"Oedipus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of us? Are we tickled trout, and fools of nature? One look at the face of heaven and earth lays all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus arrives; he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to follow it and report ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... The monster which continued to oppress Thebes until such time as one of her victims should be able to answer the riddle she put to him. Oedipus answered ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... another Oedipus could have conjectured. The young master very obviously did not wish to be observed, and in such times Peters at could be blinder than the bat noon-day and more secret than the River Styx. He turned away, unhurried, the ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... great 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, and all the circumstances ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... laid 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 he who should deliver them from her should have ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... mention of its contents attests its importance for the present and the future. Wagner's "Parsifal," in an important sense, can be termed our national drama. Such a work like AEschylus' "Persian" and Sophocles' Oedipus-trilogy, should recall to the consciousness of a world-historical people the period in which it stands in the world's history, and thereby make clear the mission it ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... I would go and tell Gruben all about it. But how should I be able to escape from the house? The Professor might return at any moment. And suppose he called me? And suppose he tackled me again with this logomachy, which might vainly have been set before ancient Oedipus. And if I did not obey his call, who could answer for ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... concatenation the 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 ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... is already to hand in the original romances of our present period; and a wonderfully great and perfect idea it is. Not the much and justly praised arrangement and poetical justice of the Oresteia or of the story of Oedipus excel the Arthuriad in what used to be called "propriety" (which has nothing to do with prudishness), while both are, as at least it seems to me, far inferior in varied and poignant interest. That the attainment of the Graal, the healing of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... says St. Cyril of Alexandria "are generally derided, which are not understood" adv. Julianum. The pagans, at the instigation, it would appear, of the Jews and early heretics, availed themselves of this secret discipline to charge the Christians with the detestable crimes of Oedipus and Thyestes, pretending that in their secret assemblies they murdered an infant covered with flour, and drank his blood. (Cecilius ap. Minut. Fel.) It was solely with the view of refuting these calumnies, that Justin Martyr explained, in his apology addressed ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... 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 of mine, as ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... Swift. I have heard of him, as an excellent scholar. His boys in Ireland 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
... go further 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... 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 fractions that ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... Clancy, the author of one or two plays, who published his memoirs in Dublin in 1750. Dr. Clancy was blind, and the playbill was headed with the line from Milton, "The day returns, but not to me returns." The play was "Oedipus," and the part of Tiresias, the blind prophet, was undertaken by Dr. Clancy. The advertisements expressed a hope that "as this will be the first instance of any person labouring under so heavy a deprivation performing ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... continued Gulab-Sing, changing his tone for a more serious one. "Don't trouble your head with such vain speculations. The day when this riddle yields its solution, the Rajput Sphinx will not seek destruction in the waves of the sea; but, believe me, it won't bring any profit to the Russian Oedipus either. You already know every detail you ever will learn. So leave the rest to our ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... having written a satire upon Louis XIV., who was just dead, and was thrown into the Bastile. But he was not cast down. It was here that he sketched his poem of the "League," corrected his tragedy of "Oedipus," and wrote some merry verses on the misfortune, of being a prisoner. The Regent, Duke of Orleans, being informed of his innocence, restored him to freedom, and granted him a recompense. "I thank your royal highness," said Voltaire, "for having provided ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... on my hands. The Professor had been right, of course; this insane repetition had only intensified an unfulfillable longing, and had made a bad mess ten times as bad. Then I heard him muttering behind me. "Strange!" he murmured. "In fact, fantastic. Oedipus—oedipus of the magazine ...
