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Read Ebook: De lynch-wet by Aimard Gustave Rochussen Charles Illustrator Cnopius L C Lodewijk Christiaan Translator
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Ebook has 4539 lines and 112886 words, and 91 pages
Translator: Gilbert Murray
OEDIPUS
KING OF THEBES
SOPHOCLES
TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE
WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY
GILBERT MURRAY
LL.D., D.LITT., F.B.A.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
FOURTEENTH THOUSAND
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1
The story itself, and the whole spirit in which Sophocles has treated it, belong not to the fifth century but to that terrible and romantic past from which the fifth century poets usually drew their material. The atmosphere of brooding dread, the pollution, the curses; the "insane and beastlike cruelty," as an ancient Greek commentator calls it, of piercing the exposed child's feet in order to ensure its death and yet avoid having actually murdered it ; the whole treatment of the parricide and incest, not as moral offences capable of being rationally judged or even excused as unintentional, but as monstrous and inhuman pollutions, the last limit of imaginable horror: all these things take us back to dark regions of pre-classical and even pre-homeric belief. We have no right to suppose that Sophocles thought of the involuntary parricide and metrogamy as the people in his play do. Indeed, considering the general tone of his contemporaries and friends, we may safely assume that he did not. But at any rate he has allowed no breath of later enlightenment to disturb the primaeval gloom of his atmosphere.
Does this in any way make the tragedy insincere? I think not. We know that people did feel and think about "pollution" in the way which Sophocles represents; and if they so felt, then the tragedy was there.
Jocasta is a wonderful study. Euripides might have brought her character out more explicitly and more at length, but even he could not have made her more living or more tragic, or represented more subtly in her relation to Oedipus both the mother's protecting love and the mother's authority. As for her "impiety," of which the old commentaries used to speak with much disapproval, the essential fact in her life is that both her innocence and her happiness have, as she believes, been poisoned by the craft of priests. She and La?us both "believed a bad oracle": her terror and her love for her husband made her consent to an infamous act of cruelty to her own child, an act of which the thought sickens her still, and about which she cannot, when she tries, speak the whole truth. And after all her crime was for nothing! The oracle proved to be a lie. Never again will she believe a priest.
In general, both in lyrics and in dialogue, I believe I have allowed myself rather less freedom than in translating Euripides. This is partly because the writing of Euripides, being less business-like and more penetrated by philosophic reflections and by subtleties of technique, actually needs more thorough re-casting to express it at all adequately; partly because there is in Sophocles, amid all his passion and all his naturalness, a certain severe and classic reticence, which, though impossible really to reproduce by any method, is less misrepresented by occasional insufficiency than by habitual redundance.
G. M.
CHARACTERS IN THE PLAY
PRIEST OF ZEUS.
CHORUS of the Elders of Thebes.
A Crowd of Suppliants, men, women, and children.
The following do not appear in the play but are frequently mentioned:--
ARGUMENT
While Thebes was under the rule of LA?US and JOCASTA there appeared a strange and monstrous creature, "the riddling Sphinx," "the She-Wolf of the woven song," who in some unexplained way sang riddles of death and slew the people of Thebes. LA?US went to ask aid of the oracle of Delphi, but was slain mysteriously on the road. Soon afterwards there came to Thebes a young Prince of Corinth, OEDIPUS, who had left his home and was wandering. He faced the Sphinx and read her riddle, whereupon she flung herself from her rock and died. The throne being vacant was offered to OEDIPUS, and with it the hand of the Queen, JOCASTA.
Some ten or twelve years afterwards a pestilence has fallen on Thebes. At this point the play begins.
OEDIPUS, KING OF THEBES
OEDIPUS.
My children, fruit of Cadmus' ancient tree New springing, wherefore thus with bended knee Press ye upon us, laden all with wreaths And suppliant branches? And the city breathes Heavy with incense, heavy with dim prayer And shrieks to affright the Slayer.--Children, care For this so moves me, I have scorned withal Message or writing: seeing 'tis I ye call, 'Tis I am come, world-honoured Oedipus. Old Man, do thou declare--the rest have thus Their champion--in what mood stand ye so still, In dread or sure hope? Know ye not, my will Is yours for aid 'gainst all? Stern were indeed The heart that felt not for so dire a need.
PRIEST.
O Oedipus, who holdest in thy hand My city, thou canst see what ages stand At these thine altars; some whose little wing Scarce flieth yet, and some with long living O'erburdened; priests, as I of Zeus am priest, And chosen youths: and wailing hath not ceased Of thousands in the market-place, and by Athena's two-fold temples and the dry Ash of Ism?nus' portent-breathing shore. For all our ship, thou see'st, is weak and sore Shaken with storms, and no more lighteneth Her head above the waves whose trough is death. She wasteth in the fruitless buds of earth, In parch?d herds and travail without birth Of dying women: yea, and midst of it A burning and a loathly god hath lit Sudden, and sweeps our land, this Plague of power; Till Cadmus' house grows empty, hour by hour, And Hell's house rich with steam of tears and blood. O King, not God indeed nor peer to God We deem thee, that we kneel before thine hearth, Children and old men, praying; but of earth A thing consummate by thy star confessed Thou walkest and by converse with the blest; Who came to Thebes so swift, and swept away The Sphinx's song, the tribute of dismay, That all were bowed beneath, and made us free. A stranger, thou, naught knowing more than we, Nor taught of any man, but by God's breath Filled, thou didst raise our life. So the world saith; So we say.
OEDIPUS.
And followed. I have sent Menoikeus' son, Creon, my own wife's brother, forth alone To Apollo's House in Delphi, there to ask What word, what deed of mine, what bitter task, May save my city. And the lapse of days Reckoned, I can but marvel what delays His journey. 'Tis beyond all thought that thus He comes not, beyond need. But when he does, Then call me false and traitor, if I flee Back from whatever task God sheweth me.
PRIEST.
At point of time thou speakest. Mark the cheer Yonder. Is that not Creon drawing near?
CREON .
Message of joy!
I tell thee, what is now our worst annoy, If the right deed be done, shall turn to good.
CREON.
Hunt the men out from Thebes, or make them bleed Who slew. For blood it is that stirs to-day.
OEDIPUS.
Who was the man they killed? Doth Phoebus say?
CREON.
O King, there was of old King La?us In Thebes, ere thou didst come to pilot us.
OEDIPUS.
I know: not that I ever saw his face.
CREON.
'Twas he. And Loxias now bids us trace And smite the unknown workers of his fall.
OEDIPUS.
Where in God's earth are they? Or how withal Find the blurred trail of such an ancient stain?
CREON.
In Thebes, he said.--That which men seek amain They find. 'Tis things forgotten that go by.
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