Oedipus

Question 1

Oedipus — key characters

Answer 1

Oedipus, Jocasta, King Laius, Polybus, Merope, Creon, Tiresias

Question 2

Oedipus quotes

Answer 2

‘I’ll never see myself disgraced’

‘Your gods, your birds’

‘I am the lands avenger by all rights’

‘I am doomed to couple with my mother and cut my father down’

‘The flight of my own intelligence hit the mark’

‘You freed us from the Sphinx’ — the priest

‘You are the curse, the corruption of the land’ — tiresias

Question 3

Plague prologue

Answer 3

‘The red waves of death… Thebes is dying’

Question 4

Oedipus context

Answer 4

• Plague in Athens at the time
• sophistry emergence

-beginnings of Peloponnesian war w Sparta
— refugees come in

Question 5

Jocasta - quotes

Answer 5

‘You prophecies of the gods, where are you now?’

‘Chance rules our lives’

‘Something monstrous may burst forth’

Question 6

Oedipus - scholars

Answer 6

‘haunted sense of being caught in a trap’
‘Modern vision of a death-haunted universe’ — fagles

‘Oedipus is a paradox in himself’ ‘both a saviour and a monster’ — goldhill

‘Fate and character are responsible for his fall’

‘Appeal for modern readers may derive from its resemblance… to a detective novel’

‘Tiresias is physically blind, while Oedipus, the physically sighted, knows nothing’

— Garvie