— The Ideal • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... 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 History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... mistaken identity,—farces like The Comedy of 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 ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... I should like the 'Oedipus Rex,'" he replied gravely; "but I could not read it. It all seemed unreal to me. Then I thought of St. Augustine, but he was worse still. The fathers of the Church were still further away from me; they all ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various
... us, therefore, consider the death ideas in the three cases studied in this chapter. We find that, as in the ordinary stupors, there are delusions of death, also of mutual death (with the father), but there is a tendency to elaboration so that the death is only part of a larger OEdipus drama, the rest of which is usually lacking in stupors. Here it is present. So we have thoughts of the death of the mother or husband, another rival, considerable preoccupation with Heaven, ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... the riddle, if you will promise that afterward you will do what the Sphinx did when vanquished by OEdipus." ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... Fide, took it into his head to write a most wretched satire against some pretty good comedies, which were exhibited very innocently every night before their majesties. He quoted the authority of the Rabbis, and some passages from St. Bonaventura, to prove that the "Oedipus" of Sophocles was the work of the evil spirit; that Terence was excommunicated ipso facto; and added that doubtless Brutus, who was a very severe Jansenist, assassinated Julius Caesar for no other reason but because he, who was Pontifex Maximus, presumed to write a tragedy ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... been dead for two hundred years: the Athenian populace knew little of her except that she had been great and that she had been unhappy; and the descendants of the men who had thronged the theatre to see the Oedipus of Sophokles, sickening with that strange disease which makes the soul crave to batten on the fruits that are its poison, found a rare feast furnished forth in the imaginary history of the one ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... has also shown himself a great master of the imagination in the scene in which the dying Oedipus prepares himself for burial in the midst of a tempest,[11] and where he tells how Achilles appeared to the Greeks over his tomb just as they were putting out to sea on their departure from Troy.[12] This last scene has also been ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... nolens volens, he must have rode along with the orchestral charge, he must have rode on the crest of the choral billows, or he would have been rode down by their impassioned sweep. Samson, and Oedipus, and others, must have danced, if they sang; and they certainly did sing, by notoriously intermingling in the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Latin realism and Celtic romance, all details and suggestions, are implicit. It states just those fundamental things of which all the rest are but manifestations or consequences. There is as much psychology in the scene between OEdipus and Jocasta, a matter of some seventy lines, as could be forced into seventy pages by a modern novelist. A change of feeling that it would take Mr. Henry James a chapter to elaborate is indicated by ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... stormy forehead, the eyes over which shaggy eyebrows hung like the shrubs on a cliff-edge, his face lined and set like a thing in bronze—all were signs of a power which, in passion, would be like that of OEdipus: in the moment of justice or doom would, with unblinking eyes, slay and cast aside as debris is ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to "the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost," which in the New Testament is proclaimed an unpardonable offence, and in pagan legend was punished by the divine wrath, thunder, lightning, rain, floods, or petrifaction being the avenging instruments. Oedipus put out his own eyes to forestall the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... wish we could guess what its about. Another riddle from the Sphynx, you must be a second Oedipus and guess for me; or go over and ask some of the others, they look as though they have been feeding ravenously of ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... married her. Wretched man, what is he to do with these exigeant and never-to-be-satisfied women? Our mothers pined because our fathers drank and were rakes. Our wives pine because we are virtuous but inadequate. Who is this sphinx, this woman? Where is the Oedipus that will solve her riddle of happiness, and then strangle her?—only to ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... appears and reappears in a thousand stories in many parts of the world, and in all kinds of disguises. Now he is the most beautiful and noble of the Greek gods, Apollo; now he is Odin, with a single eye; now he is Hercules, the hero, with his twelve great labours for the good of men; now he is Oedipus, who met the Sphinx and solved her riddle. In the early times men saw how everything in the world about them drew its strength and beauty from the sun; how the sun warmed the earth and made the crops grow; how it brought gladness and ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... 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 them, taking part as it were ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... 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 infidelity among the Rattleburghers and converted ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... snorted Johnny, rising to stretch. "The head-shrinker always does it the hard way. You can't just dislike rice pudding; it has to be a sister-syndrome. If the shortest distance is from here to there, don't take it—remember your Uncle Oedipus." ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... reserve for their maturity and age. It is of no use to persuade ourselves, as some have done, that we possess the best work of men untimely slain. Had Sophocles been cut off in his prime, before the composition of "Oedipus"; had Handel never merged the fame of his forgotten operas in the immortal music of his oratorios; had Milton been known only by the poems of his youth, we might with equal plausibility have laid that flattering unction to our heart. And yet how shallow would ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... 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
