The Teiresias Scene in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus

Abstract

In the third of his "Lettres à M. de Genonville" (1719), Voltaire discussed several "fautes de vraisemblance" that he found in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus. One of the worst was Oedipus' failure to make any connection between what Teiresias tells him and what he himself has earlier heard fromApollo. Voltaire's criticism, reaffirmed or challenged again and again up to the present, has dominated discussion of the Teiresias scene. In all of this discussion, so far as I know, the principle of verisimilitude has remained intact. But much in the scene suggests that this principle was not the correct one in the first place. The opening