How helpless are we in the face of fate? Sophocles Antigone explores the nature of tragic fate and the implications for human agency.
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labor’d it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d-.
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”
This is a poem from Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát. I always think of this poem when I read Sophocles’ tragedies. It seems like an ordinary poem. However, the lunar view of life in these four lines, the wisdom that sees all the minutiae of human behavior, is worth thousands of lines of poetry. The Buddha’s conviction that life is suffering, or Jesus’ sorrow that human beings are condemned to original sin, are all contained in these four lines. No saint, no great scholar, knows everything about life. Life is as vast as it is, and human beings are as infinite as they are. Not the vastness of the universe, but the vastness of our own lives. Therefore, despite the thousands, hundreds of millions, and incalculable number of human beings who have lived, the mystery of “what is life?” remains unsolved. It may never be solved. This mystery is often referred to as “fate” by humans. Happiness, unhappiness, success, failure, love, and hate are not the result of human endeavors, but rather the result of great unknown forces. Omar Khayyam’s resignation to the fact that in his youth he was dazzled by the mysteries of life and wandered here and there trying to unravel the secrets of life, and that even after mastering all the great theories, he still did not know life, may not be a passive resignation, but a sublimation to the vastness of the universe.
Sophocles’s tragedy is a solemnization of this sense of destiny. Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, often referred to as his three great tragedies, relentlessly trace the fate of a cursed royal family in Thebes, revealing the fear of a fate beyond human power.
In Sophocles’ greatest tragedy, Oedipus the King, Oedipus’ adoptive parents, King Laius and Queen Iocaste, abandon him as soon as he is born. Alarmed by the oracle that he is cursed to kill his father and take his mother as his wife, King Laius and Queen Iocaste attempt to escape this fate by abandoning him. However, Oedipus is saved by a shepherd and raised by the royal family of Corinth. Years later, Oedipus meets King Laius in a deserted place and kills him, not recognizing him as his father. He then enters Thebes, solves the riddle of the Sphinx, ascends the throne, and takes Iocaste (his biological mother) as his wife. They have children in her body and are living a comfortable life when suddenly a plague strikes Thebes. This is where the tragedy begins. Oedipus’s fate slowly unfolds, and he is bound by his oath to gouge out his eyes, becoming blind and losing his country.
As we read this tragedy, we realize how helpless we are in the face of the forces of fate, which are beyond our power. The tragic irony, the irony that the words you say without knowing it are actually laughing at you, is not only Sophocles’ tragic writing method, but also the play of fate. Oedipus curses the murderer, unaware that he is the murderer of King Laius. However, it is a tragic, perhaps even comic irony that the curse is ultimately a curse on himself.
“Oedipus at Colonus” depicts the end of Oedipus’ wanderings after losing his country. Dragged by his daughter Antigone, Oedipus wanders from place to place and ends up in Colonus, the promised land of death, but the hand of fate still refuses to release him. He curses his fate, curses his two sons, curses his friends, and turns to the gods. All of these terrifying curses come true. This is because the curse is not Oedipus’ curse, but the curse of ‘fate’.
‘Antigone’ tells the story of the miserable fate of Oedipus’ daughter Antigone and son Polyneices. The brothers fight for the throne and both fall to their deaths. However, the newly crowned King Creon, though a man of good sense, is strangely stubborn and forces Antigone, his son, and his wife to commit suicide. Thus ends the curse on the house of Laius.
The fate of Oedipus’ family is perhaps a benediction of human fate. They fight and curse each other and seem to live their own lives, but there is a fate behind them that laughs at them and controls them. You can call it God, or you can call it human history running wild. In any case, Sophocles’ sense of fate, that human beings inevitably come up against an impenetrable wall, makes us shudder, but it also makes us realize the futility of our voracious desires, our inadequate sense of resonance, and our petty arrogance.
To read Sophocles’ tragedies is to open one’s collar and face life with one’s collar open. As such, they teach us infinite things. “Wisdom is the greatest happiness. The rhetoric of the arrogant is always a blow, and the punished become wise only in old age.” As the last line of Antigone says, we can’t help but ponder on the poignant truth of life.
“Tragedy expresses the shuddering fear of real existence, human real existence, through the terrifying conflict that underlies the all-encompassing existence of human beings. But when one sees the tragic, one is released from the tragic by seeing it, achieving a kind of catharsis, nirvana.”
These words from the great 20th century philosopher Carl Yaspers in his book Tragedy Is Not Enough are worth savoring. Readers will gain a deeper understanding of tragedy by reading Yaspers’ Tragedy Is Not Enough alongside this tragedy.
Sophocles (496-406 B.C.) was born in Colonus, near Athens, Greece. He belonged to the upper social class and was the envy of his peers because of his great courage and talent. Sophocles emerged as a tragedian in 468 B.C. He soon surpassed his predecessor, Aeschylus, in popularity. He held his throne as a tragedian until his death, and the Athenians worshipped him as a hero and held annual sacrifices to him. Sophocles left behind a very large body of work. Some say he wrote 123 or 130 plays, but only seven have survived in their entirety: Antigone, Ajax, Electra, Oedipus the King, The Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. The first play he wrote was Antigone, and the last was Oedipus at Colonus. Sophocles, unlike Aeschylus, thought that the trilogy was not suitable as a form of tragedy. However, despite being written at different times, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone are almost a perfect trilogy. However, each of these plays is a standalone work, with almost perfect motifs and organization.
