Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles is a play about a man's actions, both intentional and unintentional, and the punishment necessary for those actions. Regardless of whether he was manipulated by the gods or motivated by himself, Oedipus must take responsibility for his actions and their consequences. His reaction to the course of his life is an important reflection of ancient Greek society. The show blurs the line between a shame-based culture and a guilt-based culture. Scholars argue that in the 5th century BC, when the work was written, the Greeks were transitioning from the former to the latter. To understand how Oedipus Tyrannus represents this, it will be necessary to better define shame, guilt, and responsibility as the Greeks understood them. Specifically, it must be shown how the character of Oedipus demonstrates all three of these concepts in a way that would likely have conflicted Sophocles' audience. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Oedipus was destined by the gods to kill his father and sleep with his mother. When he learned of this, he ran away from his city and his family to escape this fate. He later became the tyrant of the city of Thebes, saving it from the curse of the Sphinx and marrying the widowed queen. In Oedipus Tyrannus, a plague has struck Thebes and the righteous king decides to find the murderer of Laius, the former ruler, to rid the city of miasma, or "pollution". In the course of his investigations, he discovers that it was he who killed Laius in a fit of rage during his first wanderings, without knowing his identity. He also discovers that he was adopted and that Laius and Jocasta are his real parents. Oedipus realizes, with horror, that he has unwittingly fulfilled his destiny by killing his father and sleeping with his mother. In an act of deep contrition, Oedipus gouges out his own eyes and requests exile from the city. The character of Oedipus is not entirely evil and, in fact, has very good intentions. He leaves his home to avoid carrying out the oracle's terrible prediction. Save the city of Thebes by solving the riddle of the Sphinx, and try to save it again by solving the mystery of Laius' murder. However, Oedipus has a rather short temper and this causes him many problems. More importantly, it leads him to unknowingly kill his father over a small traffic dispute, which sets all the other events in motion. Later, during the investigation of the murder, he becomes angry at his brother-in-law Creon, accusing him of plotting to overthrow him, despite the irrationality of the accusation. By the time Oedipus inflicts his self-punishment, he has committed wrong actions that were both intentional and unintentional. The Greeks' basic definition of shame wasn't all that different from the modern definition. Williams states that "the fundamental experience connected with shame is that of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong condition (78)". Aidos, “shame,” does not always require a literal observer, but the idea of ​​an observer (Williams 82). Oedipus blinded himself because he could not bear to see the looks of contempt in the eyes of others regarding his actions, but even as a blind man he chose to exile himself, because he could not bear to even imagine those looks of contempt. This view of shame remains relatively true to how we experience it. However, there is no Greek word directly equivalent to guilt (Williams 88). Rather, guilt is defined in relation to shame. While shame is the result of the public's negative opinion of the revealed core character traitsfrom one's actions, guilt is an internal remorse about how one's actions have affected others. Williams says, “What I have done points in one direction to what has happened to others, in another direction to what I am” (92). Oedipus, therefore, must also face guilt for the curse his actions have placed on Thebes, as well as for the way he treated Creon. A life of internal guilt should be punishment enough, but it is compounded by a life of external shame. The relationship between his shame and his guilt is important to Sophocles' commentary on Greek society and will be discussed later. ER Dodds argues in his book "The Greeks and the Irrational", that the ancient Greeks initially operated primarily under a culture of shame. .In the archaic age the mills of God grinded so slowly that their movement was practically imperceptible except to the eye of faith. To support the belief that they moved, it was necessary to eliminate the natural time limit set by death (Dodds 33). Sometimes people were never punished in their lifetime for evil deeds. To maintain some faith in the justice of the gods, the Greeks invented the concept of miasma, "pollution." The shame of an evil deed would be passed down to descendants, thus polluting an entire family line, or in the case of a royal family, an entire city (Dodds 33). In chapter 11 of the Odyssey, there is a version of the Oedipus story told in which Laius raped a young boy, thus cursing Oedipus and his descendants. In Sophocles' version, the audience never finds out exactly why the gods would grant him such a cruel fate. It is unclear whether the miasma originates in Oedipus or in an ancestor. Regardless, under this system a seemingly innocent person could be punished for the sins of his parents. An interesting question is raised: Was Oedipus truly guilty, or simply a victim of bloodguilt and “eaten,” “divine temptation” (Dodds 2)? In earlier versions of the tale, it is clearly the latter. One effect of the culture of shame was that "the weight of religious sentiment and religious law was thrown against the emergence of an authentic vision of the individual as a person, with personal rights and responsibilities." Oedipus would have been seen in the archaic age simply as a tool through which moral debts were exacted (Dodds 34). Sophocles does not see things in such black and white terms. Oedipus spends most of Tyrannus' fourth stasimon alternating between blaming himself and blaming the gods. He calls himself "the destroyer, the curse", but also "the man whom the gods hate most of all" (1345-1346). In lines 1330-1331 he blames Apollo (the god through whom the oracle foretold his fate) for his agonies, but in 1382 he says that the gods merely denounced his impiety. He believes that "evil haunted under" his skin from birth (1396), and for this reason the gods came to hate him (1518). Was Oedipus an innocent person forced to enact a destiny chosen for him by the gods, or was he? an inherently evil man who brought about his own sad consequences? Oedipus doesn't seem to have a clear answer to this either, and neither does the audience. He could not have known that the man traveling on the road was both the king of Thebes and his father, but he could also have stopped himself from killing him. He couldn't have known that Jocasta was his mother, but he could have stopped himself from taking her to bed. Oedipus seems to blame himself for his own ignorance, but guilt implies an understanding of ignorance, which is, in this case, a contradiction in terms. However, he gouges out his eyes as penance for actions he did not understand at the time he committed them. This is a very worrying work until, 1971. 101-244.