Produced by Sigal Alon, Turgut Dincer, R. Cedron and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net OEDIPUS KING OF THEBES BY SOPHOCLES TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH RHYMING VERSE WITH EXPLANATORY NOTES BY GILBERT MURRAY LL.D., D.LITT., F.B.A. REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD FOURTEENTH THOUSAND LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C.1 _First published_ _February 1911_ _Reprinted_ _January 1912_ " _ " 1912_ " _February 1912_ " _July 1917_ PREFACE If I have turned aside from Euripides for a moment and attempted a translation of the great stage masterpiece of Sophocles, my excuse must be the fascination of this play, which has thrown its spell on me as on many other translators. Yet I may plead also that as a rule every diligent student of these great works can add something to the discoveries of his predecessors, and I think I have been able to bring out a few new points in the old and much-studied _Oedipus_, chiefly points connected with the dramatic technique and the religious atmosphere. Mythologists tell us that Oedipus was originally a daemon haunting Mount Kithairon, and Jocasta a form of that Earth-Mother who, as Aeschylus puts it, "bringeth all things to being, and when she hath reared them receiveth again their seed into her body" (_Choephori_, 127: cf. Crusius, _Beitraege z. Gr. Myth_, 21). That stage of the story lies very far behind the consciousness of Sophocles. But there does cling about both his hero and his heroine a great deal of very primitive atmosphere. There are traces in Oedipus of the pre-hellenic Medicine King, the _Basileus_ who is also a _Theos_, and can make rain or blue sky, pestilence or fertility. This explains many things in the Priest's first speech, in the attitude of the Chorus, and in Oedipus' own language after the discovery. It partly explains the hostility of Apollo, who is not a mere motiveless Destroyer but a true Olympian crushing his Earth-born rival. And in the same way the peculiar royalty of Jocasta, which makes Oedipus at times seem not the King but the Consort of the Queen, brings her near to that class of consecrated queens described in Dr. Frazer's _Lectures on the Kingship_, who are "honoured as no woman now living on the earth."