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Updated: June 28, 2025
The Oedipus Coloneus, like the Philoctetes, the other play of Sophocles' old age, closes in peace. The old fiery passions still burn fiercely in Oedipus, as they did in Lear; yet both were "every inch a king" and "more sinned against than sinning". Oedipus' miraculous return to strength before he departs is curiously like the famous end of Colonel Newcome.
And I think the English reader, even in the general analysis and occasional translations with which I have ventured to fill so many pages, will perceive that all the exertions of subtle, delicate, and passionate power, even in a modern actor, would be absolutely requisite to do justice to the characters of Oedipus at Coloneus, Antigone, Electra, and Philoctetes.
Although the three plays of the "Oedipus Tyrannus," the "Oedipus at Coloneus," and the "Antigone," were composed and exhibited at very wide intervals of time, yet, from their connexion with each other, they may almost be said to form one poem.
For nearly forty years he was taken to be the typical dramatist of Athens, being nicknamed "the Bee"; his dramatic powers showed no abatement of vigour in old age, of which the Oedipus Coloneus was the triumphant issue. He died in 405, full of years and honours.
There upon the old poet is said to have read to the judges the play he had on hand and had just composed the Oedipus Coloneus and to have asked them whether they thought that the work of a man of weak intellect. After the reading he was acquitted by the jury.
Thereafter turning his attention to Persian, he produced , anonymously, his famous translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám. He also pub. translations of the Agamemnon of Æschylus, and the Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus Coloneus of Sophocles.
We see that he must have been bordering on 80, if not 90: consequently with impaired faculties, and thus altogether disqualified for producing such a vigorous historical masterpiece; for though we have instances of poets writing successfully at a very advanced age, as Pindar composing one of his grandest lyrics at 84, and Sophocles his Oedipus Coloneus at 90, we have no instance of any great historian, except Livy, attempting to write at a very old age, and then Livy rambled into inordinate diffuseness.
The diversity of character of Aeschylus and Sophocles is nowhere more conspicuous than in the Eumenides and the Oedipus Coloneus, as both these pieces were composed with the same aim.
VII. In the "Oedipus at Coloneus," the blind king is presented to us, after the lapse of years, a wanderer over the earth, unconsciously taking his refuge in the grove of the furies "the awful goddesses, daughters of Earth and Darkness."
Chorus in Oedipus Coloneus. AFTER the repose of a few days, we held a council, to decide on our future movements. Our first plan had been to quit our wintry native latitude, and seek for our diminished numbers the luxuries and delights of a southern climate.
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