A Student's Guide to Classics by Bruce S. Thornton

Author:Bruce S. Thornton [Bruce S. Thornton]
Language: eng
Format: epub

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The next tragic poet whose work has survived is Sophocles (c. 496–406 B.C.), who wrote more than 120 plays and won some twenty first prizes. We have seven of these plays, including perhaps the most famous of Greek tragedies, Oedipus Turannos or Oedipus Rex (date unknown), which Sigmund Freud misread spectacularly.⁵ Rather than a drama of the “family romance,” as Freud thought, the Oedipus is really about the limits of reason to acquire sure knowledge in a world made uncertain by our own passions and the vagaries of time and chance. This theme is related to a representative feature of Sophocles’ drama that Aristotle called “recognition” (anagnôrisis): that moment when the protagonist realizes he has misjudged and misunderstood reality and now must pay for his mistake in suffering. Yet Sophocles acknowledges that despite our limitations, the need to search out the truth of the human condition is the driving force of human life, one admirable even if it leads to disaster.

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