How powerless are humans before fate? Through Sophocles’ Antigone, we explore the essence of tragic fate and the meaning of human choice.
With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with my own hand labour’d it to grow:
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d—
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”
This is a poem from Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát. Reading Sophocles’ tragedies always brings this poem to mind. It appears to be an ordinary poem. Yet the profound acceptance of life contained within these four brief lines, the keen insight that examines every nuance of human existence, rivals thousands of lines of verse. The Buddha’s resignation that life is a sea of suffering, or Jesus’ sorrow defining humanity by original sin—ultimately, all this is encompassed within these four lines. Neither saints nor great scholars know everything about life. Life is that vast, and humanity is that infinite. It is not the great universe that is wide, but our human lives that are wide. Therefore, even though countless billions of people have lived, the riddle of “What is life?” remains unsolved. It may be a riddle that will never be solved. Humans often express this riddle with the word “fate.” Happiness, unhappiness, success, failure, love, and hatred are not things humans achieve; they are merely gifts bestowed by an immense, unknown force. Omar Khayyam’s resignation—that even after wandering everywhere in youth, enchanted by life’s wonder, and mastering all great theories to unravel life’s secrets, one remains just as ignorant of life—is not passive resignation but perhaps a sublime union with the vast cosmos.
That sense of destiny is truly solemn, is it not? Sophocles’ tragedies are thoroughly imbued with this sense of destiny. His three great tragedies, ‘Oedipus the King’, ‘Oedipus at Colonus’, and ‘Antigone’, relentlessly trace the fate of Thebes’ cursed royal house, revealing the dread of a destiny that transcends human power.
In ‘Oedipus the King’, arguably Sophocles’ finest tragedy, Oedipus’ foster parents, King Laius and Queen Jocasta, abandon him immediately after his birth. Terrified by the oracle’s prophecy that he would become a cursed man who would kill his own father and marry his own mother, King Laius and Queen Jocasta cast Oedipus out, hoping to escape this doomed fate. However, Oedipus is rescued by a shepherd and raised in the royal house of Corinth. Years later, Oedipus encounters King Laius in a deserted place and, unaware he is his father, kills him. He then enters Thebes, solves the Sphinx’s riddle, ascends the throne, and marries Jocasta (his biological mother). While living comfortably and fathering children with Jocasta, a plague suddenly ravages Thebes. The tragedy begins here. Oedipus’s fate gradually reveals itself, and bound by his own oath, he gouges out his eyes, becoming blind and losing his kingdom.
Reading this tragedy, we keenly feel how powerless humans are before the force of fate, which transcends human strength. That tragic irony—the irony that the words he unknowingly utters are, absurdly, actually mocking him—is not only Sophocles’ tragic technique but also fate’s own play. Oedipus, utterly unaware that he himself is the murderer of King Laius, curses the killer. Yet that curse ultimately proved to be a curse upon himself—a tragic, and perhaps even comic, irony.
‘Oedipus at Colonus’ depicts the final days of Oedipus, exiled and wandering after losing his kingdom. Dragged by his daughter Antigone, Oedipus, who had been wandering from place to place, arrives at the promised land of death, Colonus, to meet his end. Yet, the hand of fate still does not release him. He curses his own fate, curses his two sons, curses his friends, and returns to the gods. This terrible curse comes true in every detail. For this curse is not Oedipus’s curse, but the very curse of ‘fate’.
‘Antigone’ depicts the tragic fate of Oedipus’s daughter Antigone and his son Polynices. The brothers fight over the throne and both fall. Yet King Creon, who ascends the throne, though a man of considerable judgment, stubbornly insists on an absurd course, driving Antigone, his own son, and his wife to suicide. Thus, the curse upon the house of Laius comes to an end.
The fate of the Oedipus family may well be a microcosm of human destiny. Though they seem to fight, curse, and live as they please, behind them lurks a fate that mocks and manipulates them. This fate could be called a god, or the relentless flow of human history. In any case, Sophocles’s consciousness of fate—that humans inevitably collide with an unavoidable wall in life—sends a chill down our spines. Yet it also makes us keenly feel how futile our stubborn desires, our vain ambition, and our petty arrogance truly are.
Reading Sophocles’ tragedies and buttoning up one’s coat is precisely how one should button up and face life. That is how much these works teach us about the infinite. “Wisdom is the greatest happiness. The boastful words of the arrogant always suffer a great blow, and the punished become wise only in old age.“ Like the final lines of ‘Antigone’, we cannot help but be solemn before the bitter truths of life.
”Tragedy reveals the shuddering fear of real existence, specifically human existence, through a terrifying conflict rooted in the comprehensive being that is human existence. Yet when we witness the tragic, we are liberated from it through that very act of seeing, achieving a kind of catharsis, a nirvana.”
These words by the great 20th-century philosopher Karl Jaspers in his Tragedy Is Not Enough are worth pondering. Readers who engage with this tragedy alongside Jaspers’ Tragedy Is Not Enough will gain a profound understanding of tragedy.
Sophocles (496–406 BC) was born in Colonus, near Athens, Greece. Socially belonging to the upper class, he possessed both striking good looks and exceptional talent, making him an object of envy. Sophocles emerged as a tragedian in 468 BC. He soon surpassed the popularity of his predecessor, Aeschylus. He held the throne as the foremost tragedian until his death. The fact that the Athenians revered him as a hero and held annual sacrifices after his death shows just how high his popularity as a tragedian was. Sophocles left behind a vast body of work. While it is said he wrote a total of 123 or 130 plays, only seven have survived in their entirety: ‘Antigone’, ‘Ajax’, ‘Electra’, ‘Oedipus the King’, ‘The Women of Trachis’, ‘Philoctetes’, and ‘Oedipus at Colonus’. His earliest work was ‘Antigone’, and his last was ‘Oedipus at Colonus’. Unlike Aeschylus, Sophocles believed the trilogy format was unsuitable for tragedy. However, though written at different times, ‘Oedipus the King’, ‘Oedipus at Colonus’, and ‘Antigone’ form a nearly perfect trilogy. Yet each work stands independently, possessing nearly perfect motifs and structure.
