This touching scene at the end of Oedipus Tyrannus anticipates a second moment of embracing now from Oedipus at Colonus when Theseus returns Ismene and Antigone to Oedipus after they have been abducted by Creon. If the first scene is made possible by Creon’s imaginative gift, rooted as it is in the rec-ognition of the longstanding delight Oedipus had always taken in his daughters, the second manifests this delight now trans-formed into a reciprocal relation of interdependence. Here is how the scene unfolds:
Oedipus: Come to your father, children; give your bodies for me to embrace, having been made present beyond all
hope.
Antigone: You shall have what you want, for this favor we yearn together.
Oedipus: Where, indeed, where are you?
Antigone: We are here together close to you.
[Oedipus and his daughters embrace.]
Oedipus: Most beloved offspring! Antigone: For this parent, all love.
Oedipus: Oh supports of light [ō skēptra photos]. Antigone:
Ill-fated daughters of an ill-fated father.
Oedipus: I have the things I love most, death would no longer make me all-wretched, with you two placed beside me.
Press close upon my ribs, children, on both sides
20 Here something like the nomadic subjectivity of which Rosi Braidotti speaks shows itself. Exiled from Thebes, Oedipus becomes a nomad, fully reliant on his relationship with his daughters. Braidotti writes that nomadic subjectivity “combines non-unitary subjectivity with ethical accountabil-ity by foregrounding the ontological role played by relationalaccountabil-ity.” See Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2013), 93.
growing together with him from whom you grew, and rest, once desolate, from that unhappy wandering.
And tell me the things that happened as briefly as possible, since
little speech suffices for girls your age.21
This poignant scene of reciprocal support and love is expressed again in the vernacular of touch in which the girls are said to be “supports of light” that press upon the ribs of Oedipus from both sides. And if Oedipus returns in that final sentence to an ancient paternalism in which the women are discouraged from speaking at length, this touching scene points symbolically to an ecology of relation other than that of patriarchal dominion.22 Theseus himself recognizes this picture of Oedipus situated be-tween his daughters, holding them and being held by them, as rooted “in your delight [tertheis] with these two children.”23 This delight, unlike that with which Creon had grown familiar, is not conditioned primarily by paternal superiority and juvenile de-pendence. Rather, it suggests a nuptial relation that has grown over the course of their unhappy wanderings during which time Oedipus has learned to lean upon Antigone and Ismene, and they, in turn, have found their voice.
To discern the contours of this nuptial relation rooted in mutual dependence and shared suffering, it will be necessary to trace in the symbolic power of the image of Oedipus situ-ated between his daughters the possibility of another politics, one in which the father becomes a brother, and these sisters,
21 Sophocles, Sophoclis Fabulae, OC, 1104–16.
22 In his funeral oration, Pericles gives voice to the ancient paternalism men-tioned here in his infamous injunction that women should give little oc-casion for rumor. See Thucydides, Historiae I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), ii 45.2. For a brief discussion of this, see, Christopher P. Long,
“Dancing Naked with Socrates: Pericles, Aspasia and Socrates at Play with Politics, Rhetoric and Philosophy,” Ancient Philosophy 23, no. 1 (2003): 49–
69, at 64. For more detail, see William Blake Tyrrell and Larry J. Bennett,
“Pericles’ Muting of Women’s Voices in Thuc. 2.45.2,” The Classical Journal 95, no. 1 (1999): 37–51.
23 Sophocles, Sophoclis Fabulae, OC, 1140.
each in her own way, come to embody those excellences capa-ble of cultivating a community of compassion. The political ef-ficacy of the community that has grown between Oedipus and his daughters can be felt in the impact it had on Theseus and the city of Athens, for their willingness to host these abject sub-jects is symbolically rewarded in the end as the nuptial union between Oedipus and his daughters is handed down to Theseus and the prophesy that secures the welfare of the city in which Oedipus is buried is fulfilled.
The symbolic importance of the grove of the Eumenides as the site in which the nuptial community is nurtured can only be fully appreciated if it is allowed to resonate against the story of Agamemnon and Iphigeneia.24 At the end of Aeschy-lus’s Oresteia, Athena forgives Orestes for killing his mother, Clytemnestra, in retribution for her murder of his father, Ag-amemnon. Athena acquits Orestes because it seems to be the will of Zeus and, as she says, “I am with my heart very much on the side of my father.”25 Recognizing that this decision will further exacerbate the anger of the Furies, those old goddesses of vengeance who had been pursuing Orestes for the murder of Clytemnestra, Athena succeeds in persuading them to give up their claims to justice in terms of violence and retribution by offering them a place of honor in the city.26 It is precisely this place of honor and the recognition that comes with it that marks the transformation of a politics of vengeance driven by the logic of force into a politics of compassion rooted in the power of persuasion. This, indeed, is the site to which Antigone leads her father at the beginning of Oedipus at Colonus and it is the site to
24 See R.P. Winnington-Ingram, “A Religious Function of Greek Tragedy: A Study in the Oedipus Coloneus and the Oresteia,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 74 (1954): 16–24. Winnington-Ingram recognizes the tight connec-tion between the Oresteia and Oedipus at Colonus, suggesting that to some degree in Oedipus at Colonus Sophocles grapples with the hope with which the Oresteia ends.
25 Alan H. Sommerstein, Aeschylus Eumenides (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1989), l. 738.
26 For a detailed discussion of the complex and politically salient manner in which Athena persuades the Furies, see Long, “The Daughters of Metis.”
which Ismene courageously returns in the hope of performing a rite in honor of the goddesses when she is taken by the force of the hands of Creon.27
Thus, in articulating the excellences these two daughters of Oedipus embody, it will also be necessary to attend to the site where these excellences are performed; for the grove of the Eu-menides marks the struggle between the politics of patriarchal domination driven by the compulsion to grasp and possess and the politics of nuptial compassion animated by reciprocity and recognition.28 In and around the sacred grove of the Eumenides, a politics rooted not in violence and retribution, but in mutual dependence, compassion, and respect emerges for a moment before succumbing again to the repetition compulsion endemic to the logic of patriarchal dominion.