"Oedipus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lunes"[657]—digression, and forget The Lady Adeline Amundeville; The fair most fatal Juan ever met, Although she was not evil nor meant ill; But Destiny and Passion spread the net (Fate is a good excuse for our own will), And caught them;—what do they not catch, methinks? But I'm not Oedipus, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... The beginners of the English novel had only a few little tricks in their box in the way of incident and are for the most part innocent of plot in the Wilkie Collins sense of the word. The opinion of Coleridge that the "Oedipus Tyrannus," "The Alchemist" and "Tom Jones" are "the three most perfect plots ever planned" is a curious comment upon his conception of fiction, since few stories have been more plotless than Fielding's best book. The fact is, biographical fiction like this is to be judged by itself, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... improper, and therefore happened only on exceptional occasions. On journeys women wore a light broad-brimmed petasos as a protection from the sun. With a Thessalian hat of this kind Ismene appears in "Oedipus in Kolonos." The head-dress of Athenian ladies at home and in the street consisted, beyond the customary veil, chiefly of different contrivances for holding together their plentiful hair. We mentioned before, that the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... the grandchildren became grannies they repeated the same old tales to the new generation. Homer knew the stories and made up the 'Odyssey' out of half a dozen of them. All the history of Greece till about 800 B.C. is a string of the fairy tales, all about Theseus and Heracles and Oedipus and Minos and Perseus is a Cabinet des Fees, a collection of fairy tales. Shakespeare took them and put bits of them into 'King Lear' and other plays; he could not have made them up himself, great as he was. Let ladies and gentlemen think of this when they sit down to write fairy tales, ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... OEdipe, by Voltaire, affords room for the display of the most characteristic qualities of Talma and Mademoiselle Georges; and when we saw them act OEdipus and Jocasta in this piece, we agreed that there were certainly no actor and actress, of equally transcendent merit, who act together in either of the London theatres. The distress of the play is of too horrible and repulsive a kind, we should conceive, to be ever admitted ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... 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 ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... repressed within, and shut from view by great power of will. Wherefore some one formerly plucked out his eyes that an inward shame should not appear without, as Statius the Poet says of the Theban Oedipus when he says that with eternal night he ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... the genius of ages and millions. Our sense of the dignity of human nature is exalted by the simple recollection, that Isocrates [143] was the companion of Plato and Xenophon; that he assisted, perhaps with the historian Thucydides, at the first representation of the Oedipus of Sophocles and the Iphigenia of Euripides; and that his pupils Aeschines and Demosthenes contended for the crown of patriotism in the presence of Aristotle, the master of Theophrastus, who taught at Athens with the founders of the Stoic and Epicurean sects. [144] The ingenuous ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... of the Egyptian war!—I should not the less say he had made a wrongful treaty. But 'a fac is a fac': someone hitherto makes this settlement impossible. If now the Tories miscarry, apparently Gladstone will come in again, and not Oedipus can tell us whether he ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... truth in those words of Hamilton,—Philosophy having become a meditation, not merely of death, but of annihilation, the precept know thyself has become transformed into the terrific oracle to Oedipus— ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... flower-garden, or riding in the park with her usual companions. Methought the charm would be broken if I were seen, but I heard the music of her voice and was happy. I gave to each heroine of whom I read, her beauty and matchless excellences—such was Antigone, when she guided the blind Oedipus to the grove of the Eumenides, and discharged the funeral rites of Polynices; such was Miranda in the unvisited cave of Prospero; such Haidee, on the sands of the Ionian island. I was mad with excess of passionate devotion; but pride, tameless ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... tear asunder the veil you have hung to conceal from us the pain of life, and I have been wounded by the mystery. . . . OEdipus, half way to finding the word of the enigma, young Faust, regretting already the simple life, the life of the heart, I come back to you repentant, reconciled, O ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... outcast children in culture-lore are Krishna, Zeus, Paris, Oedipus, King Arthur, Claribel's child in the 'Faerie Queene' (canto xii.), etc. For