... control of man, a blind, unreasoning force that seems to play with man as the football of chance. Whatever may be done by man will prove unavailing if Fate or Destiny has decreed otherwise. Out of such a philosophy of life comes the story of OEdipus. The modern conception is that ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... Athens four quarts of meal might be bought for three halfpence, and the fountains flow with water. "If then my existing possessions are insufficient for me, at any rate I am sufficient for them, and so they too are sufficient for me. Do you not see that Polus acted the part of Oedipus in his royal state with no less beauty of voice than that of Oedipus in Colonos, a wanderer and beggar? Shall then a noble man appear inferior to Polus, so as not to act well every character imposed upon him by Divine Providence; and shall he not imitate Ulysses, who even in ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... 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 ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... rather 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
... 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
... subordinate interests out of sight, the light thrown full on the central tragedy. Hence comes a rare intensity, an immediacy of impression, a sense of nearness to the thing described, which will strike anyone who reads the messenger's speech in the Hercules Furens, or the scene where the identity of Oedipus is discovered, or indeed any great passage in Greek Drama. This simplicity of treatment persists, when with Menander and the Alexandrians we pass into a world more like our own and find literature, still simple in form, but more artistic, more intellectual, more literary, less centrally ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... to 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, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... all kept deep silence. And alone arose against him Euryalos, a godlike man, son of king Mekisteus the son of Talaos, Mekisteus, who came on a time to Thebes when Oedipus had fallen, to his burial, and there he overcame all the sons of Kadmos. Thus Tydeides famous with the spear made ready Euryalos for the fight, cheering him with speech, and greatly desired for him victory. And first he cast about him a girdle, and next gave him ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... the body: observe, we do not hazard a remark so false as that the one produces the other—their relations are far from being mutual; but we only suggest that the mind, as well as the body, hobbles like a three-legged OEdipus, resting on its proper staff of life. And what can be more provocative of scribbling than travel? How eagerly we hasten to describe unheard-of adventures, how anxiously record exaggerated marvels! to prove some printed hand-book quite wrong in the number of steps ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and only speak of him for a single reason. Aristotle assures us, in his 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 ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... the weakening effect of the latter upon the former. To escape the penalty that awaits general criticism we may add here that Tragedy is never greater than when her handmaid is ready to do her modest service. Sophocles puts into the mouth of Oedipus, at the moment of his departure into blind and desolate exile, tender injunctions regarding the care ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... 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 ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... animates 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 assurance of ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... burst of gladness. "The gods take one friend, they restore another. OEdipus has read the sphinx's riddle. Honour this man, for he is worthy of honour ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... 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 ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... me to require an OEdipus to discover Mr. Fairlegh's reasons for this request," observed Stephen Wilford; "he evidently does not consider the present company deserving of the high honour of drinking the health of a young lady whom ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... Phratores, or tribesmen, on the ground that his mind was affected. The old man's only reply was—"If I am Sophocles I am not beside myself; and if I am beside myself I am not Sophocles." Then taking up his OEDIPUS AT COLONUS, which he had lately written, but had not yet brought out, he read from it a beautiful passage, with which the judges were so struck that they at once dismissed the case. He died shortly afterwards, in B.C. ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... disciple. He gives us his philosophy through the medium of wit, and is never so pathetic as when he is humorous. To turn truth into a paradox is not difficult, but George Meredith makes all his paradoxes truths, and no Theseus can thread his labyrinth, no OEdipus solve his secret. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... may take that for granted...." She allowed him his sex complex, knowing that Freudians without it would be like children deprived of a precious toy; for her part she was impatient to get back to Jim, her life's chief passion. The Oedipus complex, of course he would say it was; what matter, if he would let her talk about it? And Neville. It was strange to have a jealous passion for one's daughter. But that would, he said, be an extension of ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... part of our treasures. Over what tragedy could Lady Jane Grey have wept, over what comedy could she have smiled, if the ancient dramatists had not been in her library? A modern reader can make shift without Oedipus and Medea, while he possesses Othello and Hamlet. If he knows nothing of Pyrgopolynices and Thraso, he is familiar with Bobadil, and Bessus, and Pistol, and Parolles. If he cannot enjoy the delicious ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fact of this Fourth Book is the connection which it makes between Egypt and Greece. In another Greek legend, that of OEdipus, the same connection is made through the Sphinx, whose riddle the Greek hero solves, whereat the ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... said to himself; and yet at the end of a fortnight it turned out to the contrary; not because Mr. Tulliver's will was feeble, but because external fact was stronger. Wakem's client was the only convenient person to be found. Mr. Tulliver had a destiny as well as Oedipus, and in this case he might plead, like Oedipus, that his deed was inflicted on him rather than committed ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... another 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 ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... it is the will of the gods that it be so, let it be so; and not to say, Wretched am I, an old man: have I kept my gray hairs for this? Who is it that speaks thus? Do you think that I shall name some man of no repute and of low condition? Does not Priam say this? Does not Oedipus say this? Nay, all kings say it! For what else is tragedy than the perturbations ([Greek: pathae]) of men who value externals exhibited in this kind of poetry? But if a man must learn by fiction that no external things which are independent of the will concern ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... ordained to keep watch over the machinery of the will and attend to the winding up? Or is this infusion of strength, whereby to continue its