 | and willed actions with those actions of Jocasta and Oedipus that they took without understanding their true consequences. Tiresias had predicted Oedipus' blindness. Though Oedipus knew what he was doing when he blinded himself, the action was no less fated than the patricide and incest. When the Servant says that voluntary evils are more painful, he cannot mean either that they are more blameworthy or more serious. What he must mean is that they are done in horror and desperation, in contrast to the earlier evils committed in optimism and confidence.
|
| 1530
32
Apollo . . . did this. He made . . . perfect evil of my life
Lit. ''It was Apollo, friends, Apollo who brought to completion these my evils (
pathea
)." A
pathos
(sing.) is here, as often in Greek literature, an unmerited suffering sent by a god.
|
| 1534
these eyes
The Greek uses a pronoun (
nin
) for eyes, not a noun, which is the same for any gender, plural or dual or singular. The ambiguity is surely deliberate, but cannot be translated. The result of the ambiguity is to imply that
all
the blows that made his life evil, though struck by Oedipus, were caused by Apollo.
|
| 1744
you will have your wish
Some scholars believe Kreon here is agreeing to Oedipus' plea to be exiled. But it is more likely that the words are noncommittal in the usual way of politicians.
|
| 1753
66 The authenticity of these lines has sometimes been questioned, partly for the difficulty in making sense of several lines, partly for their suspicious resemblance to the ending of Euripides'
The Phoenician Women
. The main objection to them by a modern audience is that they seem less than climactic. This objection is illegitimate. Greek dramatists did not place strong emphasis on concluding lines in the way modern dramatists do. The final lines were needed to accompany the departure of the Chorus.
|
| 1766
never having been god's victim
Lit. "having undergone no anguish." The final word of the play,
pathon
, "having been made to undergo," is related to the noun used at 1. 1488 where it is translated as "pure and helpless anguish." Oedipus also used the same word when he explained that Apollo was the god who reduced him to misery; the word appears in several other important passages. It is often used as a technical phrase for the suffering of the hero, in hero religions, as is clear from its use by Herodotus. The Latin translation is
passio
, which gives us in the Christian version, the "passion" of Christ. The word appears in the concluding lines of two of Aeschylus' plays,
The Libation Bearers
and
Prometheus Bound
, as well as in the last sentence of Sophocles'
Electra
. It does not figure in the conclusion of any of Euripides' surviving plays.
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