#classicallitmeme

The play is set in Thebes and the main characters are Oedipus, Jocasta, Creon, Tiresias and the priest, while the other characters are two messangers and a herdsman. The chours is composed by old men of Thebes, while the characters of Antigone, Ismene and Tiresias helper stay mute. The play starts in medias res, as a terrible plague caused by a mysterious sin spreads through the city. Adviced by his brother-in-law, Creon, Oedipus goes to the Oracle of Delphi, where he discovers that the plague is caused by the fact that the murderer of the former king Laius, hasn’t been caught and remains unpunished. Oedipus then summons Tiresias, the blind prophet, which claims to know the answer to the Oracle’s riddle, but firmly refuses to tell it. The king enrages, so Tiresias reveals that he is the murderer ("You yourself are the criminal you seek") and, revealing further, he says that the criminal is a native citizen of Thebes, brother and father to his own children, and son and husband to his own mother . Oedipus can’t believe and accuses Creon to being plotting with Tiresias against him.  Jocasta, Oedipus’s wife, enters and tries to comfort him by saying that not all the prophecies are true: in fact she tells him the prophecy that her former husband, king Laius, had received, which told that he was meant to be killed by his own son, while everybody knows that he was killed by bandits.   At this point Oedipus freezes and starts to suspect that Tiresias was telling the truth: he summons one of the witnesses of Laius’s deadly attack, then explain to Jocasta that he left Corinth, the town he grew in, to escape a prophecy that said that he would’ve killed his father and laid whith his mother, and while he headed to Thebes, he killed a man on the road where Laius was told to be killed. A messanger comes to the palace and tells that Oedipus father in Corinth is dead. Oedipus seems relieved as the prophecy result to be half unaccomplished, but the messanger reveal that actually he wasn’t really a son of the king of Corinth, but he was given to him by a man from Laius’s palace. This man results to be also the witness of Laius’s death. This man arrives and reveals everything: Oedipus is Jocasta and Laius’s son. The king is in despair. Jocasta hangs herself in her bedroom after Oedipus curses his own descendants and himself. After discovering Jocasta’s corpse, Oedipus blinds himself with the pins of her dress. Oedpius then asks Creon to be sent in exile, but Creon convince him to consult the Oracles before. Oedipus then asks him to watch over his daughters and half sisters, Antigone and Ismene, and their brothers Polynices and Eteocles.  This is considered to be one of the most important tragedies of the whole ancient greek tradition. Not only it reflects the themes of despair and loneliness, favoured by Sophocles, but it also depicts with an incredible realistic attitude the fall from greatness to misery: Oedipus in his first line calls himself “Great”, people of Thebes love him and acclaim him for having killed the Sphynx. But then Oedipus results to be not only the ruin of his city Thebes, but also of his own family: better it would be if he didn’t come to life at all. The curse falls upon his children: we know from the other two plays of the series that Antigone goes to exile with the blind father, which dies in Clonus, Attics, just when the war for power between his sons Eteocles and Polynices has begun. The boys will kill each other in war, and the authority of Creon, the new king of Thebes, will lead to Antigone’s death. 

The poem, divided into 24 books, narrates the ten-years-long return of Odysseus (also known with his latin name, Ulysses) and his crew back to the island if Ithaca. Given the fact that many gods sided with Trojans during the war, all the greek heroes had to be punished by those gods for their savagery and cruelty against Troy and his inhabitants. Also Odysseus attracted Poseidon’s anger for blinding his son, the cyclops Polyphemus. Odysseus (as his son Telemachus) is anyway constantly protected by the goddess Athena, which has been recognising his wit since the famous trick of the Trojan horse, which Odysseus had conceived. After a long travel all across the Mediterrean sea, always facing multiple dangers, such as the witch Circe, the monsters Scylla and Charybdis, syrens and many more, he arrives at home, alone and unaknoweledged, just to find out that suitors have invaded his castle on the island of Ithaca and have tried to marry his wife Penelope, which has managed to stay loyal to her husband with a trick. The narrative system follows multiple layers: the poem starts with the Telemachy, the search of Telemachus of his father all across Greece (books I-IV), then focus on Odysseus at the court of king Alcinous, as he tells the story of how he left Troy, lost direction multiple times, faced shipwrecks, and landed on the island of Ogygia, just to come back home (books V-XII).  The remaining books tell how he won over his suitors with his famous tricks and finally reunited with his family.

The story takes place in Troy, during the last year of the ten-year war between Trojans and Greeks and develops around the figure of Achilles and its wrath, as the king Agamemnon has reclaimed his slave Briseis. This episode causes the refusal of the prince to fight again, until his closest friend and possibly lover Patroclus is killed in battle, a death that Achilles avenges by killing the murderer, the Trojan prince Hector. The poem, which is 24 books long, only deals with a small part of the entire war: in fact, many famous episodes, such as the death of Achilles and the trick of the Trojan horse, aren’t told. This probably hints to many other poems about this saga, which we can’t read anymore.