| First published | February | 1911 |
| Reprinted | January | 1912 |
| " | " | 1912 |
| " | February | 1912 |
| " | July | 1917 |
If I have turned aside from Euripides for a momentand attempted a translation of the great stage masterpieceof Sophocles, my excuse must be the fascinationof this play, which has thrown its spell on me as onmany other translators. Yet I may plead also thatas a rule every diligent student of these great workscan add something to the discoveries of his predecessors,and I think I have been able to bring outa few new points in the old and much-studiedOedipus, chiefly points connected with the dramatictechnique and the religious atmosphere.
Mythologists tell us that Oedipus was originallya daemon haunting Mount Kithairon, and Jocasta aform of that Earth-Mother who, as Aeschylus putsit, "bringeth all things to being, and when she hathreared them receiveth again their seed into her body"(Choephori, 127: cf. Crusius, Beiträge z. Gr. Myth,21). That stage of the story lies very far behindthe consciousness of Sophocles. But there does clingabout both his hero and his heroine a great deal ofvery primitive atmosphere. There are traces inOedipus of the pre-hellenic Medicine King, theBasileus who is also a Theos, and can make rain orblue sky, pestilence or fertility. This explains manythings in the Priest's first speech, in the attitudeof the Chorus, and in Oedipus' own language after[Pg vi]the discovery. It partly explains the hostility ofApollo, who is not a mere motiveless Destroyer but atrue Olympian crushing his Earth-born rival. Andin the same way the peculiar royalty of Jocasta,which makes Oedipus at times seem not the Kingbut the Consort of the Queen, brings her near tothat class of consecrated queens described in Dr.Frazer's Lectures on the Kingship, who are "honouredas no woman now living on the earth."
The story itself, and the whole spirit in whichSophocles has treated it, belong not to the fifth centurybut to that terrible and romantic past fromwhich the fifth century poets usually drew theirmaterial. The atmosphere of brooding dread, thepollution, the curses; the "insane and beastlikecruelty," as an ancient Greek commentator calls it,of piercing the exposed child's feet in order to ensureits death and yet avoid having actually murdered it(Schol. Eur. Phoen., 26); the whole treatment of theparricide and incest, not as moral offences capable ofbeing rationally judged or even excused as unintentional,but as monstrous and inhuman pollutions, thelast limit of imaginable horror: all these things takeus back to dark regions of pre-classical