Authors: Sophocles,Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles

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Oedipus the King (10 page)

BOOK: Oedipus the King

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OEDIPUS The second time is even more outrageous.
You'll wish you'd never spoken.

TIRESIAS Shall I feed your fury with more words?

OEDIPUS Say anything. It's all the same worthless noise.

TIRESIAS I say that you are living unaware
in the most hideous intimacy
with your nearest and most loving kin.
You have arrived at evilwhich you cannot see.

450 OEDIPUS You think you can savage me? Forever? Unscathed?

TIRESIAS Forever. Truth lasts.

OEDIPUS Truth lasts for some, but your ''truth" won't
you have blind eyes, blind ears, and a blind brain.

TIRESIAS And you're a wretched fool, lashing me with taunts
every man here will soon aim at you.

OEDIPUS You survive in the care of black
unbroken night! You can't hurt me
or any man who sees the sunlight.

TIRESIAS It isn't I who will cause your fall.
460 Apollo is enough. You're his concern.

OEDIPUS Did you invent these lies? Or did Kreon?

TIRESIAS Kreon is not your disease. You are.

OEDIPUS Wealth, and a king's power,
the skill that wins every time
how much envious malice they provoke!
To rob me of powerpower I didn't want,
but which this city thrust into my hands
my oldest friend here, loyal Kreon, worked
quietly against meaching to steal my throne.
470 He hired for the purpose this fortuneteller
conniving bogus beggar-priest!
who sees the main chance clearly
but is a blind groper in his art.

Tell us now, where did you ever
prove your claim to a seer's power?
Whywhen the Sphinx who barked black songs
was hounding uswhy wasn't it
your
answer
that freed the city? Her riddle wasn't the sort
just anyone who happened by could solve:

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480 prophetic skill was needed then,
the kind you didn't have, skill learned
from birds or from a god. Yet it was Oedipus,
who knew nothing, that silenced her,
because my wit seized the answer,
needing no help from birds.
Now it is I, this same man, for whom you plot
disgrace and exile, thinking you will
maneuver close to Kreon's throne.
But your scheme to rid Thebes of this plague
490 will destroy only youand the man who planned it.
You look now so near deathotherwise I'd make you
the first victim of your own plot.

LEADER He spoke in anger, Oedipus
but so did you, if you'll hear what we think.
We don't need angry words, we need insight
how best to manage what the god commands.

TIRESIAS You may be king, but my right
to answer makes me your equal.
In this respect, I am as much
500 my own master as you are.
You do not own my life.
Apollo does. Nor am I Kreon's man.
Hear me out.
Since you have thrown my blindness at me
I will tell you what your eyes don't see:
the evil you are mired in.
You don't see
where you live or who shares your house.
Do you know your parents?
510 You are their enemy
in this life and down there with the dead.
And soon their double curse
your father's and your mother's lash
will whip you out of Thebes
on terrorstruck feet.
Your eyes will then see darkness
which now see life.
Your shriek
will try to hide itself in every cave.
520 What mountain outcrop on Cithairon
won't roar your screaming back at you,
when what your marriage means strikes home,

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shows you the house that took you in: you sailed
your lucky wind to a most foul harbor.
Evils you can't guess
will level you to what you are,
to what your children are.
Go on, throw muck at Kreon, and at
the warning spoken through my mouth.
530 But there will never be a man
ground into wretchedness as you shall be.

OEDIPUS Shall I wait for him to attack me more?
May you be damned. Go. Leave my doors
now! Turn your back and go.

TIRESIAS I'm here only because you sent for me.

OEDIPUS Had I known the madness you would speak
I wouldn't have hurried to get you here.

TIRESIAS I may seem crazed to you, but your natural
parents thought I had an able mind.

540 OEDIPUS My parents? Wait. Who is my father?

TIRESIAS Today, you will be born. Into ruin.

OEDIPUS You always have a murky riddle in your mouth.

TIRESIAS Don't you excel us all at finding answers?

OEDIPUS Sneer at my mind. But you must face the power it won.

TIRESIAS That very luck is what destroyed you.

OEDIPUS If I save Thebes, I won't care what happens to me.

TIRESIAS I will leave you to that. Boy, guide me out.

