Summary
Sophocles' 'Oedipus Tyrannous' Summary
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Key quotes from the entire play, colour-coded by theme, with context notes and critic's quotes at the end
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Key Oedipus QuotesBy theme
Piety and Impiety
‘My altar, praying before me’- hubristic undertones, especially paired with later statements
‘Apollo save us, stop the plague’ - priest
Chorus call upon Zeus, Apollo, Artemis and Dionysus in the Paradois (first choral song)
‘You pray to the gods? Let me grant you your prayers’ - biggest statement of impiety, likens
himself to a god, hubris
‘Master of all mysteries’ and later ‘my lord’ - Oedipus initially respects Tiresias
‘You scum of the earth’
‘Not your prophets trade’ - prophet in it for the profit aha
‘Seer blind in his craft’
‘Scheming quack’
‘Pious fraud’
‘Your gods - nothing’- second biggest hubristic moment
‘I stopped the Sphinx, with no help from the birds’ - Oedipus claims to have stopped the
sphinx alone wen he actually had the help of the gods
‘So much for prophecy!’ - Jocasta says this in an attempt to calm Oedipus
‘Destiny guide me always’ - chorus, submitting to fate
‘If you didn’t look so senile, the lash would teach you what scheming means!’ - the ‘being an
old man saves you’ thing
Blindness
‘Blind to misery’
‘We’ll soon see’
‘Blind to the corruption of your life, darkness shrouding your eyes that now can see the light’
‘I see it all, I see the light’
Oedipus repeats the word blind four times in his stabbing speech, visual potentially him
stabbing each time he says this ?
Incest and the killing of Laius
‘Lauis meet his bloody death’ - his death is caused by ‘his own blood’
‘Posses his bed, wife who shares our seed’
‘Why our seed might be the same, children born of the same mother’
‘I will fight for him as if he were my father’
‘Unaware of the one you live with, you are the curse the corruption of this land’ - Tiresias
reveals the truth to Oedipus
‘Blind to the corruption of your life’
‘Lusty voyage home to the fatal harbor’
‘He sowed the loins his father sowed, he spilled his fathers blood’
‘But here is his queen, his wife and mother
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