Where three roads meet: a neglected detail in the Oedipus Tyrannus

Abstract

‘There is surely more than geography involved in the extraordinary stress laid in the play on the importance of the branching road.’ So writes the latest editor of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, R. D. Dawe, who proceeds to mention the ‘sexual significance … (the junction of the human trunk and legs)’ which ‘people tell us’ is to be discerned behind the references to the cross-roads where Oedipus met and killed his father. Dawe finds it difficult to make up his mind whether quasi-Freudian symbolism is properly to be attributed to Sophocles, and in adopting an equivocal position he cites only one further factor, that ‘the imagery of crossroads is common enough representing a point where a crucial decision has to be made’.