Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus is a play about a man's actions, both intentional and unintentional, and the punishment necessary for these actions. Whether he was manipulated by the gods or motivated, Oedipus must take responsibility for his actions and their consequences. His reaction during his life is an important reflection of ancient Greek society. The play blurs the line between a culture based on shame and a culture based on guilt. Scholars argue that in the 5th century BC, when the play was written, the Greeks were moving from the former to the latter. In order to understand how Oedipus Tyrannus represents this, it will be necessary to better define shame, guilt, and responsibility as the Greeks viewed them. Specifically, it must be shown how the character Oedipus demonstrates these three concepts in a way that would likely have conflicted Sophocles' audience. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Oedipus was destined by the gods to kill his father and sleep with his mother. When he learned of it, he fled his town and his family to escape this fate. He later became the tyrannus of the city of Thebes, saving it from the curse of the Sphinx and marrying the widowed queen. In Oedipus Tyrannus, a plague has struck Thebes, and the righteous king decides to find the murderer of Laius, the former ruler, in order to rid the city of miasma, or "pollution." During his investigation, he discovers that it was he who killed Laius in a fit of rage during his first wanderings, without knowing his identity. He also discovers that he was adopted and that Laius and Jocasta are his real parents. Oedipus realizes, with horror, that he has unwittingly fulfilled his destiny, by killing his father and sleeping with his mother. In an act of deep contrition, Oedipus gouges out his eyes and requests exile from the city. The character of Oedipus is not entirely evil and, in fact, he has very good intentions. He leaves his home to avoid putting the oracle's terrible prediction into practice. He saves the city of Thebes by solving the riddle of the Sphinx, and attempts to save them again by solving the mystery of Laius' murder. However, Oedipus has a rather angry character, which causes him a lot of trouble. More importantly, it leads him to unknowingly kill his father over a minor traffic conflict, which sets off all other events. Later, during the murder investigation, he attacks his brother-in-law Créon, accusing him of plotting to overthrow him, despite the irrationality of the accusation. By the time Oedipus inflicts his self-punishment, he has committed bad actions, both intentional and unintentional. The basic definition of shame among the Greeks was not that different from the modern definition. Williams says that “the fundamental experience of shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong condition (78). » Aidos, “shame,” does not always literally require an observer, but the idea of ​​an observer (Williams 82). Oedipus blinded himself because he couldn't bear to see the looks of disdain in others' eyes about his actions, but even as a blind man he chose to exile himself, because he couldn't even bear to imagine those looks of disdain. This vision of shame remains relatively faithful to the way we experience it. However, there is no Greek word directly equivalent to guilt (Williams 88). Rather, guilt is defined in relation to shame. While shame is the result of the public's negative opinion of character traitsfundamentals revealed by one's actions, guilt is an internal remorse about how one's actions have affected others. Williams says, “What I have done points in one direction to what happened to others, in another direction to what I am” (92). Thus, Oedipus is also faced with guilt for the curse his actions placed on Thebes, as well as the way he treated Creon. A life of internal guilt should be punishment enough, but it is compounded by a life of external shame. The relationship between his shame and guilt is important in Sophocles' commentary on Greek society and will be discussed later. ER Dodds argues in his book “The Greeks and the Irrational” that the ancient Greeks initially operated primarily within a culture of shame. .In archaic times, God's mills grinded so slowly that their motion was virtually imperceptible except to the eye of faith. In order to maintain the belief that they were moving, it was necessary to get rid of the natural time limit set by death (Dodds 33). Sometimes people were never punished during their lifetime for bad deeds. In order to maintain a certain faith in the justice of the gods, the Greeks invented the concept of miasma, of “pollution”. The shame of a bad deed would be passed on to offspring, thereby polluting an entire family line or, in the case of a royal family, an entire city (Dodds 33). In chapter 11 of The Odyssey, there is a version of the Oedipus story told in which Laius raped a young boy, thereby cursing Oedipus and his descendants. In Sophocles' version, the audience is never sure why the gods would grant him such a cruel fate. It is unclear whether the miasma comes from Oedipus or an ancestor. Regardless, under this system, a seemingly innocent person could be punished for the sins of their parents. An interesting question arises: Was Oedipus really guilty, or simply the victim of blood guilt and "eaten", "divine temptation" (Dodds 2)? In earlier versions of the tale, he is clearly the latter. One of the effects of the culture of shame was that "the weight of religious sentiment and religious law opposed the emergence of a true vision of the individual as a person, endowed with rights and personal responsibilities”. Oedipus would have been seen in archaic times as simply a tool for exacting moral debts (Dodds 34). Sophocles does not see things in such black and white terms. Oedipus spends most of Tyrannus' fourth stasimon alternating between blaming himself and blaming the gods. He calls himself “the destroyer, the curse”, but also “the man whom the gods hate the most” (1345-1346). In lines 1330-1331 he blames Apollo (the god by whom the oracle foretold his fate) for his anxieties, but in lines 1382 he says that the gods simply exposed his own impiety. He believes that "evil spread beneath" his skin from his birth (1396), and because of this the gods came to hate him (1518). Was Oedipus an innocent person forced to fulfill a destiny chosen for him by the gods, or was he an inherently evil man who brought about his own sad consequences? Even Oedipus doesn't seem to have a clear answer to this question, and neither does the audience. He could not have known that the man traveling on the road was both the king of Thebes and his father, but he could also have stopped himself from killing him. He couldn't have known that Jocasta was his mother, but he also could have stopped himself from taking her to bed. Oedipus appears to blame himself for his own ignorance, but blame implies an understanding of ignorance, which is, in this case, a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless,., 1971. 101-244.