I am not Convinced

Let me begin by saying thank you for choosing my blog. I know you have a lot of blogs to choose from and I appreciate your choice to read mine. And definitely read the second paragraph: "I am not convinced....".

“Let every man in mankind’s frailty / Consider his last day; and let none / Presume on his good fortune until he find / Life, at his death, a memory without pain.” (Exodus 297-300). That’s pretty deep Sophocles, or maybe just Choragos, but is it optimistic or pessimistic. To say that even though your life might seem great, you should be wary because in the last moments before your death you may realize your life was terrible seems pessimistic. Sophocles’s quote through the character Choragos could also be seen in an optimistic way: that we should take advantage of all the good times throughout of lives so that even if in the end we realize something terrible has ruin our lives, we still enjoyed our lives. I think Sophocles wants us to see the optimistic side of this ambiguous quote upon further investigation, but when we first read this quote I think Sophocles expects and wants us to see the pessimistic side of this quote, since Choragos says the quote as if it were a warning to the “Men of Thebes” (292).

I am not convinced that Oedipus is evil. Oedipus himself is convinced he is evil though. He calls himself the “child of evil” (135) and exclaims, “How evil!” (183) in reference to himself. I definitely agree that Oedipus’s deeds are evil, but I think the gods, specifically “Apollo” (110) because Oedipus thinks, “He [Apollo] brought his sick fate upon me [Oedipus]” (112). The Greco-Roman citizens learned morality mostly religion. So through religion and partly through society Oedipus (an ancient and mythical Greco-Roman) learned that killing his father, and marrying his mother is not morally acceptable. But Oedipus also learned from religion and society that obeying the will of the gods is also acceptable and more importantly, almost mandatory. So when Oedipus follows along the fated path Apollo prepared for him, I can’t fully fault Oedipus for his actions. Even with free will Oedipus cannot escape his fate. And I think if he could he would have. Oedipus was a good man and lived a good life all except for obeying the terrible actions that he was forced and fated to do by the gods. I definitely do not exclaim, “How evil!” when I exclaim things that have to do with Oedipus (183).

Poor Oedipus!? Poor children of Oedipus! While I was reading I wondered about the fate of his poor children because they are now orphaned and because they probably will have a terrible fate if the pattern of the terrible fates continues down the “line of Kadmos” (152) and “the house of Laïos” continues (155). The degree of how terrible each fate is increases down the ancestry line. The least terrible of the terrible fates would be Oedipus’s father’s fate: that his son would kill him and marry his wife. Next would be Oedipus’s fate: that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Then would presumably come Oedipus’s children. But who knows what fate can come for the spawn of the Oedipus and Oedipus’s mother/wife–who first produced a child who would kill her husband then marry her who would produce more children of his own with her. Oedipus even rhetorically stated, “Is there any evil waiting [for my children]” (262) because it seems so unlikely that they would be from the “bane” (261) of their family’s past.

Then I realized that we would soon find out what happens to one of these poor children because Antigone is one of Oedipus’s children, and she is the title of the next drama we will read in English. I wonder if the lives of Oedipus’s children will be less, just as, or more complex than the life of their father/brother. I have a hard time being optimistic about the fate of these children. (673!)