In the Library
Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles, 401 CE
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 60 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Francis Storr
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 14k words
£1.99
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Not to be born at all Is best, far best that can befall, Next best, when born, with least delay To trace the backward way.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
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The Tempest does the same thing, but through an old exile on an island who lays down his power and walks offstage into a kind of grace.
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About the book
A blind old man arrives at a sacred grove outside Athens, leaning on his daughter, and asks for the soil where the gods have promised his bones will bless the city that receives them. Sophocles wrote this play in his nineties; it was staged after his death in 401 BCE, the last of his three Theban tragedies. Oedipus, the king who solved the riddle and learned what he had done, returns stripped of every title except suppliant, pursued by Creon who wants him for Thebes and Polynices who wants his blessing for war. Theseus grants him refuge, and the play stages a transfiguration: the man who once polluted a city is now the gift it receives. He walks alone into the grove, and the earth opens for him.