Why is King Oedipus known as the most perfect tragedy?

1. I searched the expression "perfect tragedy" and said it was put forward by Aristotle.

2. Aristotle's Poetics does mention Sophocles' Oedipus many times as a standard example to illustrate his tragedy theory.

Aristotle was born in 384 BC, and euripides, the youngest of the three tragedies, has been dead for many years. Euripides died in 406 BC. In the same year, the decades-long war between Athens and Sparta ended in Athens' disastrous surrender. After that, Athens declined, the government was unable to provide funds to support tragedy creation, and ancient Greek tragedies declined.

4. Aristotle, who grew up in the era of "tragedy is dead", has a series of wrong understandings because he never understood tragedy, or because philosophers like to dominate poets according to their own philosophical system, or both. In his Poetics, he made a series of prescriptions for "how to create tragedy"-instead of describing it: for example, tragedy is that a just person falls from a good situation to a bad situation, for example, the protagonist of tragedy must surpass ordinary people-which means that tragedy should not have a main female role, because women are not as good as men; For example, the function of tragedy is to arouse the audience's "pity" and "fear" and purify their emotions. However, not to mention that when Aristotle stipulated how tragedy should be created, the three great tragedians were already dead. Even if they know everything, they will only laugh at these regulations. Few of the ancient Greek tragedies handed down conform to Aristotle's regulations: at least 30%-40% of the ancient Greek tragedies are dominated by women, and the works handed down are Agamemnon, trojan women, Medea, Helen, Hercobber, andromache, antigone and. The "heroes" in tragedy are never just people, most of them are either fools or murderers. If there is a monster in the village, you want the hero to kill it, but you don't want him to stay longer, otherwise he will sleep with all the girls, kill everyone and eat all the bread, beef and cheese, even the basket (see aristophanes's Frog). In ancient Greek tragedies, you can hardly find any male character with normal IQ and moral values at the same time. Those who can barely be counted as "innocent" and "decent" are all female roles.

5. But Aristotle doesn't seem to understand Sophocles' Oedipus, which leads him to have a misunderstanding that it is a work that largely conforms to his stipulations on tragedy. He mentioned Oedipus Trenos ten times in Poetics, and almost none of them were right. For example, he said that Oedipus "although not particularly just or kind, his misfortune was not caused by his own" evil ",but by some mistakes" (poetics,13)-well, if killing five people because of a quarrel caused by a traffic jam is not "evil", then Oedipus naturally did not do evil. Aristotle also said that Oedipus killed his father and married his mother without his knowledge (Poetics,14); ); In fact, he listened to a strange drunk's sentence "You are an illegitimate child" and a Corinthian with ulterior motives, thinking that he killed his father and married his mother. Please see my other answer. Should King Oedipus be punished for marrying his mother and father without knowing it? Aristotle also said that the identity in Oedipus' plays is natural. Oedipus found that the process of his birth was natural, not deliberately arranged. Naturally, he heard an unknown drunk say "you are an illegitimate child", and then suspected that he was not his parents' biological son. Go back and ask his parents, who insisted that you were biological, but you still didn't believe it, so you had to go to the temple for divination.

6. Even so, Aristotle did not seem to say that Oedipus Trenos was "perfect". In Poetics 14, he said that the plot structure of Oedipus in Sophocles was "second best"-making mistakes in ignorance and then discovering the facts. The best thing is to find out the truth before making mistakes.

7. But this doesn't mean that Oedipus Terenos is not a great work. Analyzing why she is good is too big a project. I haven't taken two courses and my level is not enough. I just want to mention one thing: Ancient Greece believed that dramatists had the duty to educate the people, and most tragedies had political significance, which was a dialogue between the playwright and the audience at that time. To understand the subtlety of ancient Greek drama, we can't leave the social background at that time, otherwise we can't understand what the dramatist really wants to teach our compatriots. These days, I reread The Two Faces of Oedipus written by the classicist F. Ahl, and found the point mentioned in it very interesting, which is also the place that China readers often ignore:

Oedipus Trenos tells a story about the plague-in a sense, he was also a leader who helped the city-state solve a crisis, but he was regarded as the chief culprit of the plague because he could not solve a new crisis. This is a story about Oedipus, a ruler, and Creon, another ruler. This is a story about the people, who endured the devastation of the plague, but were disappointed to find that the rulers were still fighting among themselves, but they didn't know who to support.

Sophocles was staged in Athens around 429-425 BC. Typhoid fever broke out in Athens in 430-429 BC and recurred in 427. Perikles, the great legislator and Athenian ruler, died of the plague in 429. One year before Pericles's death, another disaster, often called "plague" in ancient Greek society, broke out-the city-state civil war: Sparta declared war on Athens. Sparta's excuse is to punish the descendants of Athens who committed blasphemy a hundred years ago-including Pericles. Sparta tried to make Athenians think that Pericles was the chief culprit of this political "plague" through this propoganda. When Pericles's influence declined in his later years, there appeared a rising star in Athens politics, a political enemy of Pericles-his name was Cleon.

Therefore, Sophocles is facing a group of people: they are suffering from the plague, or have just experienced the plague; They have just lost their beloved leader, or are about to lose their beloved leader-and this leader is accused of causing the plague, and he is surrounded by a political enemy named Cleon. Sophocles told them a story about the plague, a story about losing a ruler he once loved, and a story about how the ruler was "convicted" and "proved" to be a curse that caused the plague-there was a competitor named Creon waiting to take his place around the ruler.