Humans: Eternally Evading Fate

In modern day society, people don’t journey to the Oracle of Delphi to find out about their future. They go to a bank to protect their money or an economist to track which stocks are on the rise. And people don’t conduct sacrifices to prevent disease; they get vaccinations and routine testing at a doctor’s office. No longer does society rely on stars; it relies on science. While the Greeks believed in the power of oracles and stars, humanity now looks to science to foresee its fate. The Greeks didn’t stop at simply finding out their fate, however. They were also concerned with evading it. In Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, both Oedipus and Jocasta take measures to thwart the misery prophesied in their futures. Oedipus is predicted to kill his father and marry his mother, so he flees the parents he knows (Sophocles 44). Fate declares that Jocasta will marry her son, so she attempts to murder him as an infant (Sophocles 40). Naturally, this leads to the question of whether evasion of fate, like the pursuit of fate itself, is a theme that has survived through the ages. Do people still try to evade their fates today?

In Oedipus Rex, the characters are unsuccessful at evading their fates. Despite all the measures Jocasta and Oedipus take, they end up simply facilitating their destinies- orchestrating their own fates by trying to escape them. Oedipus flees Corinth to remove himself from his parents. But in doing so, he ends up at Thebes, the city of his real parents (Sophocles 44). And Jocasta tries to have her son killed as a three-day-old baby (Sophocles 40), but in doing so, she only ensures that she won’t be able to recognize him as an adult. In fact, ironically enough, even when Oedipus strives to be a just and caring ruler by...

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