the stories in folk-lore, see the English Folk-lore Journal. For the solar theory of the origin of this story, see Cox, 'Mythology of ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... of the programme, it may be interesting to note, contained Arthur Foote's overture, "In the Mountains," Van der Stucken's suite, "The Tempest," Chadwick's "Melpomene" overture, Paine's "Oedipus Tyrannus" prelude, a romance and polonaise for violin and orchestra by Henry Holden Huss, and songs by Margaret Ruthven Lang, Dudley Buck, Chadwick, Foote, Van der Stucken. The concert ended with an "ouverture festivale sur l'Hymne Americaine, 'The ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... records similar instances of fatality in certain houses," observed Riccabocca. "There was the House of Pelops—and Polynices and Eteocles—the sons of Oedipus!" ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... with which some modern Sphinx may defy some coming OEdipus. Let us hope it will prove a question so adequately answered that the evil goddess using it as a challenge—the conventional deity of injustice, duplicity, and extortion—will dramatize her compulsory response to it by casting herself ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Sophocles breaks out with incomparable beauty in the last words of oedipus, when the old banished king sees through the darkness of death a mysterious light dawn, which illumines his blind eyes, and which brings to him the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... deeply, nor represent them forcibly. But this is not necessarily the case. The externals of a past action, indeed, he cannot know with the precision of a contemporary; but his business is with its essentials. The outward man of Oedipus[9] or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the ceremonies of their courts, he cannot accurately figure to himself; but neither do they essentially concern him. His business is with their inward man; with their feelings and behavior in certain tragic situations, which engage their ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... of the most celebrated soothsayers of the early ages of Greece. He lived in the times of Oedipus, and the war of the seven chiefs against Thebes. He was afflicted by the Gods with blindness, in consequence of some displeasure they conceived against him; but in compensation they endowed him beyond all other mortals with the gift of prophecy. ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... Prometheus has a Titan for subject; has magnanimity for occasion; has suffering, on account of his philanthropy, as tragic element; and the barren crags of Caucasus as theater; and the style is the loftiest of Aeschylus, sublimest of Greek dramatists. Perhaps "Oedipus Coloneus" is nearest approach among Greek tragedies to the elevation of "Prometheus Bound," and Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" has much of the Greek sublimity and more than the Greek frigidity. Dante is nearest neighbor to Aeschylus, though ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... a dark riddle; and, although I am a very Oedipus, I confess I have not yet unravelled it. Come, there is Washington Irving's autograph for you; read it; is it not quite in character? Shall I write any more? One of Sir Walter's, or Mr. Southey's, or Mr. Milman's or Mr. Disraeli's? or shall I sprawl ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... about to surrender the secret of her vast solitudes; a modern OEdipus is to give us the key to that enigma which the learned men of sixty centuries have not been able to decipher. In other days, to seek the sources of the Nile—fontes Nili quoerere—was regarded as a mad endeavor, a chimera that ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... offered a prayer to Mars, waited for his burly antagonist in the darkness, and as the vile man, clearly one of St Paul's 'god haters'" (that time the Sixth were reading the "Romans") "thundered by, he smote him with a stone above the eye, and left him discomfited and, like OEdipus, well nigh ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Nora, Hedda—Sir Robert would never even have spoken to such baggages! Mon sieur Bergeret—an amiable weak thing! D'Artagnan—a true swashbuckler! Tom Jones, Faust, Don Juan—we might not even think of them: And those poor Greeks: Prometheus—shocking rebel. OEdipus for a long time banished by the Censor. Phaedra and Elektra, not even so virtuous as Mary, who failed of being what she should be! And coming to more familiar persons Joseph and Moses, David and Elijah, all of them lacked his finality of true heroism—none could ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... satisfies me; it is well felt and well said; a little less technically than it is my weakness to desire to see it put, but clear and adequate. You are very right to express your admiration for the resource displayed in OEdipus King; it is a miracle. Would it not have been well to mention Voltaire's interesting onslaught, a thing which gives the best lesson of the difference of neighbour arts? - since all his criticisms, which had been fatal ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... there arise any doubts in my way, I do forget them; or, at least, defer them, till my better settled judgment, and more manly reason, be able to resolve them: for I perceive every man's reason is his best Oedipus, and will, upon a reasonable truce, find a way to loose those bonds, wherewith the subtilties of errour have enchained our more flexible ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... to. The Premier has seen it five times already. I loathed its cleverness. I loathed the element of surprise in it. I laughed, and loathed my own laughter. The man who wrote it would put cap and bells on St. Francis of Assisi and make a mock of OEdipus." ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... Poetics, that the best known myths dramatised on the Athenian stage were known to very few of the Athenian audience. It is not impossible that the story of Saint-Germain, though it seems as familiar as the myth of Oedipus or Thyestes, may, after all, not be vividly present to the memory of every reader. The omniscient Larousse, of the Dictionnaire Universel, certainly did not know one very accessible fact about Saint-Germain, nor have I seen it mentioned in other versions of his legend. We read, in Larousse, ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... necessarily be, Mr. Pitt. It is true he might have been that keystone now; and would have accepted it, but not without Lord Temple's consent, and Lord Temple positively refused. There was evidently some trick in this, but what is past my conjecturing. 'Davus sum, non OEdipus'. ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... Indeed I do! Confound those antiquated minxes: I won't play "Billy Black" to a "Blue," Or OEdipus to ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... by Thetis, whose mother's prayer had moved the Heart of Zeus, to dwell with Cadmus and Peleus, is Achilles' true home; or the isle of the heroes of all time, described by Carducci, where King Lear sits telling OEdipus of his sufferings, and Cordelia calls to Antigone, "Come, my Greek sister! We will sing of peace to our fathers." Helen and Iseult, silent and thoughtful, roam under the shade of the myrtles, while the setting sun kisses their golden hair with its reddening rays. ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... when I lay awake in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn from times before OEdipus or Priam, before Tyre, before Memphis. And at the same time a corresponding change took place in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour. And the four following facts ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... lonely to-day, in the midst of this endless solitude. Sat before the hut-door thinking of Zimmerman and his Reflections. Also thought of Brasenose, Oxford, and my narrow escape from Euclid and Greek plays. Davus sum, non Oedipus. Set to work, and cooked a kangaroo stew for the ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... itself, whose inhabitant, Sophocles, was brought at once before my eyes: for you know how I admire, and how I delight in him: and accordingly a sort of appearance moved me, an unsubstantial one indeed, but still it did move me to a more vivid recollection of OEdipus coming hither, and asking in most melodious verse what all these places were. Then Pomponius said—I whom you all are always attacking as devoted to Epicurus, am often with Phaedrus, who is a particular friend ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... Sophocles' narcissus, and the soft crocus light linger there still; while from thickets of olive, nightingales break their hearts in song, as thrilling as the melody that smote the ears of doomed and dying Oedipus. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... probable levels, by limiting human nature to the bounds within which he can clinically examine it, he shirks, for the most part, the greatest crisis of the soul. Can the greatest drama be concerned with less than the ultimate issues of nature, the ultimate types of energy? with Lear and with Oedipus? The world of Shakespeare and of the Greeks is the world; it is universal, whether Falstaff blubbers in the tavern or Philoctetes cries in the cave. But the world which Ibsen really knows is that little segment of the world which we call society; its ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the Yorkist collar. The letter S is an emblem of a somewhat different kind; and, as it proves, more difficult to bring to a satisfactory solution than the symbols of heraldic blazon. As an initial it will bear many interpretations—it may be said, an indefinite number, for every new Oedipus has some fresh conjecture to propose. And this brings me to render the account required by Dr. Rock of the reasons which led me to conclude that the letter S originated with the office of Seneschallus or Steward. I must still refer to the Gentleman's Magazine ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... Greece Swoops to gloat and pasture; The AEtolian, he who sits upon his rock, Like that old disaster; He feeds upon our flesh and blood, and we Can no longer labor; For it was ever thus the AEtolian thief Preyed upon his neighbor; Him punish Thou, or, if not Thou, then send Oedipus to harm him, Who'll cast this Sphinx down from his cliff of pride, Or ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... father of Oedipus as the inaugurator, whereas Timaeus declared that the fashion of making favourites of boys was introduced into Greece from Crete, for Malthusian reasons said Aristotle (Pol. ii. 10), attributing it to Minos. Herodotus, however, knew far better, having discovered ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the commonwealth, and on my return I find myself rewarded with sour looks and unpleasant speeches, sans any consciousness of deserving them. I cannot ask a plain question, without being answered in riddles that would have crazed the brain of OEdipus." ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... fundamental question. We inquired about the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us—or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation. And could it be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern it, get a sight of it, and RISK RAISING it? For there ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the son of Hippocooen (at least if it were really he who offered it, and not another with the same name as the son of Hippocooen), being of an age contemporary with OEdipus ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... Laius, and espoused the widowed queen. Children were born to them and Thebes prospered under his rule, but again a grievous plague fell upon the city. Again the oracle was consulted and it bade them purge themselves of blood-guiltiness. Oedipus denounces the crime of which he is unaware, and undertakes to track out the criminal. Step by step it is brought home to him that he is the man. The closing scene reveals Jocasta slain by her own hand and Oedipus blinded by his own act and ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... action that is represented to us, that we should see it issue from the mind of the agent by a natural gradation, under the influence and with the concurrence of external circumstances. It is thus that we see spring up, grow, and come to maturity under our eyes, the curiosity of Oedipus and the jealousy of Iago. It is also the only way to fill up the great gap that exists between the joy of an innocent soul and the torments of a guilty conscience, between the proud serenity of the happy man and his terrible catastrophe; in short, between the state of calm, in which ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Errors and melodramas like The Lyons Mail, for example. The crowd, too, will accept without demur any condition precedent to the story of a play, however impossible it might seem to the mind of the individual. Oedipus King has been married to his mother many years before the play begins; but the Greek crowd forbore to ask why, in so long a period, the enormity had never been discovered. The central situation of She Stoops to Conquer seems impossible to the individual mind, but ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... drama which would give direct expression to reverie, to the speech of the soul with itself, there is some device that checks the rapidity of dialogue. When Oedipus speaks out of the most vehement passions, he is conscious of the presence of the chorus, men before whom he must keep up appearances 'children latest born of Cadmus' line' who do not share his passion. Nobody is hurried or breathless. We listen to reports and discuss ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... is one of the greatest humorists of the eighteenth century. Fielding is also a master of plot. From all literature, Coleridge selected, for perfection of plot, The Alchemist, Oedipus Tyrannus, and ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of gladiators, which is to take place in Beneventum. See to what cobblers rise in our time, in spite of the saying, 'Ne sutor ultra crepidam!' Vitelius is the descendant of a cobbler; but Vatinius is the son of one! Perhaps he drew thread himself! The actor Aliturus represented Oedipus yesterday wonderfully. I asked him, by the way, as a Jew, if Christians and Jews were the same. He answered that the Jews have an eternal religion, but that Christians are a new sect risen recently in Judea; that ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Richelieu, D'Argenson and friends. He is greatly to be pitied;—even Friedrich pities him, the martyr of bodily ailments and of spiritual; and sends him "extract of quinquina" at one time. [Letter of Voltaire's.] Three miserable months; which only an OEdipus could read, and an OEdipus who had nothing else to do! The issue is well known. Of precise or indisputable, on the road thither, here are ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... is too late! Ah, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers, When each had numbered more than fourscore years. And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten, Had but begun his Characters of Men. Chaucer, at Woodstock ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... grand commemoration, it would "draw" almost as well as the Duke; the dresses might be quite as showy, the action hardly less