operations, a sudden tightening of those invisible cords which bind the All-Father to the spirits he has created? Truly, there is no Oedipus for this vexing riddle. Many luckless theories have been devoured by the Sphinx; when will metaphysicians solve it? One tells us vaguely enough, "Who knows the mysteries of will, with its vigor? Man doth not yield him ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... this last, and weakest, of all the nations of Western Europe from drinking to the dregs the cup of ruin and desolation. Tragic indeed in the profoundest sense—in the sense of Aristotle—more tragic than the long ruin of the predestined house of Oedipus—is this accumulated tragedy of a small and helpless people, whose sole apparent crime is their stern determination to cling at any cost to their plighted word of honour. I have been lately glancing into a little book published about five years ago, ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... however, was very anxious to retain his services, and a sort of general office seems to have been created for him, the duties of which were to supply music for any dramatic works which the king took it into his head to have so embellished. And, though it is to this that we owe the noble "Antigone," "Oedipus," "Athalie," "Midsummer Night's Dream," and other music, this work to dictation was very worrying, and one cannot think without impatience of the annoyances to which he was subjected. The king could not understand why he shrank from ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... 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 ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... art, made use even of mechanical contrivances to 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, one might ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... recoils,—which all law, social and divine, stigmatizes as 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 ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the old King Oedipus of Thebes. After a time heavy troubles, the consequence of the sins of his youth, came upon him, and he was driven away from his kingdom, and sent to wander forth a blind old man, scorned and pointed at by all. Then ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became positively distressing to me: at night, 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 ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... in the flagging does man after man cross yonder street? What plebeian Lear or Oedipus, what Israel Potter, cowers there by the corner they shun? From this turning point, then, we too cross over and skim events to the end; omitting the particulars of the starveling's wrangling with ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... if we ask 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 was modern civilization, bringing swift ruin to his wigwam ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... in a stupid gaze The host beheld him, silent with amaze! 'Twas thou, Euryalus! who durst aspire To meet his might, and emulate thy sire, The great Mecistheus; who in days of yore In Theban games the noblest trophy bore, (The games ordain'd dead OEdipus to grace,) And singly vanquish the Cadmean race. Him great Tydides urges to contend, Warm with the hopes of conquest for his friend; Officious with the cincture girds him round; And to his wrist the gloves of death are bound. Amid the circle ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... have been a sirocco to stir the soul of an anchorite, transformed into an icy mist—the Paphian Venus lies crushed, degraded, cold, amid the reeds of Pan. But this mesalliance, this mating with Davus the detested instead of with Oedipus the adored, is not the only cause of indifference. The health of American wives, their muliebrity or womanly power, is sapped in various ways. Millions of them are overworked, all the virility ground out of them in the brutal treadmill of existence; and it not infrequently ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... declares himself to have taken: "If 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 ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... to say, "How about Bernard Shaw?" when he treacherously went on, "How would it be then to give a Greek drama—say 'Oedipus Tyrannus'?" ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... Who Were Hanged" tells how differently different persons take death. Grim death lurks in the background of almost every work, casting a fearful gloom, mocking the life of man, laughing to scorn his joys and his sorrows, propounding, sphinx-like, the big riddle that no Oedipus will ever be ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... Oedipus Rex, l. l: Kudmou tou palai nia trophe. 120 (Heading) Endroit or lieu is the general word for a "place" or "spot." Place is the place ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... men, how utterly a thing of nought I count the life ye have to live! For what man is there who wins more of happiness than just the seeming and after the semblance a falling away. With thy fate before mine eyes, unhappy Oedipus, I can call no earthly creature blest." Here and there, as in this passage, the parallel is very close. But Milton's genius is too great and self-reliant for mere imitation. He sometimes recalls the very words ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... my superior force in fight. He ended, and his speech found no reply. One godlike Chief alone, Euryalus, 845 Son of the King Mecisteus, who, himself, Sprang from Talaion, opposite arose. He, on the death of Oedipus, at Thebes Contending in the games held at his tomb, Had overcome the whole Cadmean race. 850 Him Diomede spear-famed for fight prepared, Giving him all encouragement, for much He wish'd him victory. First then he threw[18] His cincture to him; next, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... was performed in 472. It was one of a trilogy, a series of three plays dealing with the misfortunes of Oedipus' race. After the death of Oedipus his sons Polyneices and Eteocles quarrelled for the sovereignty of Thebes. Polyneices, expelled and banished by his younger brother, assembled an army of chosen warriors to attack his native land. Eteocles opens ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... countenance. "How do I know she would have succeeded? She had never then trod the boards. Besides, what strikes you as so good in a village show may be poor enough in a metropolitan theatre. Gentlemen, I do my best for her; you cannot think otherwise, since she maintains me! I am no OEdipus, yet ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lore the OEdipus Saga enthralled the imagination of antiquity and inspired dramas amongst the world's masterpieces. Later forms of the tale may be found ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... East on solemn occasions is a practice more frequently mentioned. There is an interesting note on the subject in the Translation above quoted, at Oedipus Col., 477., ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... 