In search of a message in a Sophoclean tragedy

Inaugural lecture--Department of Classical Languages, Rand Afrikaans University, 5 October 1971One of the central problems in present day Sophoclean scholarship is the search for the so called Religious and Moral ideas in Sophocles (not of Sophocles) resulting in two opposite points of view. The orthodox point of view for whom, to quote Bowra "the central idea of Sophoclean tragedy is that through suffering man learns to be humble before the gods", and the humanistic point of view for whom, to quote hitman, "Sophocles was not concerned with divine justice but with divine injustice" or "Morality is man's position and the cosmos -or chaos -may be what it will". Sometimes we get the impression that sheer subjectivism is rife simply because we come to a Sophoclean play "with the settled convictions of our own", with our unchallenged and unsuspected presuppositions -and that our image would have been far more correct were it not for a failure at the level of sound method. The truism that Sophocles should be read and analysed within the context of the structure of his work implies that we accept the autonomy of a work of art, that we have respect for its framework, and its proportions and that we add or subtract nothing from what we find in the work. In short, Sophoclean drama should in the first place be approached from the structural-analytical angle. In the second place, seeing that the Greek tragedians of the fifth century got the raw material for their dramas almost without exception from the heroic myths of a few families, we ought to look into this complex and ever changing myth-structure for the new motifs and/or new emphasis Sophocles worked into the structure of his Oedipus Tyrannus. In the last instance we ought to keep our eyes on the functional role of the chorus to see whetherit really is co-actor, as Aristotle said, or whether it betrays the voice of the poet or has a parabatic function. These three criteria were applied in isolation and in combination to elucidate, as objectively as possible, certain aspects of meaning from the II Oedipus Tyrannus and the end results were amongst others that (I) The OT is the tragedy of the wise and intelligent man,the intelligent searcher always moving deeper into the world of appearance; (2) that this is par excellence the tragedy with a tragic rhythm determined by three basic questions, the last of which is, "Who am I Oedipus, yes, who is man?" and (3), above all the OT relates the tragedy of the wise man and at the same time sings the praise of Delphi