The Complete Plays of Sophocles

OEDIPUS: Good son of Aegeus, gentle son,
only to the gods is it given not to age or die.
All else disrupts through all disposing time.
Earth ebbs in strength, the body ebbs in power.
Faith dies and faithlessness is born.
No constant friendship breathes
between man and man, or city and a city,
Soon or late, the sweet will sour,
the sour will sweet to love again.
Does fair weather hold between this Thebes and you?
Then one day shall ever teeming time
hatch nights on teeming days,
Wherein this pledge, this harmony, this hour
will break upon a spear,
slashed down for a useless word.

--Oedipus at Colonus


Though he lived well into his nineties, writing and producing plays from his twenties, only seven of Sophocles' 123 plays remain to us, a fact which seems appropriately tragic. In his time, Sophocles was regarded as the greatest that Greek tragedy had to offer, a dramatic Homer, and he won the first prize given to the best dramatist at the Athenian Dionysia twenty times. It is left to us to wonder whether the Greeks of Sophocles' time saw what we see in his plays--a persistent timelessness and depth of spirit--and whether it existed to the same degree in the 116 plays we have never seen.

Each of these seven is great in its own right: Ajax is the story of a warrior driven mad by jealousy, and mocked by the indifferent gods. Philoctetes is about a man who was abandoned by Odysseus on a desert en route to the Trojan War because his terrible snakebite made him irritating, but now Odysseus and Achilles' son Neoptolemus must return and convince Philoctetes to give them his bow, which never misses, so that they might use it to defeat the Trojans. The Woman of Trachis is about Deianeira, Heracles' wife, who struggles to love her husband in the face of his infidelity. Then there is Sophocles' take on Elektra, which to me is the least interesting of the seven, especially when placed next to Aeschylus' and Euripides' versions.

But the best plays here are the Oedipus plays, one of which I wrote about already (although Roche's translation improves on it significantly). It can't be said that Oedipus the King can't be understood without reading the other two in the "trilogy," because they were written at vastly different points of Sophocles' life and were never truly meant to create a unified whole, but I think they're vastly more interesting when read together

In Antigone, the first written, I think that you can see Sophocles' youth in Antigone's headstrongness and willingness to martyr herself. Antigone's brothers (Oedipus' sons) killed each other on the field of battle, one fighting for Thebes and the other against it, and her uncle Creon, the king, refuses to let the latter be buried properly. Knowing that it means she will be punished by death, Antigone buries him anyway, and commits suicide before Creon, having been enlightened by the prophet Teiresias, can come to pardon her.

On the other hand, Oedipus at Colonus was clearly written by a man reflecting upon his own age and mortality; it was one of the last plays that Sophocles wrote. It takes place between the events of Oedipus the King and Antigone, when Oedipus, having blinded himself, wanders with Antigone into the Athenian suburb of Colonus where they are welcomed by Theseus, the King. A prophecy has just told that whoever has Oedipus' favor will win the war for Thebes, and so King Creon and Oedipus' rebel son Polyneices have come to make amends, but Oedipus is too dignified to accede to their demands and for Theseus' warmth and kindness, Oedipus basically ensures Athens' dominance over Thebes in the decades to come.

Oedipus at Colonus is a pleasant reminder that Greek tragedy really isn't as rigid as Aristotle thought it should be, and that happy endings did exist. At the end of their lives, there is something appropriate about the way that Sophocles allows Oedipus--synonymous, for us and for Aristotle, with the spirit of tragedy--to be buried in dignity and love, and to be able to show the justice of a king in his final acts. Oedipus' words to Theseus, which I've copied above, affirm the inconstancy of the world, its chaos, entropy, and inevitable change, but without corrupting their basic truth, Oedipus is able to defy them as much as any human being is able. And though Sophocles could not have known this, the fact that Oedipus' story has survived for 2,500 years as an essential parable of downfall and redemption must temper his words as well.