OEDIPUS Yes, let him take you home.
Here, you are painfully underfoot. Gone,
550 you'll take away a great source of grief.

TIRESIAS I'll go. But first I must finish
what you brought me to do
your face won't frighten me.
The man you have been looking for,
the one your curses threaten, the man
you had outlawed in Laius' death:
I say that man is here
you think him a foreigner,
but he will prove himself a Theban native,
560 though he'll find no joy in that news.

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A blind man who has eyes now,
a beggar who's now rich, he'll jab
his stick, feeling the road to foreign lands.

(Oedipus enters the palace.)

He will soon be shown father and brother
to his own children, son and husband
to the mother who bore himshe took
his father's seed and his seed,
and he took his own father's life.

You go inside. Think through what I have said.
570 If I have lied, say of me then
I am a prophet with no mind.

(Exit Tiresias.)

CHORUS Who is the man
who inspires the rock voice
of Delphi to speak out?
This crime that sickens speech
is the work of his red hands.
Now he will need legs strong enough
to outrun wild horses of the storm.
Apollo is ready to strike:
580 armed with lightning,
he and the Fates close in,
grim beings who don't miss.

From snowfields
high on Parnassus
the word blazes out to us all:
track down the man no one sees.
He takes cover in thick brush,
he drives up the mountain
bull-like to its rocks and caves,
590 going his bleak and hunted way,
still struggling to escape the doom
earth from her sacred mouth has spoken:
but that doom buzzes low,
never far from his ear.

Fear is what the man who reads birds
makes us feel, fear we can't fight.
We can't accept what he says,
we have no power to challenge.
We thrash in doubt, we can't see

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600 even the present clearly,
much less the future.
And we've heard of no feud
embittering the House
of Oedipus in Corinth
against the House of Laius here,
no past trouble and none now,
no proof that would make us accuse
our king's fame, as he works
to avenge this murder
610 done to our royal house.

Zeus and Apollo are infallible,
they know what happens to mankind.
But there is no way to prove
whether an earthbound prophet
ever sees more of the future
than we do, though in knowledge and skill
one man may surpass another.
But never, not till I see
the charges proved against him,
620 will I give my credence
to a man who blames Oedipus.
All of us saw his brilliance
prevail, when the wingéd virgin
Sphinx came at him: his winning
won him the people.
My heart can't find him guilty.

(Kreon enters.)

KREON Citizens, I hear that King Oedipus
has made a fearful charge against me.
I'm here to prove it false.
630 If he thinks anything I've said or done
has made this crisis worse, or injured him
then I have no more wish to live.
This is no minor charge.
It's the most deadly I could suffer,
if my city, my own people, you!
believe I'm a traitor.

LEADER He could have spoken in a flash
of anger with no thought behind it.

KREON Did he say
I
persuaded the prophet to lie?

640 LEADER That's what he said. What he meant wasn't clear.

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KREON When he announced my guilttell me
how his eyes looked. Did he seem sane?

LEADER I can't say. I don't question what my rulers do.
Here he comes, now, out of the palace.

(Oedipus enters.)

OEDIPUS So? You would come here? You have the nerve
to face me in my house? When you're
exposed as its master's murderer?
Caught trying to steal my kingship?
In god's name what weakness did you see
650
in me
that led you to plot this?
Am I a coward or a fool?
Did you suppose I wouldn't notice
your quiet moves? Not fight back if I did?
Aren't you attempting something
downright stupidto win absolute power
without partisans or even friends?
For that you'll need money and a mob.

KREON Stop!
Give me time to answer you.
660 Let me speak before you judge me.

OEDIPUS You're a formidable speaker. But I listen
badly to someone trying to destroy me.

KREON I'll prove you are mistaken to think that.

OEDIPUS Your malice is too blatant to deny.

KREON Why do you prize your perversity?
If you think it's a virtue, your mind's deranged.

OEDIPUS
Your
mind's deranged, if you think a man
can attack a brother kinsman and not suffer.

KREON I'll grant that. Now:
how
have
I
attacked you?

670 OEDIPUS Did you, or did you not, urge me
to send for that venerated prophet?

KREON Yes. I'd give the same advice now.

OEDIPUS How long ago was it that King Laius . . .

KREON Laius? Did what? Why speak of him?

OEDIPUS was lost in that murderous attack?