Oedipus Rex

After a bit of extra time on a very recent movie, let's step back a bit. About 2000 years or so.  

If you haven't been here before, please take a look at the Introduction to Generations, the Generational Attributes and the Four Stories in order to get up to speed on how this works and terms being used.

Oedipus Rex - Oedipus the King  - is one of the few available tragedies from Ancient Greece. Written by Sophocles in the fifth century BC, it tells the story of the king of Thebes and his very dysfunctional family. Since it has given its name to a psychological label for a specific sort of neurosis, the basics are well known. The play itself, though, plays out as more of a police procedural or courtroom drama. The city of Thebes is in trouble, a plague is upon it,  something is clearly wrong, and the cause must be found. Witnesses of various sorts appear, adding new pieces of information to the case, eventually clarifying a complicated tale of prophecy and woe. It takes until the end for the  truth to be known, to reveal the unexpected connection between Oedipus and his current queen and the previous king.

For a generational view, it's easy enough to start with the title character. Oedipus, the king of Thebes has been married to Jocasta, widow of the late King Laiius, for about 12 years. For reasons that are abundantly clear by the end of the piece, Jocasta and Laiius are of the next older generation than Oedipus. Even older than them is a key witness to the events, Tiresius, who is literally called a prophet. Oedipus is therefore about 30 - 12 years since the marriage, and he was presumably about 18 when he departed his own home. The Queen, Jocasta, being the next older generation, must be around 50 years of age. The yet older Tiresius is probably a venerable 70, perhaps a bit more or less. 

If it's a dangerous time, with an old Prophet and a young Hero, it sounds like a Crisis. However it's not a heroic story, but a tragedy. It's not clear that it's a tragedy of Oedipus himself, although he bears the brunt of it. It is more about the futility of change, the inevitability of fate. The dead King Laiius tried murdering his child to avoid prophecy, while Oedipus runs from his adoptive home for the same reason. There are no winners, only doomed perpetrators and damned victims - it's an Artist story .  

The more we examine what is happening, though, the clearer it is that the generations and setting match each other, if not the story. Oedipus' parents try to avert prophecy through infanticide -  they are Bad - Nomads, if we needed another clue. That Crisis period matches, then, but the story does not. 

Which shows that different types of stories don't necessarily need to match up with their generations. There are Artist stories about Heroes, redemption stories involving Prophets, self-actualization stories about Artists. It's possible that there is an influence from the author to consider - Sophocles, born just before the triumphs of the Persian Wars, young when Marathon was won, is clearly an Artist himself.