How Oedipus at Colonus drew on The Odyssey
A documented line of influence: Sophocles demonstrably engaged Homer’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Odyssey
Homer · c. 725 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles · 401 BCE
Ancient GreeceRelevance
4/10
On Oedipus at Colonus’s page
- Sophocles was called "the pupil of Homer" in antiquity, and the Odyssey is where his Theban material starts
- Book XI — Odysseus among the dead, the prophet Teiresias speaking, Epicaste glimpsed below — gives you the blind seer and the cursed house before Sophocles makes Oedipus himself the one who sees and prophesies
- Read it first and the dying, blind, oracular Oedipus reads as the Homeric underworld turned inside out
On The Odyssey’s page
- The underworld of Book XI seeds Sophocles' tragedy — among the dead Odysseus meets the prophet Teiresias and glimpses Epicaste, the mother who married her son
- An ancient Life called Sophocles "the pupil of Homer"; the blind seer and the doomed house of Thebes both reach him through this poem
- The memory the audience already carried — Oedipus, Teiresias, prophecy from the grave — is the raw material Oedipus at Colonus transforms