Letter to Sophacles
By Omar Andre
Dear Sophocles,
I really liked the plays you made, I especially liked how well Antigone worked as a sequel. Antigone had the same themes and tone as Oedipus Rex, and I liked how it got to continue the story and consequences of Oedipus.
I loved how you handled the main theme in the story: Tragedy. Throughout both stories, you can see the characters dealing with injustice, although they do so in different ways. In Oedipus Rex, tragedy falls upon the main character and we see him be in denial at it initially, as shown in the dialogue between Oedipus and Teiresias, where Oedipus is shown to lash out in rage at the very reasonable and well spoken Teresias:
“OEDIPUS: Do you intend
to betray me and destroy the city?
TEIRESIAS: I will cause neither me nor you distress…
OEDIPUS: You most disgraceful of disgraceful men!”(Sophocles 9) And eventually we see Oedipus broken by fate, we see the result of the tragedy, and we see Oedipus resign to the will of the gods: “OEDIPUS: I must obey,
although that’s not what I desire.”(Sophocles 38) In Antigone, the theme was also tragedy, but this time you used tragedy not only to strengthen Oedipus’ point that fate is tragic but inevitable by writing Oedipus’ descendants to have tragic endings, but you also used tragedy to explore the idea of positions of power and morality. You showed the inevitability and tragedy of fate by making the two sons of Oedipus die by each other’s hand:
“Now they are dead, both on one day;
Each stabbed the other and was stabbed.
Brother struck brother, and the blows were cursed.” The new point about morality and power was made through both characterization and conflict in Antigone.
I really enjoyed how you used characterization in Antigone, specifically the protagonist and antagonist, Antigone and Creon respectively. Creon was, from the beginning, characterized as a temperamental and unfair ruler. The first example that comes to mind is the messenger that comes to relay the message that Polynices was buried properly, he was scared, and rightfully, that Creon might take his life just for relaying information, which is self evidently unfair:
“We simply had to bring word to you,
Because we could not hide a thing like this.
We voted to do it, and I am so damned unlucky
I wo the lottery to have this lovely job…
As it is, this has gone better than I expected–
I’m still alive, thanks be to the gods.” (Sophocles 13-14)
Creon believed himself justified in doing whatever he pleased because he believed in following the highest in the hierarchy, no matter what:
“But when the city takes a leader, you must obey, whether his commands are trivial, or right, or wrong.”(Sophocles 29)
In contrast, Antigone is characterized as a believer in the gods’ rule:
“What laws? I never heard it was Zeus
Who made that announcement…
No man could frighten me into taking on the gods’
penalty for breaking such a law” (Sophocles 19)
I enjoyed the questions that these two belies being antagonists in the conflict made. You used the conflict to prove Antigone unquestionably right, and in a way, Creon half right, while still keeping tragedy as a main theme. In the plot, you punished Creon by killing his son and wife:
“She [Creon’s wife] died at the altar…
Last of all she called out to you,
‘These are your crimes, Childkiller!’ ” (Sophocles 56)
You used this both to show that Creon was wrong, because the gods were behind this punishment, but also showing that gods are cruel. Even if you believe that the wife could somehow be half at blame, because she could have stopped all this, which she couldn’t, she was away, Creon’s child was definitely innocent, and only died because Creon had to be punished. I really liked how you ended this story, because I think it leaves to interpretation something, which is that Creon might have been kind of right. Gods’ rules are two things in this story, yes, they are the “logical” good things to do, it is right to bury someone, it is not good to disrespect the dead, but gods are also kind of people, no? Gods determine who gets to have good afterlives and they determine fate and if they have the power to ruin someone’s whole life if they don’t follow their rules, then the rules should be followed, even if they are “bad”, no? And in this way, Creon was right that we must follow the ruler, he was just wrong in who was the ruler. This could also tell us a little bit about the culture you wrote this in, do we think burying the dead is good because it’s self-evidently good and the gods are just, or do we think burying the dead is good only because the gods say so. I think we can say that you believed the latter because of the way you wrote the gods as cruel.
Oedipus was a classic tragic hero archetype, which I think you used very nicely. Oedipus did everything right in life according to the beginning of the story. Oedipus was very highly praised at the beginning of the story:
“In their stories, the people testify
how, with gods’ help, you gave us back our lives.
So now, Oedipus, our king, most powerful
in all men’s eyes, we’re here as suppliants,
all begging you to find some help for us,” (Sophocles 3)
He had left his hometown to escape a prophecy that he was going to kill his father, reasonable, he saved the town from a terrorizing entity, very good of him, he married the past queen, which I admit I find a big questionable given that we later learn the age difference, but the story treated it as very justified. The main think I disagreed with you on is with the way you treated Oedipus killing a bunch of people. You treated this is as if it was fine had it not been his own father:
“Then I killed them all.
If that stranger was somehow linked to Laius,
who is now more unfortunate than me?
What man could be more hateful to the gods?”
What do you mean more hateful to the gods? He just killed a bunch of people and he thinks gods must hate him, he thinks only if one of them was his father that would have been bad. And the priest later agrees with him:
“My lord, to us these things are ominous.
But you must sustain your hope until you hear
the servant who was present at the time.”
“Hear the servant” means that he is giving importance to the fact that one of them might have been his father, and not reprimanding the killing otherwise. What were you thinking, Sophacles? Don’t you think it would have been more heroic if Oedipus hadn’t, you know, killed a bunch of people for basically no reason.
This is one of the many anecdotes you used during Oedipus. Because Oedipus is a mystery, a mystery of who must be punished, the way that you progress the story is by recounting anecdotes of the past. I think this was a good decision because this way the readers can slowly unravel the mystery. It also gives space for Oedipus to guess himself, to be in denial, and to build up to the eventual reveal that Oedipus tragic prophesy had been fulfilled.
Thank you for writing both of these amazing stories! My favourite part was exploring the conflict between Creon and Antigone’s points of view.