings of the sorrows that come with a long life. Mortals can only live as long as they are fated to, then Hades claims them. When one’s youth has passed, sorrow and labor multiply. Oedipus, battered from every direction, exemplifies that.

Scene 6 Summary

Antigone sees Polyneices approach, weeping. Addressing Antigone and Ismene, Polyneices wonders whether he should weep first at his own misfortunes or his father’s. He admits his previous negligence toward Oedipus. When his father fails to respond, Polyneices begs him for an answer or explanation. Turning again to his sisters, he begs them to make their father answer him. Antigone urges Polyneices to tell their father what he needs, and Polyneices agrees to try. He notes that Theseus raised him from Poseidon’s altar and gave him the right to speak, listen, and leave unharmed and hopes their father will do likewise.

Polyneices explains to Oedipus that Thebes has banished him because he sought to rule, as befits the eldest son. After seizing the throne not through combat but with persuasive speeches, Eteocles exiled his brother. Fleeing to Argos, Polyneices married the daughter of its king, Adrastus, then bound six of the city’s best warriors, whom he names, with an oath to launch an attack against Thebes. An oracle has prophesied that whichever side Oedipus supports will prevail. Noting that he and his father share the same fate as unhoused beggars, he asks for his father’s support.

The Chorus leader instructs Oedipus to speak “some fitting words and send him on his way” (Line 1347). Oedipus complies, but only because Theseus has sent him. Addressing Polyneices, Oedipus calls him evil, claiming that he drove his father out of Thebes and is the reason for his grief, banishment, and wandering. His daughters are his saviors and caretakers. Oedipus continues that Polyneices’s armies will not topple Thebes because he will fall before that happens. He prays that the curses he directed at his son will defeat his “royal hopes” (Line 1380), asserting that they will “if ancient laws are valid still | and Justice sits enthroned at Zeus’s side” (Lines 1381-2). Saying that he spits on Polyneices and claiming not to be his father, he orders him to leave with the curses he has rained on his head and to die with his brother.

The Chorus withholds any sympathy from Polyneices and orders him to leave. Polyneices laments his mounting sorrows. He cannot turn his expedition back but must confront his fate. Turning to his sisters, Polyneices asks that they bury him with funeral rites. Antigone entreats him to lead his men back to Argos, but Polyneices will not show fear. Antigone asks what he has to gain by indulging in his anger and overthrowing Thebes. Polyneices replies that retreat would be shameful; he will not be taunted by his younger brother. She begs him to reconsider, but he is determined to continue, though his father and the Erinyes have doomed him to fail. He bids goodbye to Antigone, telling her that she will never see him alive again. She grieves, but he tells her not to mourn him. His end is fated. Whatever happens to him, he prays that she will meet no evil and departs.

Choral Song 6 Summary

As thunder rolls, the Chorus sings of immortal designs that are fulfilled. Interpreting the thunder to mean that Zeus will soon send him to Hades, Oedipus asks Ismene to summon Theseus quickly. The Chorus sings of Zeus’s ineffable thunder and predicts an imminent catastrophe. Oedipus reiterates that his end has arrived. Calling on Zeus, the Chorus sings of the thunder and entreats the god to be gentle and gracious, bellowing a blessing greater than the penalty of having seen “this cursed man” (Line 1485).

Oedipus is anxious for Theseus to arrive before he loses his mental clarity. He wants to repay the king’s kindness. The Chorus sings for Theseus to arrive so that Oedipus can thank him. Theseus enters with an attendant wondering what the clamor portends. Oedipus states that he does not want to die “without fulfilling all my promises” (Line 1509). Theseus asks why he believes he is about to die, and Oedipus refers to the thunder. Convinced, Theseus asks Oedipus what to do.

Oedipus tells Theseus he will lead him to the place where it is fated for him to die, and he must keep the secret so that place will be a source of strength. When Theseus himself is on the verge of death, he must choose an heir to reveal the secret location. His vision restored, Oedipus tells his daughters that their roles have reversed: He is now their guide. They may come with him but not touch him. He will find his “holy tomb” (Line 1545) himself. Addressing a few final words to Theseus, Oedipus wishes happiness and prosperity to his land and people.

The Chorus sings a prayer to Hades to release Oedipus from pain and woe. They sing for Oedipus’s spirit to be raised and to the “goddesses of the earth” (Line 1568) and Cerberus—the three-headed dog that bars the way to the underworld—to allow him to pass on his journey.

An attendant enters to announce Oedipus’s death and the strange events that have transpired. He reports that Oedipus seated himself on a marble tomb beside a pear tree and shed his traveling rags. His daughters bathed and clothed him for burial. When this was done, thunder rumbled, causing his daughters to panic, weep, and wail. Oedipus comforted them, saying that they had lifted a heavy task from his shoulders, and declared his love for them. They embraced, weeping, then silence fell. A god called to Oedipus, and Oedipus then spoke a few final words to Theseus, asking him not to harm his daughters. Theseus promised, holding back tears. Oedipus then entreated his daughters to be courageous and noble, instructing them to ask neither to see “unlawful sights” nor to hear “forbidden words” (Line 1642), and to depart quickly.

Only Theseus was permitted to see what followed. The attendant and the girls moved away but saw Theseus praying silently, kissing the earth, and raising his hands toward Olympus. The attendant concludes that a god led Oedipus to the underworld. The Choral leader asks where Ismene and Antigone are, and the attendant reports that they are approaching.

