Oedipus the King (14 page)

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Authors: Sophocles,Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles

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BOOK: Oedipus the King
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Page 54
1270 from the girls whose games he shares:
the nymphs of Helikon?
OEDIPUS Old men,
if I can recognize a man I've never met,
I think I see the herdsman we've been waiting for.
Our fellow would be old, like the stranger coming.
Those leading him are my own men.
But I expect you'll know him better.
Some of you will know him by sight.
(Enter Herdsman, led by Oedipus' servants.)
LEADER I do know him. He is from Laius' house,
1280 a trusted shepherd if he ever had one.
OEDIPUS I ask you to speak first, Corinthian:
is this the man you mean?
MESSENGER You're looking at him.
OEDIPUS Now you, old man. Turn your eyes toward me.
Answer every question I ask you.
Did you once come from Laius' house?
HERDSMAN I did. I wasn't a bought slave,
I was born and raised in their house.
OEDIPUS What was your work? How did you spend your time?
1290 HERDSMAN My life has been spent tending sheep.
OEDIPUS In what region did you normally work?
HERDSMAN Mainly Cithairon, and the country around there.
(Oedipus gestures toward the Messenger.)
OEDIPUS That man. Do you recall ever seeing him . . .
HERDSMAN Recall him how? Doing what? Which man?
(Oedipus goes to the Messenger and puts his hand on him.)
OEDIPUS This man right here. Have you ever seen him before?
HERDSMAN Not that I recognizenot right away.
MESSENGER It's no wonder, master. His memory's faded,
but I'll revive it for him. I'm sure he knows me.
We worked the pastures on Cithairon together
1300 he with his two flocks, me with one
for three whole grazing seasons, from early spring
until Arcturus rose. When the weather turned cold

 

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I'd drive my flock home to its winter pens,
he drove his away to Laius' sheepfolds.
Do I describe what happened, old friend? Or don't I?
HERDSMAN That's the truth, but it was so long ago.
MESSENGER Do you remember giving me a boy
I was to raise as my own son?
HERDSMAN What? Why ask me that?
1310 MESSENGER There, friend, is the man who was that boy.
(He nods toward Oedipus.)
HERDSMAN Damn you! Shut up and say nothing.
OEDIPUS Don't you attack him for his words, old man.
Your own ask to be punished far more.
HERDSMAN Tell me, royal master, what I've done wrong.
OEDIPUS You didn't answer him about the boy.
HERDSMAN He's trying to make something out of nothing.
OEDIPUS Speak willingly, or you'll speak under torture.
HERDSMAN Dear god! Don't hurt me, I'm an old man.
OEDIPUS One of you bind his arms behind his back.
(Servants approach the Herdsman and start to seize his arms.)
1320 HERDSMAN Why this, you doomed man? What else must you know?
OEDIPUS Did you give this man the child he claims you gave?
HERDSMAN I did. I wish I had died that day.
OEDIPUS You'll die yet if you don't speak the truth.
HERDSMAN Answering you is what will get me killed.
OEDIPUS I think this man is determined to stall.
HERDSMAN No! I've said once that I gave him the boy.
OEDIPUS Did the boy come from your house? Or someone else's?
HERDSMAN Not from my house. Someone gave him to me.
OEDIPUS Name the person! Name the house!
1330 HERDSMAN Don't ask that of me, master. For god's sake, don't.
OEDIPUS You will die if I ask one more time.

 

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HERDSMAN He was a child from the house of Laius.
OEDIPUS A slave? Or was he born to Laius' own blood?
HERDSMAN I've come to the terrorwhich I must speak.
OEDIPUS And which I must hear. But I will hear it.
HERDSMAN The child was said to be Laius' own son.
Your lady in the house would know that best.
OEDIPUS
She
gave you the child?
HERDSMAN She gave him, King.
1340 OEDIPUS To do what?
HERDSMAN I was to let it die.
OEDIPUS Kill her own child?
HERDSMAN She feared prophecies.
OEDIPUS What prophecies?
HERDSMAN That this child would kill his father.
OEDIPUS Why, then, did you give him to this old man?
HERDSMAN I pitied him, master. The man would take him,
I hoped, to a new home in another land.
But that man saved him for this
1350 the worst grief of all. If the child
he speaks of is you, master, you know,
now, all the evil of your birth and life.
OEDIPUS All! All! It has all happened,
it was all true. O light! May this
be the last time I see you.
You see now who I am. I am
the child who must not be born,
I loved where I must not love,
I killed where I must not kill.
(Oedipus runs into the palace.)
1360 CHORUS Men and women who live and die,
I set no value on your lives.
Which one of you ever, who reaches
for the true blessedness that lasts,
seizes more than what seems blest?
You live in that seeming
a brief time, then you plunge.

 

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Your fate teaches me this, Oedipus,
yours, you suffering man, the story
god spoke through you: praise
1370 no human life, none, for its luck.
O Zeus, no man drew a bow like this man,
he shot his arrow home,
winning power and pleasure and wealth,
he killed the virgin Sphinx
whose talons curl, who sang
the god's black oracles.
He fought death in our land,
he towered against its threat.
I've called you my king since that time,
1380 honoring you mightily, my Oedipus,
who wield the might of Thebes.
But now!nobody's story
has the sorrow of yours.
O my Oedipus, this is your fame:
the welcome of one harbor was enough
for you, both child and father, when your plow
drove through the room where women love.
How can the furrow your father plowed
not have screamed before now, at you, doomed man?
1390 Time, who sees all, caught you
living a life you never willed.
Time damns this marriage which is
no marriage, where the fathered child
fathered children himself.
O son of Laius, I wish
I'd never seen you. I fill my lungs
to cry with all my power,
to speak the truth in my heart:
you gave me once new breath,
1400 Oedipus, but now you pour
darkness through my eyes.
(Enter Servant from the palace.)
SERVANT Masters, always the most honored men in our land,
what crushing deeds you will see and hear!
whose sorrow you must bear, if you still feel
a born Theban's love for the House of Labdacus.
I don't think rivers could wash the evil
out of this house, not the Danube or the Phasis,

 

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it hides so much suffering, which is now
coming to light. But what happened inside
1410 was not involuntary evil, it was willed.
The griefs that hurt us worst are those
we think we've chosen for ourselves.
LEADER What we already knew made us suffer.
Do you want to add more?
SERVANT It is brief news to give or hear.
Our royal lady Jocasta's dead.
LEADER That pitiable woman. How did she die?
SERVANT She killed herself. You will be spared the worst
because you weren't there to see it.
1420 But you will hear exactly as I can
tell it, what that wretched woman suffered.
She came raging through the courtyard
straight for her marriage bed, the fists
of both her hands clenched in her hair.
Once in, she slammed the doors shut, calling out
to Laius, so long dead, remembering
the living seed of long ago, who killed Laius,
the mother living on to breed with her son
more ruined children.
1430 She grieved for the bed
where she had loved, and given birth
to all those doubled lives
husband fathered by husband,
children sired by her child.
From here on I don't know how she died,
because Oedipus burst in shouting,
taking our eyes from her misery.
We watched him, stunned, as he plowed through us
feverishly asking each man for his spear,
1440 demanding his wife who was not a wife,
but the twice-mothering earth
out of whom he and his children came.
He was raving, but some divine hand
drove him toward his wifenone of us near him did.
With a savage yell, as though guided there,
he lunged at the double doors, and wrenching
hollow bolts from their sockets,
he broke through into the room. There we saw her,
the woman above us, hanging by her neck,

 

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1450 twisting there in a noose of tangled cords.
He saw her, anguish roaring from deep inside him,
he reached and loosened the noose that held her.
When the poor lifeless woman was laid on the ground,
this was the terror we saw now: he pulled
the long pins of hammered gold from her gown,
these pins he raised and punched into his eyes
back through the sockets, shouting these words:
''Eyes, now you will never see
the evil I suffered and the evil I caused.
1460 Now you will see blackness! Not those lives
you should never have seen, not those yearned-for
faces you so long failed to know."
While he sang these tortured words,
not once, but many times his raised hands
struck his eyes. And the blood kept coming,
drenching his beard and cheeks, not a few wet drops
a black storm of bloody hail lashed his face.
What this man and this woman did
broke so much evil loose, that evil joins
1470 the whole of both their lives in grief.
The happiness they once knew was real
but now that happiness is ruin,
screaming, death, disgrace. Each misery
we have a name for has come here.
LEADER Has his grief eased at all?
SERVANT He shouts for someone to open the doorbolts:
"Show this city its father-killer," he cries,
"Show it its mother's . . . ." He spoke the word, I can't.
He wants to banish himself from the land,
1480 not curse this house any longer
by living here under his own curse.
He's so weak now, though, he needs to be helped.
No one could stand up under a sickness like his.
Look there. The doorbolts are sliding open.
You will witness a vision of suffering
even those it revolts must pity.
(Oedipus emerges from the slowly opening palace doors. He is blinded, with blood on his face and clothes, but the effect should arouse more awe and pity than shock. He moves with the aid of a servant.)

 

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