The Issue of Moral Culpability in Euripides's Phoenician Women

The Issue of Moral Culpability in Euripides's Phoenician Women

Euripides Phoenician Women retells the story of Oedipus's cursed family in the aftermath of the discovery of his real lineage. Unlike Sophocles's version, Euripides focuses almost obsessively on the issue of culpability for the disreputable actions. Ultimately, the Phoenician Women seeks to understand whom to blame: the gods or the people involved.

The play begins with an exposition by Jocasta, who recounts the familiar tale. The gods made it so that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother, two unspeakably loathsome crimes. He did absolutely nothing to deserve this fate and yet, despite the efforts of his father, could not avoid it. Disgraced, Oedipus cursed his sons, who had locked him up upon reaching adulthood.

The characters can be reasonably divided into two groups, one for whom the audience feels sympathy, and another for whom they do not. Oedipus and Jocasta are plainly victims of the gods. What those two did was undeniably wrong, but it was not their choice to do so. Consequently, they are sympathetic characters. Antigone seems the victim of both the will of the gods and the poor choices of her brothers. Her cousin, Menoeceus, son of Creon, is likewise sympathetic. According to the seer Teiresias, Menoeceus must die in order to save the city. Though the need for his death is never logically established, other than being commanded by the gods, he does not hesitate to carry out what he considers his patriotic duty.

The least sympathetic character is Eteocles. The brothers cannot rule together, so Polyneices went into a voluntary exile while Eteocles rules, planning to return in a year (the time the play takes place), and rule as king for a year. Eteocles, rather enjoying his crown, feels no need to step down at the end of his year. He calls it "cowardice to let the big thing go / and settle for the smaller." In a brazen defense of his position, he claims, "If one must do a wrong, it's best to do it / pursuing power." His outrageous theft of power was made of is own free volition. Jocasta, who unlike the audience does feel bad for her son, tries to associate his behavior with divinity. She asks him why he seeks the goddess Ambition, whom she then calls "Injustice." In so doing, she transforms his crime of betraying his brother into merely "seeking Ambition," something that seems far less perfidious. She continues on condemning tyrannical power and greed. Euripides creates a very pious Jocasta, who claims that men don't actually own their apparent possessions but are merely caretakers for the property of the gods.

It is ironic then that this exemplar of piety should suffer so much at the hands of the gods. "Euripides dwells on divine malignity, on the sadism which daemonic and godly forces unleash upon human beings when these are, by any rational moral estimate, not at fault or only partly so" (Steiner, George, "'Tragedy' Reconsidered," New Literary History 35 no. 1 (2004), 12). In the Euripidean world, moral concepts are often subject to radical reconstruction. Traditionally, the bad should suffer and the just be rewarded. In the Phoenician Women, innocent Jocasta dies and Oedipus and Antigone go into exile while the scheming opportunist Creon takes control of the country. Creon, though not as detestable as Eteocles, is firmly on the side of the bad brother and, as a result, is quite unsympathetic by the end, despite brief empathy over the death of his son.

Polyneices and Eteocles both die but their troubles cannot be directly ascribed to any divine meddling. True, they would never have been in such a situation if not for the gods' cruelty towards their father, but that does not excuse their behavior. No god made them lock up there father, and certainly no god forced Eteocles to hold on to power. Euripides likes to mix things up. Polyneices doesn't fit neatly into either of the two categories. On one hand, he is betrayed by his own brother, cheated out of power and wealth that is rightfully his. On the other hand, he too locked up Oedipus and did, in fact, return to Thebes at the head of an army fully willing to sack his own city. He made those choices, and both would eventually contribute to his death.

Euripides gives accounts of the initial crimes of Laius and Oedipus. The first establishes that Oedipus and Jocasta were merely acting in accordance with their predestined fates. The second blames Laius for the multigenerational attrocities. Jocasta says to Polyneices:

Some god is ruining all of Oedipus' children.
The beginning was my bearing outside law.
It was wrong to marry your father and to have you
But what of this? The god's will must be borne.

In this, she recognizes that though their actions were wrong, the gods caused it but, as humans, she and Oedipus would have to deal with it. Teiresias says, "Laius made a child against heaven's will." This may be true, but is Laius at fault for having a child, whom the gods cursed? Why should he not have been able to have a child? And were his efforts to "expose" the newborn not a reasonable attempt to ameliorate the prediction? Laius could have, perhaps, prevented Oedipus from ever being born, but it was only the malicious designs of the gods that made such action necessary. Oedipus, while acknowledging the destructiveness and perversion of his crime, attempts to assuage his own complicity by stating that he never would have done so "if it were not some god who had contrived it." In this classic example of Euripidean thought, Oedipus directly blames the gods for his suffering. The gods are not our friends but rather are wicked and conniving.

Euripides spends a lot of time directly blaming or otherwise implicating the gods as the source for many evils. However, he also finds serious fault with some of the human characters. Man and the gods are responsible for their own respective actions.