Oedipus the King by Sophocles

The story of Oedipus is well-worn: Boy meets girl. Boy saves girl's city from riddle-obsessed monster. Boy discovers that he's actually girl's son, and that he killed his own dad years ago without knowing but it's too late because they've already boned. It's almost cliche.

To be more specific, Oedipus is the king of Thebes, a position he inherited when, wandering from his home in Corinth, he encountered the Sphinx, who was eating any Theban who could not answer his riddle. Oedipus answered it, and saved the city, and now has married its queen Jocasta, the former king being recently murdered. A plague has struck the city, and the oracle of Apollo says that it will only pass when the former king's murderer is put to justice. With the help of the prophet Teiresias, Oedipus discovers that he is the murderer, recalling a fight in which he killed an unknown man years ago, and that he is really Jocasta's son, expelled from Thebes as an infant because of a prophecy that said he would do exactly what he ends up doing.

But it is, of course, the essential work of ancient Greek tragedy. It is the most oft-used example Aristotle gives when he outlines tragedy for us in the Poetics, suggesting that shows remarkable purity of genre. All the elements are there: a hero is neither a great man nor a villain, but the bearer of a fatal flaw that eventually leads to his downfall. There is a startling revelation (peripeteia), a sudden reversal of fortune (anagnorisis), and an ending so bleak and ruinous that you might call it a catastrophe (catastrophe).

Of course, it is also the basis for Freud's theory of the Oedipal complex, making it one of the most essential texts in the development of Freudian criticism and literary criticism as a whole. In this way, its relevance spans a vast stretch of time, and it is an excellent illustration of the way that we regard literature differently than our predecessors.

Unlike The Odyssey, I find Oedipus the King wanting for emotional heft to complement its academic fecundity. All tragedies are meant to act as funhouse mirrors in which we see ourselves, but Oedipus' basic humanity is less apparent to me than Odysseus', whose longing for his home and his wife is truly affecting. One issue may be the translation, which I feel is a little banal. See the way that this translator, Benard Knox, renders Oedipus' opening address to the priests who are gathered in supplication to the gods:

My sons! Newest generation of this ancient city of Thebes! Why are you here? Why are you seated there at the altar, with these branches of supplication? The city is filled with the smoke of burning incense, with hymns to the healing god, with laments for the dead.

Contrast Sir George Young:

Children, you modern brood of Cadmus old,
What mean you, sitting in your sessions here,
High-coronalled with votive olive-boughs,
While the whole city teems with incense-smoke,
And paean hymns, and sounds of woe the while?

Knox's translation, besides committing the terrible sin of being in prose, is awfully clumsy and plain, isn't it? Not only that, but you get the impression a lot of the syntax is lost here--see how Oedipus' statement about the incnese is subordinated in Young's translation, suggesting that Oedipus is asking about that as well as the priests' presence, and in Knox's it is presented as a flat statement unconnected to anything. Stupid.

But whatever. One benefit of Oedipus is that it's literally one-tenth the size of The Odyssey, so in my class we can really pick it apart and deconstruct it. I wish it were made of better stuff, but what can you do?

The Odyssey by Homer

Of mortal creatures, all that breathe and move,
earth bears none frailer than mankind.

--Odysseus, Bk. XVIII

How to summarize The Odyssey, which surely is among the handful of texts that might be called the greatest work of literature ever written? I have been reading this with my senior class, and--in my opinion, at least--it's been a lot of fun. The Odyssey is so rich that we could have spent months and months dissecting it; as it is, we've done it in six weeks and barely scratched the surface.

Those who have never actually read it may be surprised to learn that the string of adventures that give us the term "odyssey" for a long journey are confined to a relatively small portion of the book. Odysseus' encounter with the Kyklops Polyphemos, the goddesses Kirke and Kalypso (both of whom he bones), his trip to the underworld, Skylla and Kharybdis, all take up only four books out of the twenty-four. The beginning of the book is given almost completely to Odysseus' son, Telemakhos, struggling with the suitors who have taken up residence in his father's manor and undertaking a journey of his own to learn of his father's whereabouts. A long section in the middle is given to Odysseus at the court of King Antinoos of the Phaiakians (to whom he tells the story of his adventures), and the final half of the book is all about Odysseus back home in Ithaka planning the suitors' demise while disguised as a beggar. Yet, all these sections are great, and, in my opinion, The Odyssey's best moments actually occur when the pace slows down.

