The Riddle of Oedipus, a talk about Sophocles' play Oedipus Tyrannus from 429 BC, given at Chigwell School, March 16 2022.

The paper analyses two passages from Thyestes and Oedipus, where the protagonists cry unexpectantly and involuntarily. In the first case, where Thyestes has a sort of metamorphoses in a werewolf, there is an exploration of all the semantic possibilities for this attitude: any of them is in part true. It is interesting to compare them with two Homeric passages, one where Odysseus manages to stop his tears, another where the unexpected crying is due to the goddess Athena. Oedipus cries after the revelation, when he represents the incarnation of rage. His attitude coincides perfectly with the one of the angry man, except for the tears which he turns into blood. This makes him look like the women in grief, who used to scratch their cheeks. Both in Thyestes and in Oedipus, tears have also a narrative and so cognitive function: it is due to their tears that they make the plot go on (Thyestes understands the scelus, Oedipus finds the fitting punishment): so these tears are in a way a sort of meditation.

As an imperial Greek author of both cultural and stylistic interest, Aretaeus deserves to be more widely read. His most riveting disease descriptions bring before our eyes the spectacle of the human body in extreme states of suffering and dehumanization. These descriptions achieve a degree of visual immediacy and emotional impact unparalleled among ancient medical writers. This essay considers them as examples of ekphrastic rhetoric, designed to create enargeia. To create immediacy and intensify impact, Aretaeus deploys a set of techniques that invite the reader’s active engagement with the spectacle he describes. This engagement has the potential to generate a corporeal response that destabilizes the boundary between the body of the reader and the body in the text. The modern concept of “empathy” is perhaps too anodyne to convey the complexity of the response involved.

The article demonstrates how the poems in Lamentations provide a unique theological language for the 21st- century believer to express and to communicate their pain or even the remorse or rage at God.