'Not good as models' 'DREAM,' The The most mournful and picturesque story that ever came from the pen and heart of man 'One of the most interesting' of Lord Byron's poems Dreams Drummond, Sir William His 'OEdipus Judaicus' ——, Mr., Lord Byron's schoolfellow at Harrow Drury, Rev. Henry, Lord Byron's letters to ——, Rev. Dr. Joseph, his account of Lord Byron's disposition and capabilities while at Harrow Lord Byron's character of His retirement ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... breathless account of an evening spent in seeing Oedipus Rex played by Mounet Sully at the Comedie Francaise. In this half-sophisticated girl, the famous performance, traditional now through two generations of playgoers, had clearly produced an emotion whereof the expression in her letter greatly disquieted Catharine Elsmere. She felt too—a little ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to expresse my paine, To you, great Lord, the causer of my care, In clowdie teares my case I thus complaine Unto your selfe, that onely privie are. But if that any Oedipus unware Shall chaunce, through power of some divining spright, To reade the secrete of this riddle rare, And know the purporte of my evill plight, Let him rest pleased with his owne insight, Ne further seeke to glose upon the text: For griefe enough it is to grieved wight To feele his fault, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... 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 (ii. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... honoured long, Long may your highness joy this highest place: Thyself the root and cause of mine own wrong. But must I leave to view my lady's face, And, banish'd from my prince's royal court, Wander,[83] as erst the unhappy Oedipus, Whose pain my foes will make their chiefest sport— My most unhappy chance will ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... universe again tumbled into chaos. She was the veritable Sphinx, and he not the Oedipus to read ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... looseness of construction. It is a series of anecdotes strung together by the accident that they all happen to the same person. 'Tom Jones,' on the contrary, has a carefully constructed plot, if not, as Coleridge asserts, one of the three best plots in existence (its rivals being 'Oedipus Tyrannus' and 'The Alchemist'). Its excellence depends upon the skill with which it is made subservient to the development of character and the thoroughness with which the working motives of the persons involved have been thought out. Fielding claims—even ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... precincts consecrated to the Eumenides, but in deathless tenacity, the rich aroma of 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
... for us to do or dare; Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear. 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 four-score years. And Theophrastus, at three-score and ten, Had but begun his Characters of Men; Chaucer, at Woodstock ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... that they were of a very complicated nature, having every fictitious division of decan and subdecan, with the hieroglyphic signs of their influence. Kircher has given us a copy of one of them in his Egyptian Oedipus, and Gybelin a figured fragment in his book of the calendar (under the name of the Egyptian Zodiac). The ancient Egyptians, says the astrologer Julius Firmicus, (Astron. lib. ii. and lib. iv., c. 16), divide each sign of the Zodiac into three sections; ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... 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, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... it!" 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 myself to bring ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... spectator kept alive and in suspense to the last moment. Several of his plays have an unity of subject to which nothing is wanting; but he has not left us any production that should rival that boast of Ancient Greece in the conduct of a plot, the OEdipus Tyrannus, a piece in which each act rises upon the act before, like a tower that lifts its head story above story to the skies. He has scarcely ever given to any of his plays a fifth act, worthy of those that preceded; the interest generally ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... Half of our lady friends (so say The other half) are Cats to-day. In Egypt she made quite a stir, They carved huge Images of her. Riddles she asked of all she met And all who answered wrong, she ate. When Oedipus her riddle solved The minx—I mean the Sphinx—dissolved In tears. What is there, when one thinks, So wonderful about ...
— The Mythological Zoo • Oliver Herford
... 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 ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... predecessor, 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
... a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity. Thus in the Oedipus, the messenger comes to cheer Oedipus and free him from his alarms about his mother, but by revealing who he is, he produces the opposite effect. Again in the Lynceus, Lynceus is being led away to his ...
— Poetics • Aristotle
... subject may have a strong, positive identification with his mother rather than his father. It is part of the unresolved Oedipus complex. He sees his mother as a kind, loving individual, always ready to help. Even if the mother did something socially unacceptable, the individual would defend her vehemently. The father who might do something wrong would ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... lovers do not meet upon the scene. The sterner and fiercer passions, on the whole, predominate, though Euripides has given us touching pictures of conjugal, fraternal, and sisterly love. In the "Oedipus Coloneus" of Sophocles also, filial love and the gentler feelings play a part in harmony with the closing scene of the old man's unhappy life. In the "Philoctetes," Sophocles introduces, as an element of tragedy, physical ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... crossed my mind while this strange individual fell silent, like someone completely self-absorbed. I regarded him with a mixture of fear and fascination, in the same way, no doubt, that Oedipus regarded the Sphinx. ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... little circumstance which now occurs to me respecting the kings manufactured by Napoleon. I recollect that during the King of Etruria's stay in Paris—the First Consul went with that Prince to the Comedie Francaise, where Voltaire's 'OEdipus' was performed. This piece, I may observe, Bonaparte liked better than anything Voltaire ever wrote. I was in the theatre, but not in the First Consul's box, and I observed, as all present must have done, the eagerness with which the audience applied ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... unsocialized desires, arising out of a metaphysical, undifferentiated yearning called libido. In the Freudian "psychology" the libido is mainly sex desire and takes the form of homosexual feelings, incest feelings (desire for the father or for the mother—the oedipus complex), desire for the sister or brother.