Though The Odyssey is typically read by freshmen, this translation by Robert Fitzgerald is much more complex than the one that's usually found in schools, and in my opinion is infinitely better. Fitzgerald's rendering of Homer's words is frequently gorgeous. Here is the moment when Odysseus' wife Penelope sees him, undisguised, for the first time in twenty years, after he's killed all of her suitors:

She turned to descend the stair, her heart
in tumult. Had she better keep her distance
and question him, her husband? Should she run
up to him, take his hands, kiss him now?
Crossing the door sill she sat down at once
in firelight, against the nearest wall,
across the room from the lord Odysseus.

There leaning against the pillar, sat the man
and never lifted up his eyes, but only waited
for what his wife would say when she had seen him.
And she, for a long time, sat deathly still
in wonderment--for sometimes as he gazed
she found him--yes, clearly--like her husband,
but sometimes blood and rags were all she saw.

One of the other teachers maintains that The Odyssey is a very simple book--I couldn't disagree more. The Odyssey continues to amaze us today, I think, because it's several books at once--it is an adventure story, a love story, a novel of manners, maybe even a proto-feminist book. It is about a man who misses his wife; it is about a man who comes to know his son; it is about a man who learns to put his warlike self aside; it is about the way that people are rewarded or punished by how they treat those in need; it is a story about fate and destiny and the gods.

I know that some of my students think it's awful and tedious, but I hope that one day they can approach it again and remember some of the things that we've talked about and realize how powerful it is. I know that it sort of bored me in high school; now I think that it's fantastic.

The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan

The Percy Jackson series was a little hit-and-miss for me. The first book was nearly pitch perfect. It was a fast-paced adventure that managed to be inventive and funny and have interesting characters. With each successive book the story moves further and further into the world of the gods. While this seems like a very logical move storywise, it is why I didn't enjoy the next four books as much as I expect I would.

Part of the charm of the first book was the interaction between the world of the gods and the "real world" or world of mortals. That Percy had one foot firmly in each world made for funny situations. This lessens after the first book.

The Last Olympian pits Percy and the forces of good, which include most of the gods and many of the demigods against the Chronos and his forces, which include many of the lesser gods and also a large number of demigods. The final showdown takes place on the streets of New York City.

The Percy Jackson series started off with a bang. The Lightning Thief was excellent, but the rest of the books were not nearly as good. All in all, the series was just okay. It fell way short of His Dark Materials and Harry Potter.

I saw the teaser for The Lightning Thief before the latest Harry Potter movie. It looked cool. I expect that the movies will do well.

My review of The Lightning Thief (Book One)
My review of The Sea of Monsters (Book Two)
My review of The Titan's Curse (Book Three)
My review of The Battle of the Labyrinth (Book Four)

The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan

The Battle of the Labyrinth is the fourth book in the Percy Jackson & the Olympian series. The book begins with Percy starting at yet another new school. He is a freshman, and his mother's boyfriend has pulled a few strings and made it possible for Percy to attend the school where he teaches. Percy enters Goode High School hoping things will go well. But Percy is a demigod, who is being hunted by all sorts of monsters, so things rarely go well. After being there for less than an hour, he faces off against a trio of empousai, masquerading as cheerleaders, and ends up setting the band room on fire.

After narrowly escaping the she-monsters, Percy makes it back to Camp Half-Blood, a safe place where demigods spend the summer. He learns that Kronos's army intends to circumvent the camps protective barrier by using the Labyrinth constructed by the ancient architect and inventor Daedalus. (Remember Icarus who flew too close to the sun fell to the earth when the wax holding his wings together melted? Daedalus was his father and the maker of the wings.) The Oracle chooses Annabeth to lead a group into the Labyrinth and try to thwart the attempt to attack Camp Half-Blood.

