The Poor Treatment Of Oedipus And Creon And Plato's Realizatio

In Plato’s account of Socrates’s trial, the Apology, Socrates asserts that “it is the greatest good for a man to discuss virtue every day … for the unexamined life is not worth living” (Apology, 38a). By this he means that in order to go through life properly, and to experience the greatest satisfaction, a person must devote serious thought to how they live their life and whether they are truly acting and have acted with virtue. In Sophocles’s Oedipus Cycle, the protagonist and (initially) king of Thebes, Oedipus, learns of horrors he took part in long ago, namely patricide and incest, which come back to haunt him as he realizes their nature — or rather, as he examines them. Although one assessment of the circumstances might lead one to believe that Oedipus’s

As Oedipus himself describes it, Creon comes “not to take [Oedipus] home, but to dump me out on the frontier to protect Thebes from fighting a war against Athens” (Oedipus at Colonus, 783-786). Creon seeks not to help Oedipus as he claims, but to use his divine power with no regard for Oedipus’s peace or happiness. It’s impossible to be sure whether Creon would have been more genuine had Oedipus not thrown Creon under the bus himself, but it seems that way to me. More importantly, Oedipus prolongs the curse that afflicts the city as the murderer remains unexposed. This works directly against Oedipus, because he is responsible for Thebes’s well-being. By pridefully insisting he could have nothing to do with Laius’s death, despite knowing that he had killed several unidentified people, he neglects his city and lets it suffer. Socrates would have Oedipus search his life for wrongdoing and immorality, but he instead chooses to shove blame onto others, and it’s clear from the events mentioned above that he only postpones the consequences of guilt, and makes them worse to