 | | My seed may be base born,
but I will see at last what it is.
It may well be that my birth
humiliates her female pride.
But I, who have always known I am
the child of Luck, whose gifts are always good,
will never know disgrace.
Luck is my mother, my brothers are the months
who measured out the low times
in my life and the great ones.
It these are my true kinsmen,
how could I betray my nature
by giving up the great search
now
that will find my birth? (107685/123649)
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Euphoric as this is, it fits what Oedipus at this moment knows of his life. He knows he has been favored. He has survived dire oracles and self-exile from Corinth, he defeated the Sphinx and won Thebes. Now he learns he was saved from death on the very mountain that looms over Thebes. He finds himself without parents, he traces his origins back only to a babe on a mountainside. Luck herself, a vivid presence to a Greek of Sophocles' time, must be his true parent. And he is right, his life has issued from Luck, though the kind of mothering she has given him he does not yet see. Still, to make
Tyche
his parent is defensible. It fits what he knows. When the truth arrives, he speaks no more of this mother Luck. He accepts Laius and Jocasta as his true father and mother, and what it means to be their son.
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This readiness to make daring formulations is Oedipus' outstanding quality. He is open to new evidence, he can change his mind. It is Sophocles' purpose to show Oedipus changing his mind about the largest question of all. Oedipus' sense of the reasonable has been grounded in the belief that a person of good will, energy, and ability will have the gods' help and so stand in a better position to achieve happiness than one indifferently possessed of these attributes. The proof of his intelligence is his willingness to abandon his belief that the gods favor the good at the moment the evidence becomes overpowering. He never doubts his own good will or intelligence. When he returns blind and frail to the stage, we will hear him reformulate the nature of human life in terms of his own. What he will have most in mind is marriage, his sexual acts, and the kinship binding parents and children.
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If we reflect on the taboos forbidding incest and parricide, and the threat of defilement that enforces them, we will see that, whatever origins they may have in our genetic struggle for survival, these taboos express our awe for our parents. Yet, it is this very expression
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