Riordan employs Ovid's version of the Labyrinth -- a maze of numberless winding passages and turns that open into one another, seeming to have neither a beginning nor an end -- rather than Homer's, which was a maze with a definite path. As he does in the other books, Riordan adds his own personal touches to the mythology here and there. In his rendering, the Labyrinth is connected to the lifeforce of Daedalus. It is a living thing capable of change.

Labyrinth suffers from some of the same problems that books two and three did. It is on par with the last two, neither of which were as good as the first book.

My review of The Lightning Thief (Book One)
My review of The Sea of Monsters (Book Two)
My review of The Titan's Curse (Book Three)

The Centaur by John Updike

As my father and I strode along the pavement that divided the school side lawn from Hummel's alley, a little whirlwind sprang up before us and led us along. Leaves long dead and brittle as old butterfly wings, an aqua candy wrapper, flecks and dust and seed-sized snips of gutter chaff all hurried in a rustling revolution to our eyes; a distinctly circular invisible presence outlined itself on the walk. It danced from one margin of grass to another and sighed its senseless word; my instinct was to halt but my father kept striding. His pants flapped, something sucked my ankles. I closed my eyes. When I looked behind us, the whirlwind was nowhere to be seen.

In the school we parted. A student, I was held by regulations to this side of the wire-reinforced doors. He pushed through and walked down the long hall, his head held high, his hair fluffed from the removal of his blue knit cap, his heels pounding the varnished boards. Smaller and smaller he grew along their perspective; at the far door he became a shadow, a moth, impaled on the light he pressed against. The door yielded; he disappeared. With a grip of sweat, terror seized me.

John Updike passed away a month ago; though I could try I do not think I would be able to make a better encomium than any of the hundreds that have already been published. Slate published a slew of them, including what I thought was a pretty incoherent one by John Irving, and a tangential one by Christopher Hitchens. The best are a series of shorter obituaries that Slate published together; among my favorites is editor Anne Fadiman's, whose piece ends simply, "Can it really be that John Updike will never write another sentence?" Should one of my favorite authors die tomorrow, I might lament that they will never write a book, but true to Fadiman's sentiment, it's Updike's sentences that seem to leave the deepest hollow: miniature masterpieces like Rabbit Angstrom moving along the street like a shark, or dreaming of his own immortality, or Peter Caldwell watching his father disappear, shrinking to a "moth... impaled on the light he pressed against."

In his obituary on Slate, Steely Dan founder Donald Fagen notes David Foster Wallace's protest that Updike's characters are all veiled portraits of himself, ""incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous," and chauvinistic. But The Centaur ought to put that notion to rest, because its protagonist, George Caldwell, is defined by a selflessness that is almost nauseating. Caldwell is modeled after Chiron, the centaur and great teacher of myth who was accidentally hit by a poisoned arrow. Plagued by the wound, he begged Zeus to die, and that by doing so he might redeem the sin of Prometheus, who had long ago stolen fire from the gods. Frequently in the narrative Updike switches from Caldwell to Chiron without warning, at one point depicting him as a modern-day schoolteacher and the next an ancient demigod.

In fact, everyone in the book has a mythological counterpart: Peter, George's son, is Prometheus, who is deeply embarrassed by his father's selflessness, though he doesn't realize the depth and sincerity of his father's sacrifice. A drunk is Dionysius, the principal is Zeus--and so on and so on, all cross-indexed in the back.

A classicist might have fun trying to identify the second identity of each character, but I think that the book ultimately suffers by this gimmick, which would have been less muddled without the mythological veneer Updike imposes on it. As in the Rabbit Angstrom novels, Updike dots The Centaur with moments of unparalleled prose, but here I am left wondering to what they all add up. The novelty of this kind of modernism was really exhausted with Joyce; here, where he would imbue the myth with heart and pathos, Updike too often creates a distraction from the novel.