graceful, than those of the odd-looking gentlemen who are dubbed doctors of civil law on such occasions; and the speeches of Prometheus, Oedipus, or Antigone, would be more intelligible to the learned, and more amusing to the ladies, than those Latin essays or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... anguish thus Still brood o'er OEdipus? And weave enigmas to mislead anew, And stultify the blind Dull heads of human-kind, And inly make thy moan, That, mid the hated crew, Whom thou so long couldst vex, Bewilder and perplex, Thou yet couldst find a ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... him. These are the elite of Athens. Then there are the Sophists and their young disciples, and the vast crowd of the Athenian people. Some of the oldest among them may have seen and heard the "Prometheus Vinctus"; certainly very many of them have seen "Antigone," and "Oedipus," and "Electra"; and all of them have heard the Rhapsodists. Great wonders have they seen and heard, which, in their appeal to the heart, transcend all the wonders of this nineteenth century. Not more fatal to the poor Indian ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... the plaintive chorus in the Oedipus at Colonos, 1211. Among the tragedies of Sophocles this stands forth a mass of feeling. See Schlegel's remarks upon ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... of famous authors. Twenty young women from the Paris and St. Petersburg conservatories of dancing have already been engaged. Among other works they will dance the Psalms and Ecclesiastes, the second book of the Iliad, "Oedipus the King," the fifth Canto of Dante's "Inferno," Spinoza's "Ethics," "Hamlet," Rousseau's "Confessions," "Mother Goose," Tennyson's "Brook" and the "Charge of the Light Brigade," Burke's "Speech on Conciliation," "Alice in Wonderland," ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... waste the land many days, there chanced to come to Thebes one Oedipus, who had fled from the city of Corinth that he might escape the doom which the gods had spoken against him. And the men of the place told him of the Sphinx, how she cruelly devoured the people, and that ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... play the Oedipus to the Rattleborough enigma. I will expound to you—as I alone can—the secret of the enginery that effected the Rattleborough miracle—the one, the true, the admitted, the undisputed, the indisputable miracle, which put a definite end to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... delude the imagination of the spectator, and to entice him away from the associations of everyday life. The cothurnus lifted the actor to heroic stature, the mask prevented the ludicrous recognition of a familiar face in "Oedipus" and "Agamemnon"; it precluded grimace, and left the countenance as passionless as that of a god; it gave a more awful reverberation to the voice, and it was by the voice, that most penetrating and sympathetic, ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... though I did not think so: those two odd crenellated figures could have nothing in common with any permutation-lock. I had seen them; they were tantalizingly familiar; but where? And what meaning did those two figure "10's" bear? Here was a riddle for Oedipus. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... any means mean to be so sphinx-like in my letter, though you have turned out an Oedipus of the first water. True it is that I mean to "range myself," "live cleanly and leave off sack," within the next few months—that is to say, if nothing happens to the good ship which is at ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... weary, after an encounter with a band of dissatisfied performers in the library, said: "One could have put one's heart into making an Antigone of her; that's what I wanted—the filial Antigone, leading Oedipus through the olive groves of Colonus. It's bitter, instead of that, to have to rig Mrs. Scott out as Cassandra; will you believe it, Mary, she insists on being Cassandra—with that figure, that nose! And she has fixed her heart ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... romances, and mythological tales, including the imitations of Ovid. The earliest in date of the first group (about 1150-1155) is the ROMANCE OF THEBES, the work of an unknown author, founded upon a compendium of the Thebaid of Statius, preceded by the story of OEdipus. It opened the way for the vast ROMANCE OF TROY, written some ten years later, by Benoit de Sainte-More. The chief sources of Benoit were versions, probably more or less augmented, of the famous records of the Trojan war, ascribed to the Phrygian Dares, an imaginary defender ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... OEdipus—although a man of delicate perceptions and brilliant intellect—and he turned imploringly to a wise counsellor for aid against the tormentor who chose to be so stony-faced ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... protest against that as too harsh for Christians and college professors, right-thinkers and forward-lookers, then you protest against "Oedipus Rex."