In a sung exchange with Ismene and the Chorus, Antigone sings her grief for her father’s destined death. The Chorus remarks on the sisters’ nobility, fame, and blamelessness. Antigone sings of her love for her father, then tells the Chorus that he achieved what he wished for, to die in a foreign land leaving behind mourners. Ismene wonders what fate has in store for them without their father. The Chorus replies that their father’s suffering is at an end, and they must not be distressed. Antigone wants to see her father’s resting place, while Ismene sings of her vulnerability and loneliness, having nowhere to go. Antigone wonders how to return home, which the Chorus cautions against attempting.

Antigone asks Theseus to see her father’s resting place, but he tells her that her father forbade him from showing it to anyone. Only by keeping it secret can Theseus keep his people “eternally happy and free” (Line 1765), and he swore to do so before Zeus and Oath. Antigone agrees to respect her father’s wishes and asks to be sent to Thebes in hopes of discouraging her brothers from fighting. Theseus pledges to do whatever will benefit them, and the Chorus orders an end to lamentation since “these matters have ended as they were ordained” (1779).

Scene 5-Choral Song 6 Analysis

Theseus returns with Antigone and Ismene, then reports that one of Oedipus’s kinsmen is waiting for him at an altar dedicated to Poseidon. Oedipus immediately intuits that it must be his “detested son” (Line 1173), Polyneices, and he states that does not want to hear what he has to say. This conflict adds complexity to The Significance of Place and Sanctuary. Like Oedipus, however, Polyneices has been exiled from Thebes and sought sanctuary at a sacred space, in his case Poseidon’s altar. Theseus and Antigone both remind Oedipus of his sacred duty to do for Polyneices what Theseus did for him, which is to hear his request.

While Oedipus is not obligated to grant Polyneices’s request, he must show respect to Theseus, who has protected him, and Theseus is obligated to treat Polyneices as a suppliant. Thus, Theseus’s warning to respect the gods is pointed: Impiety by a suppliant could make him a danger to the city sheltering him. Antigone echoes Theseus’s warning, reminding Oedipus that he must repay the kindness he himself has been shown, and finally, he reluctantly agrees.

Across the play, oracles have shaped characters’ actions and reactions, and it is the same with Polyneices. He has come to Thebes because he heard from an oracle that he cannot defeat his brother, Eteocles, without his father’s support. His response to this information illustrates The Interwoven Nature of Fate and Individual Will: Polyneices cannot change the oracle’s prophecy—he can only try to ensure that he fulfills it to his own advantage.

The position of the audience—who would have had substantial knowledge of the stories in which these characters take part—is similar in some ways to that of the gods. From the perspective of the Athenians at the 401 BC performance, the outcome is already determined. They would have known, if only from Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, that Polyneices will unsuccessfully invade Thebes and be killed in the attempt. For the spectators, then, the sense that outcomes are fated would be amplified.

Within the world of the play, however, Polyneices acts without knowledge of the future. Equipped only with the limited foreknowledge granted to him by the oracle, he appeals for his father’s support. He shares that Eteocles unlawfully claimed power, notably using “persuasive speeches” (Line 1298), and banished his brother, and he reveals the prophecy that whichever side Oedipus supports will succeed. Oedipus immediately and unequivocally rejects his son’s request, now claiming that Polyneices drove him out of Thebes.

Neither the Chorus nor Theseus questions Oedipus’s rejection, which from the spectators’ perspective would have been a foregone conclusion. Only Antigone begs Oedipus to reconsider and promises to fulfill her brother’s request, which she will do, given Sophocles’s Antigone. For his part, Polyneices is determined to carry out his attack, though he understands it will lead to his death. Oedipus’s choice, then, dooms not only his sons but also Antigone, the daughter he cherishes. Whether he is right or wrong to reject Polyneices has no bearing on Oedipus’s heroic status within the myth or history. The remainder of the play focuses only on his final moments, which occur offstage and are relayed by the Attendant.

Following Polyneices’s exit, thunder is heard, signaling to Oedipus that his life has reached its end and the time of his immortalization has arrived. The Chorus calls for Theseus since he must be the only one present to see the location where Oedipus will be buried, his “holy tomb” (Line 1545). This indicates that the place where Oedipus is buried will become a sacred space, the place connected to The Hero as a Source of Collective Immortality. Within the narrative, Theseus’s privileged knowledge is explained as a way to protect Oedipus’s remains from being stolen by Thebans and relocated. This has a corollary in ancient times when remains believed to belong to heroes were moved from one place to another to claim their power.

Oedipus’s bitter and angry rejection of his son’s desperate plea, and Theseus’s placid acceptance of this cruelty, can seem behavior unbefitting of a hero. But within the worlds of ancient Greek myth and ritual, it confirms the dangerous power of heroes and the importance of propitiating them. As spectators witness Oedipus cursing his son and sending him away to “[d]ie by kindred hands | and kill the selfsame man who’s banished” him (Lines 1387-1388), Oedipus’s earlier observation that he will be a benefit for Athens and a danger to its enemies is confirmed. Per the events of Antigone, Oedipus’s rejection in this moment will lead to a series of tragic events that ultimately destroy even Antigone, the daughter Oedipus lauded for her loving support and unfailing loyalty. At the end of the play, she departs for Thebes hoping desperately to forestall a disaster that has, from the spectators’ perspective, already happened.