Of course, much is required from greatness and Updike's less successful books are still better than most, and when the guessing-game is ignored, a pithy and powerful book remains: The plot is thin, following Caldwell and his son over a stretch of three days where they are prevented from returning home by car trouble and snow. Caldwell would do anything for Peter, but it is unclear what there is to be done, and Peter is increasingly resentful of what he sees as his father's weak nature. Caldwell is Chiron, who wants nothing more to give himself for others, and by extension is also a commentary on the nature of Christ.

At any rate, perhaps it would be fitting to say that Caldwell has as much of Updike, who gave of himself in scores and scores of books, in him as Rabbit Angstrom, whose selfishness and audacity are secondary only to his humanity.

Also: This is the 600th post on this blog! Hooray!

The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan

I liked the first book of this series a lot, and The Sea of Monsters was a nice follow-up. But The Titan's Curse was not nearly as good as the first two. Much like Order of the Phoenix, in the HP series, we find out some interesting bits to the overarching story in this book, but the pacing and much of the plot just felt off to me.

Riordan relies way to much of "future reveals" as in, "Annabeth looked directly at me. 'Percy, I should probably tell you something.' But our conversation was cut off by Grover who stumbled into the room out of breath." Exchanges like this happen all throughout the book. The info is withheld from the reader, sometimes not revealed at all, sometimes used later for a climactic end to a chapter. I began to find it really annoying.

Another thing that is starting to bug me is that no one ever dies. Percy and his friends are constantly fighting all sorts of monsters and (new as of this book) Titans, but no one is ever killed. Even when is seems like someone has died, you find out twenty pages later that they are not dead. And in most cases, Riordan does not explain how they managed not to die. That was one of the aspects of the HP series that I really liked. When people faced down real danger, they didn't always make it through.

There were still many positives to The Titan's Curse. The plot of the series really begins to unfold in this book. Riordan continues to deftly weave together Greek mythology and the modern world, in ways that are unique and often funny. In the case of Riordan v. Rowling, I side with Rowling on nearly every issue. However, when it comes to humor, Riordan has a slight advantage.

My review of The Lightning Thief (Book One)
My review of The Sea of Monsters (Book Two)

The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

Monsters never die. They are reborn from the chaos and barbarism that is always bubbling underneath civilization, the very stuff that makes Kronos stronger. They must be defeated again and again, kept at bay. Heroes embody that struggle. You fight the battles humanity must win, every generation, in order to stay human.
-- Chiron speaking to Percy

Percy Jackson once again finds himself in the middle of a dangerous adventure, in the second book of the Percy Jackson & the Olympians series. In the first book, Percy is introduced to Camp Half-Blood, a safe place for demigods -- the offspring of Greek gods and humans. Some kids go there during the the summer, and some stay there all year long. Sea of Monsters opens with the camp coming under attack -- somehow its magical borders have been breached -- Grover in danger, and Percy getting kicked out of yet another school.

Percy and Annabeth set out to find and rescue Grover, who is being held by the cyclops Polyphemus (the same cyclops that Odysseus blinded). They are also trying to find some way to restore the tree that protects the boundaries of the camp. They are helped in their quest by Tyson, a young cyclops that Percy befriends and later finds out is his half-brother. Cyclops are are the offspring of the gods and nereids. Clarisse, a daughter of Ares and fellow Camp Half-Blood resident, also shows up throughout the book, sometimes helping, sometimes causing problems. What do you expect from a daughter of the god of war?

Most of the action in the Harry Potter books happened during the school year at Hogwarts. The Percy Jackson books are the exact opposite. The school year is almost completely ignored and the books begins with Percy heading to Camp Half-Blood for the summer. I point out some other similarities between these two series (Riordan wrote his much later than Rowling) in my review of the first book, The Lightning Thief.

If you approach these books with the right mindset, they are a lot of fun.