[26] ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... Professor Goodwin must not feel any way bound to print them, even if you both approved of them; and that is not at all certain. How would you two Scholars approve of two whole Scenes omitted in either OEdipus (as I know to be the case), and the Choephori {259a} reduced almost to an Act? So that would be, I doubt. Then, as you know, Sophocles does not strike Fire out of the Flint, as old AEschylus does; and though my Sophocles has lain by me (lookt at now and then) these ten years, I was then a ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... built for the representation of classic tragedy, and which is perhaps the perfectest reproduction of the Greek theatre in the world. Alfieri is the only poet of modern times, whose works have been judged worthy of this stage, and no drama has been given on it since 1857, when the "Oedipus Tyrannus" of Sophocles was played. We found it very silent and dusty, and were much sadder as we walked through its gayly frescoed, desolate anterooms than we had been in the Campo Santo. Here used to sit, at coffee and bassett, the merry people ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... Mr. Paine in his own house, she said: "I am in the midst of the awful and thrilling music of the Oedipus Tyrannus, and it curdles my blood; we are all steeped in it, for J. K. P. goes on and on composing it all the time, and the tremendous chords thrill the very timbers of the house. ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... betrays the lesser man in the greater artist. Aeschylus's superhuman speech seems like natural superhuman speech. It is just the language that Prometheus would talk, that an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might talk in the great moments. But neither Prometheus nor Oedipus nor Electra, nor anyone but an Attic poet of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes them. It is this which has established Sophocles as the perfect model, not only for Aristotle, but in general for critics and grammarians; while the poets have been left to admire Aeschylus, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... sources of the tensions producing mental disturbances? Physical and financial insecurity, the threat of war, the aggressive patterns of a competitive society, the unresolved Oedipus-situation rooted in the old-style family relationship. These were the swamps where the mosquitoes buzzed and bit. Most of the swamps have been dredged, ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... cried the Captain, throwing off his assumption of the tragic father. The Oedipus Coloneus, the Lear—the venerable victim of winter winds and men's ingratitude—was transformed in a moment into an elderly Jeremy Diddler, lined with Lord Foppington. "He shall repeat it; I will have him at your feet to-morrow. Yes, Di, my love, I pledge ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... former name: then from Oiolycos was begotten Aigeus, after whom are called the Aigeidai, a powerful clan 132 in Sparta: and the men of this tribe, since their children did not live to grow up, established by the suggestion of an oracle a temple to the Avenging Deities 133 of Laios and OEdipus, and after this the same thing was continued 134 in Thera by the descendants of ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... I shudder, child of Oedipus! I heard the clash and clang! The axles rolled and rumbled; woe to ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... Yeobright went forth from the little dwelling. The pupils of his eyes, fixed steadfastly on blankness, were vaguely lit with an icy shine; his mouth had passed into the phase more or less imaginatively rendered in studies of Oedipus. The strangest deeds were possible to his mood. But they were not possible to his situation. Instead of there being before him the pale face of Eustacia, and a masculine shape unknown, there was only the imperturbable countenance of the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... elevate, and the tragedy is to please us by the tears it draws! Imagine our shock if a poet were to place on the stage some wise gentleman with whom we dined yesterday, and who was discovered to have killed his father and married his mother. But when Oedipus commits those unhappy mistakes nobody is shocked. Oxford in the nineteenth century is a long way off from Thebes three thousand or ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... but is (like the Supplices) one of a connected series, dealing with the evil fate of the Theban House. But instead of being three acts of a single story like the Supplices, these three plays trace the fate through three generations, Laius, Oedipus and the two sons who die by each other's hands in the fight for the Theban sovereignty. This family fate, where one evil deed leads to another after many years, is a larger conception, strikingly suited to Aeschylus' genius, and constitutes ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... description concerning the inevitable relation in the Oedipus legend (The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 222, translated by A.A. Brill, The Macmillan Co., New York, ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... when he had spoken of Alick's fidelity, all confirmed him in his belief that he was on the right track, and that the lines in her hand coincided with the facts of her tragic life. Tragic indeed—one of those lives fated from the beginning, doomed to sorrow and to crime like the Orestes, the Oedipus, of old. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... Russia made you so tender a declaration of his love, publicly and before the whole world? But no, you cannot remember it; for you it was a matter of no moment; but I—I shall never forget it! It was at the theatre; we were playing 'Oedipus.' I looked up at the box in which your majesty sat, between the King of Prussia and the Emperor Alexander. I could see you only—the second Alexander of Macedon, the second Julius Caesar—and I held my arms ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... conversation flagged or suggested it, she could throw herself into the part of Medea or Antigone, with a force and truth which far surpassed the effect produced by the male and masked representations of those characters at the theatre. Brother and sister were OEdipus and Antigone, Electra and Orestes, Cassandra and the Chorus. Once or twice they attempted a scene in Menander; but there was something which made Agellius shrink from the comedy, beautiful as it was, and clever as ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Chancellor; those that lived in his age, and from whence I have taken this little model of him, give him a lively character, and they decipher him to be another Solon, and the Simon of those times, such a one as OEdipus was in dissolving of riddles; doubtless he was an able instrument, as it was his commendation that his head was the mallet, for it was a very great one, and therein kept a wedge, that entered all knotty pieces that come to ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... writers, relate horrible stories of them; a recipe, by virtue of which the most beautiful daughters no more allure their fathers' lust; nor brothers, of the finest shape and fashion, their sisters' desire; the very fables of Thyestes, OEdipus, and Macareus, having with the harmony of their song, infused this wholesome opinion and belief into the tender brains of children. Chastity is, in truth, a great and shining virtue, and of which the utility is sufficiently known; but to treat of it, and to set it off in its true value, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... to be solved. The riddle of the southern sphinx awaited its Oedipus. How ought local self-government to be reconstituted in the old slave states was the momentous question to be answered at close of the war. Sumner had his answer, others had their answer. His answer he framed ...
— Charles Sumner Centenary - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 14 • Archibald H. Grimke
... romance is in itself no proof of the Druidic origin of that form of the romance, nor even of the existence of that element in the romance's earliest form: upon such a principle the archaic character of the motif of the "Oedipus Coloneus" would prove it to be the oldest of the Greek tragedies, while as a matter of fact it seems to be doubtful whether the introduction of this motif into the story of Oedipus was not due to Sophocles himself, ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... earliest childhood has heard men speaking in the same manner about them always and everywhere, whether in comedy or in the graver language of tragedy. When the poet introduces on the stage a Thyestes or an Oedipus, or a Macareus having secret intercourse with his sister, he represents him, when found out, ready to kill himself as the penalty of his ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... once performed a Greek play, and when Sir William Jones and I were talking over this event, I determined to make the experiment in England. I selected some of my best boys, and they performed the Oedipus Tyrannus, and the Trachinians of Sophocles. I wrote some Greek Iambics to vindicate myself from the imputation of singularity, and grieved I am that I did not keep a copy of them. Milton, you may remember, recommends what ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... interpret the riddle, if you will promise that afterward you will do what the Sphinx did when vanquished by OEdipus." ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... king, and his name is Talma," exclaimed Napoleon, smiling. "These German princes may take a lesson from Talma as to the manner in which a king should bear himself in prosperity as well as in adversity. You will, therefore, perform Oedipus, Cinna, Mohammed, and Andromache, that kings may see how true monarchs ought to behave. I could have wished, however, that you had prepared not only the tragedies of Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire, but also some of the comedies of Moliere. You know how highly ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... his country, which could sustain him in an action of such melancholy grandeur. But the Indians did not always reply to their oppressors with escaping passively beyond their hands. Here is a story with matter in it for as rich a tragedy as OEdipus