'Portrayal of society in Oedipus the king Essay\r'

'People and club have been signifi tidy sumt principles in both civilization. We gain personnel finished it, bear on top because of it and argon a part of it. In Sophocles’ clock time mess were of great importance for the Greeks, it was the time of the foundation of democracy, the countrified was governed for and by the spate. Antig whiz was written in France during the German occupation and contains political messages to the commonwealth.\r\nThis probe t destinations to investigate how corporation is portrayed in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Jean Anouilh’s Antig iodin, and before long how and for what purpose this is done. The portrayal of society depicts the society in the hang, and how that reflects the contemporary society of the author.\r\n champion representation of portraying society in Oedipus the King is through the chorus. In this play the chorus is a group of Theban slew who express their ideas and intellections, and pray to the G ods. By doing this they parade how the Theban people fight to what happens during the play. In the chorus’ first fashion we see them praying to the gods describing the horrors of the plague. The people of Thebes ar paltry and they turn to Zeus, Apollo, Athena and Artemis for deliverance. This shows their strong belief in and devotion to the deities.\r\nThe second time the chorus appears it is confused more or less Tiresias’ accusations. In spite of their sentenceion of the omniscience of the Gods, they decide to propitiate loyal to their king and non see the prophecy until they see proof. This shows great the true to the king as does the finishing fourth dimension â€Å"Never will I convict my king, never in my heart.”(l. 572)\r\nAt the end of the ode the chorus is open to both possibilites, that of the deities beingness wrong and of Oedipus having killed his father. This is although they believe in them and lever them deeply. This demonstrates t heir open-mindedness and openness to new ideas.\r\nSophocles’ contemporaneous Athenian society is also twined into the story. Oedipus’ constitution reflects that of the Athenian people. Bernard MacGregor Walke Knox writes1 â€Å"The poet’s language presents him to the audience non as a figure of the transcendental past further as one fully contemporary; in situation he is easily recognizable as an epitome of the Athenian character as they themselves conceived it and as their enemies saw it too.\r\nOne attri just nowe after a nonher in the character of Sophocles’ Oedipus corresponds to Athenian qualities praised by Pericles in his Funeral diction or denounced by the Corinthians in their dishonor on Athenian imperialism at the pass around in Sparta before the war.”\r\nHe goes on to explain that these characteristics are: being a man of swift and zipous action mechanism, having project as a number of unvaried action especi totallyy in m arine warfare, courage, swiftness and rationality in action and decision, intelligence, adaptability to slew, and his dedication to the interests and needs of the city. Knox concludes with â€Å"Oedipus the King is a dramatic embodiment of the creative vigor and intellectual daring of the fifth- carbon Athenian spirit.”\r\nThe preoccupations of the Athenians are also reflected in the play. During the fifth century B.C. when Sophocles wrote the play great changes were taking prescribe in Athens. The old think of and aid given to the deities were eroding as the result of the intellectual, social and scientific progress of the time.\r\n round this Knox writes â€Å"The figure1 of Oedipus represents not only the techniques of the transition from atrocity to civilization and the political achievements of the newly colonized society but also the annoyance and methods of the fifth-century intellectual revolution. His speeches are full of words, phrases and attitudes that bri ng together him with the â€Å"enlightenment” of Sophocles’ own Athens.”\r\nThis change in society is reflected when Oedipus ridicules and offends Tiresias who represents prophecy and spiritual power. In fact Sophocles expresses his conservative ideas by panorama up the double irony of the screen door man who can see the lawfulness and the future and the seeing man who is guile to his past, present and even to his own identity. As the story goes on we see the rarefied man who rejected the prophetic power descend to total humiliation and destruction.\r\nKnox puts it this way: ” The catastrophe of the tragic hero gum olibanum becomes the catastrophe of fifth-century man; all his idle energy and intellectual daring fag him on to this terrible discovery of his primaeval ignorance †he is not the measure of all topics…”\r\nAnouilh wrote a new version of Antigone during universe War II. His writing therefore contained political messages against the Vichy regimen. Most of the depiction of society happens through Creon and not the chorus. They are not Anouilh’s opinions but rather what he thought the Germans and the Vichy government’s view of people. By conveying this to the people he could proceed them to join the resistance.\r\nAs opposed to Oedipus who loves and cares for his people, Creon does not respect or care rough the people he governs. He refers to them as â€Å"the featherheaded rabble I govern” and produces that if they â€Å"are to understand what’s what, that stench has got to cope with the town for a month!” intelligibly he doesn’t think very much of their intelligence. He has only taken the smirch because he thought it would be direful not to and he thinks the orbit is on the brink of destruction.\r\nAs he himself explains to Antigone he thought â€Å"Someone had to agree to passe-partout the ship. She had sprung a hundred leaks; she was loaded to the water-line with crime, ignorance, poverty. The cycles/second was swinging with the wind. The crew refused to work and were looting the cargo. The officers were building a raft, ready to built in bed overboard and desert the ship. The mast was splitting, the wind was howling, the sails were begin to rip. Every man-jack on board was about to drown †and only because the only thing they thought of was their own skins and their cheap secondary day-to-day traffic.”\r\nIn these few lines Creon has called people criminal, ignorant, poor, thieves, lazy, quitters and egocentric. He is also giving a very dark picture of the country when he came in charge. He is implying that the government before him, be it Oedipus causing a plague and Eteocles and Polynices’ civil war or France’s third republic’s failure to deal with the depression, has destroyed the country and he is the one making amendments and restoring order.\r\nHe observes people as hypocritical and makes them look jerky when describing Eteocles’ funeral. He sarchastically explains how â€Å"schoolchildren emptied their savings-boxes to buy wreathes for him. ageing men, orating in quavering, hypocritical voices …and every tabernacle priest was present with an appropriate show of sorrow and solemnity in his stupid face.” This also shows that he has no respect for religion or people’s beliefs, earlier he also uses phrases exchangeable â€Å"flummery about religious burial chamber”, â€Å"priestly abracadabra”, â€Å"jibber-jabber” and â€Å"dreary bureaucrats”.\r\nAt one point Antigone exclaims ” Animals, eh, Creon! What a king you could be if only men were animals”. This can be Anouilh using Antigone’s voice to say that not all people are animals, but docile and obedient people are.\r\nIn general one can say that society is portrayed as better in Oedipus the King than in Antigone. Sophocles describ es society as loyal, pious, open-minded and Oedipus and the Athenians as active, rational, courageous, intelligent, experienced, good at adapting to new circumstances and compassionate. The only portrayal of society in Antigone, which is through Creon, describes it as criminal, hypocritical, stupid, lazy, self-centred and ignorant. That does not necessarily say anything about the people, but more about the ruler himself. The writers describe two successive generations of the Theban people, but through them write to and about people more than 2000 years apart.\r\n1 accession to Oedipus the King in The Three Theban plays, Penguin Classics. Notes by Bernard MacGregor Walke Knox.\r\n'