The superlative reviews from publications as disparate as the New York Times, the New Yorker and Hellenic World (!)should be sufficient inducement to convince anyone with the least interest in Sophocles and "Oedipus Tyrannus" to buy this book.Bernard Knox is perhaps the greatest living classicist and he may just be one of the greatest of all time. He writes with an ease and lucidity that renders the most difficult subject available to the lay reader. He has an uncanny facility to sum up in a paragraph a subject that has occupied him for twenty or thirty pages. Indeed one of the delights of this book is that at the end of each section there appears a wonderfully pithy summation.
When this book was first published it (surprisingly) received immediate and positive reviews from the New York Times and the New Yorker. But it was almost universally ignored by the classical community who were perhaps annoyed at the twitting they received in Knox's introduction. Dismayed by the appearance of an article entitled "The Carrot in Classical Antiquity", Knox had lashed out at the "excessive technicality" of his colleagues. This will remind many of us of Victor Davis Hanson's brilliantly polemical attack on the classical establishment in "Who Killed Homer".
Time, however, was on Knox' side and he went, on, as I said, to become a giant in his field. In 1998, "Oedipus at Thebes" was republished for a new and grateful generation of students.
This is a true tour de force. Knox took as his starting point a statement made by Walter Headlam. Headlam had claimed that "when embarking on the elucidation of a Greek text, the scholar should first learn the text by heart and the read the whole of Greek literature looking for parallel passages." Sounds almost preposterous. Right? Well Knox actually did this. The result is a reading of "Oedipus Tyrannus" that is not only breath-taking in its magisterial sweep, but which, as far as I am concerned offers the first coherent explanation of what the play is about (but see also Charles Segal's sensitive reading - "Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge"). Knox has lovingly burnished Sophocles somewhat tarnished reputation and has ensured that Oedipus Tyrannus takes its place in the pantheon of the greatest works of literature.
But Knox is also careful to point out the relevance of the play for modern readers -- yet another reminder (and it is despairing that we need them) that the classics should be taught in our schools and read by all of us. Here is Knox on the subject: "A play, however, which suggests that, for all its great achievements, human ingenuity may be fatally flawed, does not seem irrelevant for an age that lives in dread of atomic and biological warfare, not to mention the nightmare possibilities offered by the latest developments in genetics."
The reason I read this little book is that I had started to read Sophocles' plays in the Chicago collection, "The Complete Greek Tragedies", edited by Grene and Lattimore. I became immediately bogged down in "Oedipus Tyrannus" and I began to suspect he had more to do with the translation than anything else.
The dust jacket of this collection contains superlatives about Grene's translations. We are gushingly told at one point that the Greekless reader needs "no other translation." Well allow me to politely differ. As I read Knox's book, using it as a tool to annotate Grene's translation, I came to see that time and again Grene had, for what could only be poetic purposes, obscured the true meaning of the text. In so doing he presents a version of the play that is VERY far from what Sophocles must have intended.
So, for those of you about to embark at University (or at home) on a study of Sophocles let me suggest two things. 1. Buy Knox and read him FIRST. 2. Buy Fagles' translation of Sophocles and not Grene (it is anything but unpoetic as has been suggested elsewhere). You won't be disappointed. I think you will emerge with far more respect for Sophocles and Greek society in general.
