OEDIPUS, ODYSSEUS, AND THE FAILURE OF RHETORIC

Nancy Worman

Τραγούδησε µικρὴ ᾽Αντιγόνη, τραγούδησε, τραγούδησε … δὲ σοῦ µιλῶ γιὰ περασµένα, µιλῶ γιὰ τὴν ἀγάπη· στόλισε τὰ µα ιά σου µὲ τ’ ἀγκάθια τοῦ ἥλιου, σκοτεινὴ κοπέ α· Sing, little Antigone, sing, sing …. I do not speak of the past, I speak of love; Crown your hair with thorns of the sun, dark girl. G. Seferis, ‘Thrush’

Tragic heroes on the ancient Athenian stage often explain, exhort, remon- strate, and lyricize, but tragedy does not stage many successful scenes of persuasion. In Sophocles’ plays in particular, neither song nor love ofers solution or redemption; and heroes are trapped in fences of their own mak- ing. These heroes are also tyrannical, sometimes literally kings, but almost always drastically uncompromising and undemocratic. The impasses these dynamics create may even be structurally necessary to the tragic plot, marked out as it is among divergent viewpoints, the tragic crisis pegged strenuously to the impossibility of resolving them one with another. At times the dramatic staging that the texts indicate also map this isolation and impasse, so that heroes may appear uniquely solitary, unreachable, and intransigent. Why, then, would Sophocles, or any tragic poet for that matter, ofer examples of persuasive argument, compromise, and/or successful connec- tion, if this failure is often the central catastrophe dramatized? Sophocles seems to have been particularly interested in heroes at odds with the social group—most famously Antigone, whose stringent views on family rather than community loyalty lead to her death. We might also recognize a sim- ilar perspectival isolation in Ajax, the maddened and then inexible sui- cide; or Electra, who stalwartly refuses to move or to shut up. Oedipus also treads humanity’s margins, high and low. His extreme elevation at the out- set of Oedipus Tyrannus leads the citizens to associate him with the lesser gods (daimones); and he leaves the stage as a blind and bloody scapegoat 326 nancy worman at the play’s end, a status reiterated with diferent emphases in Oedipus at Colonus. Philoctetes spends much of his time onstage screaming in pain from the pulsing of his wound, or expostulating emotionally alone and with others. All of these characters dramatize in their various ways breakdowns in communication, and the di culties of conict resolution by means of speechifying. But Philoctetes also showcases Odysseus as stage manager and master plotter.1 In Sophocles’ plays, if not in tragedy more generally, only the pro- foundly strategic Odysseus ofers audiences any sustained view of the po- tential harms and bene ts of persuasive rhetoric. Even though he is merely temporarily successful in persuading Neoptolemus to deceive Philoctetes into giving up his famous bow, the drama exposes the brutal necessities of wartime choices and deploys Odysseus as a clever and oratorically adept tactician. In Ajax, by contrast, while the hero views Odysseus as a crafty deceiver, Odysseus behaves in a distinctly thoughtful and fair-minded man- ner, pitying the beleaguered Ajax and using his persuasive skills to preserve an honourable burial for him. In  fth-century drama Odysseus is not exactly a good man, but he is a wise and practical one. And while his reputation sufers quite generally on the Athenian stage, Sophocles may be unique in highlighting in his charac- ter both the positive and the negative aspects of persuasive, strategic modes. In Sophocles’ corpus, most of which is lost, fragments indicate that Odysseus was a familiar presence in his dramas, likely more so than any other char- acter from Greek mythohistory. At least eleven plays (out of a total of 120) either feature him or include him crucially in the action.2 Of these,  ve de nitely or probably place Odysseus in the role of politician and hench- man to the Greek leaders (Ajax, Philoctetes, Philoctetes at Troy, Scyrians, and Teucer), while at least three highlight the strategic and sometimes deceptive aspects of his rhetorical capabilities (Palamedes, Philoctetes, Teucer). The composite portrait that emerges from these plays indicates a hero uniquely poised to orchestrate political (and by extension dramatic) plots, an often unscrupulous but always deinos (i.e. ‘dauntingly clever’) manipulator of cir- cumstances and emotions.

1 See Worman (1999), (2000). 2 Counting the extant Ajax and Philoctetes, as well as Euryalus, Nausicaa, Niptra, Odys- seus Acanthoplex (‘Struck by a Fishhook’), Odysseus Maddened, Palamedes, Philoctetes at Troy, Scyrians, and Teucer. See Sutton (1984) on what can be gleaned from fragments and synopses.