or Agamemnon; and in its stern and tremendous features, more nearly resembling them than any which were conceived ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... reinterpretations of old customs. In early popular religion the only examples of a deity's deliberately inflicting on innocent persons the punishment of another's wrongdoing are connected with the old conception of tribal and national solidarity—OEdipus, Achan, David, and others, by their crimes, bring misfortune on their peoples; when the guilty have received their punishment the innocent are relieved. A real vicarious suffering is not found in these cases or in any ancient ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... supposed they had parents who protected them, so that they could never know this strange anguish, this dread uncertainty. I knew not, then, that none could have any father but God. I knew not, that I was not the only lonely one, that I was not the selected Oedipus, the special victim of an iron law. I was in haste for all to be over, that I might get into ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... true love never can run smooth," says the old proverb, and love-stories are but tales of a man or a woman's escape from the desert of lovelessness into the citadel of love. Even tragedies like those of OEdipus and Hamlet have the same thought in the background. In the tale of OEdipus, the old blind king in his tattered robe, who had committed in ignorance such nameless crimes, leaves his two daughters and ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... my patients I emphasize the frequency of the Oedipus dream—of having sexual intercourse with one's mother—I get the answer: "I cannot remember such a dream." Immediately afterwards, however, there arises the recollection of another disguised and indifferent dream, which has been dreamed repeatedly by the patient, and the analysis shows it to be ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... discredit on divine providence, but was rather taken to prove that the sufferer was an evil-doer, justly hateful to the gods."[9] Jehu and his house were blamed for the blood spilt at Israel, although Jehu was commissioned by Elisha to destroy the house of Ahab.[10] This is like the case of OEdipus, who obeyed an oracle, but suffered for his act as for a crime. Jehovah caused the ruin of those who had displeased him, by putting false oracles in the mouths of prophets.[11] Hezekiah expostulated with God because, although ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... than knowledge, that in things and in events, as well as in human thought and feeling, there lies a mysterious final something, which, of whatever nature it may be and whatever its effect, must be regarded as holy. Let us remember Oedipus and the way in which in this drama one riddle is always solved ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... against Thebes The Argonautic Expedition, and The Trojan War. I. Laius, king of Thebes, was told by an oracle that he should be killed by his son. He exposed him, therefore, as soon as he was born, on Mount Cithaeron. Saved by a herdsman, Oedipus was brought up by Polybus, king of Corinth, as his own son. Warned by the oracle that he should kill his father, and marry his mother, the son forsook Corinth, and made his abode at Thebes. Meeting Laius in a narrow pass, and provoked by his attendants, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... and Polynices, sons of Oedipus and Jocaste, who, contending at the siege of Thebes, slew each other. Such was their mutual hate that, when their bodies were burned on the same funeral pile, the ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... inexpiable, which the sternest imagination of the very heathen had invented as the gloomiest catastrophe that can befall the wisdom and the pride of mortals! But one step farther, and the fabulous Oedipus had not been ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... difference between a mistake of FACT and one of RIGHT; and hence the reason why the one is commonly criminal and not the other. When Oedipus killed Laius, he was ignorant of the relation, and from circumstances, innocent and involuntary, formed erroneous opinions concerning the action which he committed. But when Nero killed Agrippina, all the relations between himself and the person, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... the speaker with a gaze as stony as Antigone herself could have turned upon any impious jester who had hinted that Oedipus, in his blindness and banishment, was groping for some frivolous ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... smiting. Truth there was under their stories, but how much of it no man can tell: how Amulius of Alba Longa slew his sons, and slew also his daughter, loved of Mars, mother of twin sons left to die in the forest, like Oedipus, father-slayers, as Oedipus was, wolf-suckled, of whom one was born to kill the other and be the first King, and be taken up to Jupiter in storm and lightning at the last. The legend of wise Numa, next, taught by Egeria; her stony image still weeps trickling tears ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford |
