Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(11)

The shepherd finally arrives and reluctantly confirms the messenger’s story. Oedipus then sees what Jocasta has already guessed: they are not only wife and husband, but mother and son. He goes into the palace, but of course we cannot follow him. We must wait until a palace servant rushes out to say that the queen is dead by her own hand. In one of the most memorable sequences in all of theatre, he then tells us that Oedipus found his wife, hanged, took the brooch pins from her dress and put out his own eyes. Now he has truly seen who he is, he cannot bear to see anything else: blindness is the only possible response. At his own request, he is banished from the city (and his children) by Creon, who assumes the throne.

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The play moves with an astonishing momentum. The revelations come raining down on Oedipus so quickly that we barely have time to catch our breath. In one short day, he goes from king, husband, father and son, to widower, murderer, ruin, exile. An equally devastating fall from grace happens to Jocasta, and yet we almost forget about her. But her fate is at least as terrible as that of her son, perhaps more so, because she had less information than he did to begin with, so she has had no time to psychologically prepare herself for anything. When she tells Oedipus about the prophecy Laius received6 all those years ago, her words are quite plain: the god said that Laius would be killed by their son. As far as she knows, as she explains, her husband was killed by thieves and her son wasn’t among them, because he died at three days old, his feet pinned together, slung onto an untrodden place on the mountain. She describes the loss of her baby so bluntly and briskly that it is easy to imagine that it’s not much more than a plot point, that it wasn’t an especially harrowing ordeal. Child abandonment wasn’t uncommon in the ancient world, and child mortality was enormously high: at the time Sophocles wrote these scenes, perhaps as many as a third of infants didn’t survive to adulthood. But which of us would mourn a child less because other people’s children died too? Jocasta must have been – by temporal necessity in this version of the myth – a very young bride to Laius, because she was still capable of having four children with Oedipus. If she was sixteen when Oedipus was born, and he was sixteen when he arrived in Thebes having bested the Sphinx, she would be thirty-two when they wed, which seems to fit the timeline reasonably well. So by the time she and Oedipus married, she had spent half her life living with the knowledge that she had had a healthy child and he was taken, maimed and left to die. There can be few tortures more cruel.

And once Laius had insisted that her child be killed, she would have known there was no chance of having another (in some versions of the myth, which we’ll look at in more detail below, Laius only impregnates her because he gets hopelessly drunk and is overwhelmed by lust. Did she know throughout her pregnancy that the baby would be killed? Or would Laius have let her keep it if she had given birth to a girl? The prophecy is specific about it being his son7 who would kill him). There are years of grief behind this short speech of Jocasta’s. No wonder she tells Oedipus not to listen to prophecies: what good have they ever done her? And after all her pain, Laius was killed by bandits, as any unfortunate traveller might be.

But let’s think about what she knows of the oracles involved in this story, compared with what Oedipus knows. She has been told one thing, which is that Laius would be killed by his – their – son. She thinks this is impossible because her son has died, but even if by some miracle it had happened, that is all the information she ever had, and it has long since ceased to be important. Oedipus, meanwhile, has far more to work with. Firstly, there’s the drunk at the banquet who tells him he’s adopted. He questions his parents, but they deny it. Still, he’s uncertain, so he goes to Delphi to consult the Oracle. Apollo doesn’t answer the question about adoption, but does tell him something far more terrible: that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. One might legitimately suggest that, if it has been predicted that you will kill your father and marry your mother, and if you had (separately) been told you were adopted, it might be a good idea to avoid killing any men of an age to be your father and marrying any women who could conceivably be your mother. That he doesn’t, and that we don’t feel compelled to shout this out during productions of Oedipus Tyrannos, is testimony to Sophocles’ skill and the sheer, relentless pace of a play that allows Oedipus to pelt towards the realization of his crimes while somehow also dangling the truth just out of reach for what feels like forever. Nonetheless, he entered into their marriage knowing far more than Jocasta possibly could about its potential horror. So at some level, conscious or subconscious, he is surely less shocked than she must be by their horrific crime, since she only knows about its possibility on the same day that she finds out its truth.

And when that day of reckoning finally comes, Oedipus’ celebrated cleverness is at the very core of the play. The chorus beg him to help lift the plague, to help solve the crime of who killed Laius, because he is famously clever. Both the priest at the beginning of the play and Oedipus himself mention his brilliance in solving the riddle of the Sphinx. And yet it is Jocasta, long before Oedipus, who realizes the truth of who they both are: wife and husband, mother and son. She is the cleverest person in the room and we barely notice it because we’re too busy concentrating on Oedipus. She has time to withdraw into the palace, make the decision to take her own life and carry that out, all before he works out what she realizes immediately.

And when Jocasta hangs herself, she is making an explicit statement. In Greek myth, hanging is usually the method of suicide employed by virginal girls (it is the method Antigone, the daughter of Jocasta and Oedipus, will employ in Sophocles’ Antigone, for example). So when Jocasta hangs herself, she is not only ending what she perceives to be a cursed life and marriage. She is also wishing herself back to the time before Oedipus was conceived, to when she had never been married, never had a child, never had sex.