[1] (The human being, according to Freud, goes through three stages in his sex life: first, a sex attachment to himself marked by thumb sucking, masturbation, etc., second, an attachment to the same sex—homosexuality—and, finally, the attachment ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... 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 History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... daughters, Cecilia and Margaret. Next him is Cecilia, who has a boot in her lap, clasped. By her side sits her sister Margaret, who has likewise a book on her lap, but wide open, in which is written, L. An. Senecae—Oedipus—Fata si liceat mihi fingere arbitrio meo, temperem zephyro levi. On Cecilia's petticoat is written, Cecilia Heron, daughter of Thomas More, aged 20, and on Margaret's, Margaret Roper, daughter of Thomas More, aged 22.' (The best beloved, most amiable, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... 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 ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... which we have hitherto handled, are very difficult of explanation. But the three inconveniencies, which close the discourse, are true aenigma's, and require an Oedipus to solve them. And as such an one, in my opinion, has not appeared hitherto, I will use my endeavours to do it. The golden ewer, says he, is dashed in pieces: the pitcher is broken at the fountain-head; and the chariot is dashed ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... concurre With others (ours?) were even to strike him in his shame Or (as he thinks) his glory, on the stage, And so too truly make't a Tragedy; When all the people cannot chuse but clap So sweet a close, and 'twill not Caesar be That shall be slaine, a Roman Prince; Twill be Alcmaeon or blind Oedipus. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... invariably poor creatures; as are those who have a knack at finding out such trifles. The same remark applies to punsters. It is difficult for a man of sterling talent to perpetrate a pun, or to solve an enigma. On the latter account, Oedipus must have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... true representation of life does not prove one thing only, it proves many things. Life is large, unlimited, and incessant; and the lessons of the finest art are those of life itself; they are not single but multiple. Who can declare what is the single moral contained in the "OEdipus" of Sophocles, the "Hamlet" of Shakespeare, the "Tartufe" of Moliere? No two spectators of these masterpieces would agree on the special morals to be isolated; and yet none of them would deny that the masterpieces are profoundly moral because of their essential truth. Morality, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... print. Comfort yourself—as you will—you will survive the reading, and will be a sure proof that the nut is not cracked. For when we find out what Fate is, I suppose, the Sphinx and we are done for; and Sphinx, Oedipus, and world ought, by good rights, to roll down the steep into ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... spirit of a spurious morality, of involving both crime and criminal in a common odium. It is to discrimination between the doer and the deed, that we owe the sublimest revelations of the human heart: in this discrimination lies the key to the emotions produced by the Oedipus and Macbeth. In the brief poem before us a whole drama is comprehended. Marvellous is the completeness of the pictures it presents—its mastery over emotions the most opposite—its fidelity to nature in its exposition of the disordered and despairing mind in which tenderness becomes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... all injure his fame, for he continued to write into extreme old age with uniformly increasing reputation. It is recorded that he composed one hundred and twenty tragedies, of which not more than seven are extant—namely, AJAX, ELECTRA, OEDIPUS THE TYRANT, ANTIGONE, THE TRACHINIAE, PHILOCTETES, and OEDIPUS AT COLONOS. The last of those tragedies has been ever marked with particular regard on account of a most interesting circumstance that attended its production, and made it the apex of that great ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... and 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 ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... but Fielding 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 ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... discussion, and return at the call of a smiling young lady. They have selected a word that may be applied to the most enigmatical replies. Everybody knows that, in order to puzzle the strongest heads, the best way is to choose a very ordinary word, and to invent phrases that will send the parlor Oedipus a thousand leagues from each of his ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... 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 headlong ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... 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
... would be 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
... take Oedipus himself all his time to do that,"—said Gervase, forcing a laugh which had no mirth in it, for he was conscious of a vaguely unpleasant sensation—a chill, as of some dark presentiment, which oppressed his mind. "When you know I do not believe in the soul, why do you talk to me about ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... taking Tragedies among the Ancients were built on this last sort of Implex Fable, particularly the Tragedy of Oedipus, which proceeds upon a Story, if we may believe Aristotle, the most proper for Tragedy that could be invented by the Wit of Man. [3] I have taken some Pains in a former Paper to shew, that this kind of Implex Fable, wherein the Event is unhappy, is more apt to affect ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... a constant annoyance to him, notwithstanding the mask of mutual civility. "I never," he tells his mother, "ask for a place in the colony troops for anybody. You need not be an Oedipus to guess this riddle. Here ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... and no doubt suggested to Sheridan the falling of the screen in the "School for Scandal." But the chief distinction of Fielding lies in his having carried the novel to a high point as a work of art. It was the opinion of Coleridge that the "Oedipus Tyrannus," "The Alchemist," and "Tom Jones," were the three most perfect plots ever planned.[176] It is to this excellence of plot—the subordination of each minor circumstance to the general aim, the skill with which all events are made to lead up to the final denouement—that Fielding, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... king, Laius, was told that his first child would be his death. So as soon as it was born he had its ancles pierced, and put it out in a wood to die; but it was found by a shepherd, and brought to Corinth, where the queen named it OEdipus, or Swollen Feet, and bred it up as her own child. Many years later OEdipus set out for the Delphic oracle, to ask who he was; but all the answer he received was that he must shun his native land, for he would ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... improved his good reputation both here and in Europe by composing what is called his Greek music; that is, an overture to the play of "Oedipus Tyrannus," which was acted at Harvard in the spring of that year. Of course his seashore friends wished to hear him play it himself, and after the applause which followed had subsided, he said: "A little approbation is all the reward I get for my compositions. A good deal of money was made ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... struggle. And he read much Greek with Jane on that afternoon, pouring into her young ears, almost with joyous rapture, his appreciation of the glory and the pathos and the humanity, as also of the awful tragedy of the story of Oedipus. His very soul was on fire at the idea of clutching the weak bishop in his hand, and crushing him ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... the best-known Russian dramatists of the period; he possessed more originality than Kniajnine. "Oedipus in Athens," "Fingal," "Demetrius Donskoi," and "Polyxena," are the ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... gotten a book by Sir W. Drummond, (printed, but not published,) entitled Oedipus Judaicus, in which he attempts to prove the greater part of the Old Testament an allegory, particularly Genesis and Joshua. He professes himself a theist in the preface, and handles the literal interpretation very roughly. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... sufficient for his desires, it is well; yet he will not hesitate to bring down the elk or the buffalo, and, satiating himself with the choicer delicacies, abandon the bulk of the carcass to the wolves or the vultures. So of Papaverius. If his intellectual appetite were craving after some passage in the Oedipus, or in the Medeia, or in Plato's Republic, he would be quite contented with the most tattered and valueless fragment of the volume, if it contained what he wanted; but, on the other hand, he would not ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... uses the expression "slave from the third mother" as implying that three descents were considered to confirm the position of the fourth generation as slave or citizen, or whatever the case might be. Oedipus assures Jokasta that her pedigree and status will remain unimpugned, even though the enquiry he is prosecuting establish him thrice-born a slave from slave mother, slave grandmother, ...
— On The Structure of Greek Tribal Society: An Essay • Hugh E. Seebohm
... solve them. It was said that the Sphinx would destroy herself if one of her riddles was ever correctly answered. It was this: "What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?" It was explained by Oedipus, who pointed out that man walked on his hands and feet in the morning of life, at the noon of life he walked erect, and in the evening of his days he supported his infirmities with a stick. When the ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... 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
... now the domestic relation, which is passingly introduced by the spouse of Hercules, Megara, who is simply mentioned. The two chief women of the group are Epicaste and Chloris, the one supremely tragic in her motherhood, the other reasonably happy. Epicaste is mother of OEdipus, who marries her after slaying his own father who is her husband, both deeds being done in ignorance; thus the closest domestic ties are whelmed into guilt and tragedy, whereof Sophocles has made a world-famous use, in his two dramas on the subject of OEdipus. ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... archaic element in an Irish 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 ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... performance I attended the house was crowded and attentive. I was not enough of an Athenian to attend all three. Even at the Music Hall in Berlin, where, as in other cities, the thinly covered salacious is ladled out to the animal man, there was a capital stage caricature of Oedipus, which atoned for the customary ewig Legliche, which now rules in these resorts. If for some untoward reason women ceased to have legs, what would the British and American ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... either of Apollo or Athena is temporary and partial:—and also, while Apollo or Athena only slay, the power of Demeter and the Eumenides is over the whole life; so that in the stories of Bellerophon, of Hippolytus, of Orestes, of Oedipus, you have an incomparably deeper shadow than any that was possible to the thought of later ages, when the hope of the Resurrection had become definite. And if you keep this in mind, you will find every name and legend of the oldest ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... but I shudder, child of Oedipus! I heard the clash and clang! The axles rolled and rumbled; woe to ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... desire the mother also in the newly acquired sense, while he begins to hate the father as a favored rival, who stands in the way of this wish, and develops a conscious antagonism toward him. He falls, as we say, under the domination of the Oedipus complex. Yet the wishes toward the mother go as a rule no further, since meanwhile the incest barrier has already for a long time been erected. Through this the boy is compelled to submit the mother complex to a ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... emblematic character of early riddles is seen in that proposed by the Sphinx to OEdipus. "What is that which goes on four legs in the morning, on two in the middle of the day, and on three in the evening?" And in the riddle of Cleobulus, one of the seven ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... the 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
... first acted in the year 415 B.C. "The first prize was won by Xenocles, whoever he may have been, with the four plays Oedipus, Lycaon, Bacchae and Athamas, a Satyr-play. The second by Euripides with the Alexander, Palamedes, Troaedes and Sisyphus, a Satyr-play."—AELIAN, Varia ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... 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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... a wise sentiment in their presence. In this sense I should say that Greek mythology was true and Calvinist theology was false. The chief terms employed in psycho-analysis have always been metaphorical: "unconscious wishes", "the pleasure-principle", "the Oedipus complex", "Narcissism", "the censor"; nevertheless, interesting and profound vistas may be opened up, in such terms, into the tangle of events in a man's life, and a fresh start may be made with fewer encumbrances ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... least in Athens, the appearance of women in the public street was considered 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, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Fleischer, in his Catalogue of Oriental Manuscript Codices in the Royal Library of Dresden, p. 75, Leipzig, 1831, 4^o, makes but brief mention of our codex, as 'a Mexican book of wood, illustrated with pictures, which awaits its OEdipus;' whereupon he cites the writing of Boettiger. The signature of the manuscript here noted, E 451, is the one ...
— Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices • Cyrus Thomas
... in the intellectual wrestlings of the world,—the thinkers, poets, sages; the Victors in great sorrows, who conquer the savage pain of heart and desolation of spirit which arise from heroic human grief,—Oedipus and Antigone, Iphigenia, Perseus, Prometheus, King Lear, Samson Agonistes, Job, and David in his penitential psalm. And there are the Victors in the yet deeper strivings of the soul—in its inner battles and spiritual conquests—Milton's Adam, Paracelsus, Dante, the soul in The Palace ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... torment to them. The fact is, that these great men are for all the world like handsomely bound books. Outside are the gilt edges and the purple cover: and within? a Thyestes feasts upon his own children; an Oedipus commits incest with his mother; a Tereus woos two sisters at once. Such are these human books: their brilliancy attracts all eyes, but between the purple covers lurks many a horrid tale. Turn over the pages of any one of them, and you find a drama worthy the pen of Sophocles or Euripides: ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... fire of their lusts. 'What is it?' The declaration that such things are hateful to the Gods, and most abominable and unholy. The reason is that everywhere, in jest and earnest alike, this is the doctrine which is repeated to all from their earliest youth. They see on the stage that an Oedipus or a Thyestes or a Macareus, when undeceived, are ready to kill themselves. There is an undoubted power in public opinion when no breath is heard adverse to the law; and the legislator who would enslave these enslaving passions must consecrate such a public opinion all through the city. 'Good: ...
— Laws • Plato
... among all ranks and denominations of men (few mourning over the low state of our Zion, and the daily decay of the interest of Christ and religion). Then we not only may say as the poet once said of the men of Athens, Thebes and Oedipus, "That we live only in fable, and nothing remains of ancient Scotland but the name;" but also take up this ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... 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 on ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... were the silver statue of Peace in the Tuileries; a statue of Cincinnatus in the Senate Chamber; a statue of OEdipus; a bas-relief of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, in the Musee Napoleon, and ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... of Oedipus in the crises. I am compelled to believe that Sophocles erred as regarded nature; for in cases so transcendent as this Greek nature and English nature could not differ. In the great agony on Mount Oeta, Hercules points ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... too seriously, I tell you. Everything will go its own way whether you want it to or not! I used to read the classics, once, and some fragments of those old fellows' sublime philosophy are still fresh in my memory. There is a scrap in one of the Greek tragedies—the Oedipus, I think, that has always ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... own, I think, there needs no great Oedipus to solve the difficulty of this passage. Nothing has ever been more common, than for lovers to compare their mistresses eyes to suns and stars. And what does Henriquez say more here than this, 'That though ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... 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 was ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... not the victims of an inexorable destiny, but of their own follies. Nor does he even excite emotion apart from a moral end. He lived to be ninety years old, and produced the most beautiful of his tragedies in his eightieth year, the "Oedipus at Colonus." Sophocles wrote the astonishing number of one hundred and thirty plays, and carried off the first prize twenty-four times. His "Antigone" was written when he was forty-five, and when Euripides had already gained a prize. Only seven of his tragedies have survived, but ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... the popular voices of the day to the comments of those capable of appraising genius, "What a master of composition Fielding was!" exclaimed Coleridge, "Upon my word I think 'Oedipus Tyrannus,' the 'Alchemist,' and 'Tom Jones' the three most perfect plots ever planned." To Sir Walter Scott Tom Jones was "truth and human nature itself." Gibbon described the book as "the first of ancient or modern romances"; and, as we have seen, declared that its pages would ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... all petulance at rest, and soothes us to wiser convictions. To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and many an Oedipus[523] arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips. Her mighty orbit vaults like the fresh rainbow into the deep, but no archangel's wing was yet strong enough to follow it, and report ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson |