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Twelve year old Percy Jackson has some problems. He is dyslexic and has ADHD to the max. As a result, he gets kicked out of every school in which his mother enrolls him. His stepfather is a jerk, and he doesn't know his real dad. As the book opens, Percy is on a field trip to the Met with his fellow classmates. Just a typical, boring field trip until one of the teachers turns into a Fury and tries to rip him in half. Percy realizes that dyslexia and ADHD are the least of his problems, when he discovers that he is a demigod -- half man, half god -- and that he is caught in the middle of a war that is threatening to tear the world apart, quite literally.

The Lightning Thief is a quest story set in modern times. The setting moves from New York City to St. Louis to L.A., as Percy works his way toward the West Coast, where the entrance to the Underworld is located. He is helped along on his quest by Grover, a satyr, and Annabeth, another child demigod.

The Lightning Thief is the first book in a five-part series, called Percy Jackson & the Olympians. Four books have been released. If you liked the Harry Potter series you will probably like this book. It is written for the same audience. Riordan even cribs a little from the Potter series. The protagonist in the book is helped by two best friends, a boy and girl. There is mystery surrounding his past. And the Greek-god world exists alongside the mortal world, hidden in plain sight.

I liked how Riordan brought the Greek gods into modern times, updating them, but not fundamentally changing who they are. I am sure he fudges a little on some of the details to make things fit his story, but I don't know enough about Greek mythology to notice.

To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck

I have not read much by Steinbeck. I read Of Mice and Men three or four years ago, and I am fairly certain that I was assigned The Grapes of Wrath in high school, although I am not certain that I actually read it. The cover of this book caught my eye, before I noticed anything else. It was a painting of a man approaching a large gnarled tree, which stood at the top of a hill. (The picture to the left is the only one on the official Penguin Classics website. I was unable to find the correct cover.) Seeing that it was written by Steinbeck, but not recognizing the title, I flipped the book over and read the first sentence of the summary on the back. It read, “Ancient pagan beliefs, the great Greek epics, and the Bible all inform this extraordinary novel, which occupied Steinbeck for more than five difficult years.” After reading this, I had to read the book.

That one sentence summarizes To a God Unknown very well. Set in the early 20th century, it is a story of four brothers who move from Vermont to California to homestead the land. Joseph Wayne is not the oldest, but he is the leader of the brothers since their father gave him his blessing before he died. Joseph becomes convinced that the spirit of his father inhabits a large tree on his farm. He secretly communes with the tree, talking to it, seeking advice, and even offering sacrifices.

Amongst his brothers and their wives, opinions about Joseph vary. Thomas puts up with it, seemingly amused. Rama, the wife of the oldest brother, reveres Joseph. She tells Joseph’s new wife, “I do not know whether there are men born outside humanity, or whether some men are so human as to make other seem unreal. Perhaps a godling lives on earth now and then. Joseph has strength beyond vision of shattering, he has the calm of mountains, and his emotion is as wild and fierce and sharp as the lightning and just as reasonless as far as I can see or know. I tell you this man is not a man, unless he is all men.” Later the priest of a nearby town mirrors her thinking. As Joseph leaves, the priest thinks, “Thank God this man has no message. Thank God he has no will to be remembered, to be believed in, else there might be a new Christ here in the West.” However others feel about Joseph, Burton, a staunch Christian, thinks that his brother is practicing a kind of devil worship. He fears that he is allowing evil to take root in their land, and voices his disapproval to Joseph on a number of occasions.

Whether as a result of Joseph's actions or not, the Wayne family does prosper. Their crops are bountiful, their livestock reproduce at an alarming rate, and there is never any want for wild game on their property. But it is not long before the ground begins to dry up and the animals begin to die and leave the land. Joseph is certain that he knows what brought on this change, and he knows what he must do.

All throughout To a God Unknown, Steinbeck alludes to and borrows from Greek mythology and a wide range of religious traditions. In so doing, Steinbeck creates a mystical tale of his own, adding to his mythology of California.