Oedipus The King Comparative Essay

Throughout history, there have been many paradigm shifts that have made us change the way we look at the world. One of the most important paradigm shifts in ancient Greece was the shift from the gods being the “truth”, to the objective sciences being the “truth.” As we read through the books, “Iliad”, “Odyssey”, “Lysistrata”, and “Oedipus the King”, we can see the paradigm shift as the stories go from Gods heavily influencing the story to barely any God-human interaction at all. The “Iliad” and the “Odyssey”, for example, were written the earliest, so we can see that the gods play a key role in the stories’ narrative. By the time “Lysistrata” and “Oedipus the King” were written, we see this transition of paradigm in their stories, as there

However, there is still a clear distinction in the level of god-interaction between the two stories. “Oedipus the King”, for example, can be seen as the middle ground or bridge between literatures that include heavy god interaction, to none at all. For example, in “Oedipus the King”, it states, “If you haven’t heard it from messengers,/ we now have Apollo’s answer: to end/ this plague we must root out Laios’s killers./ Find them, then kill or banish them./ Help us do this. Don’t begrudge us/ what you divine form bird cries, show us/ everything prophecy has shown you./ Save Thebes! Save yourself! Save me!” (Oedipus the King, 370-377). Oedipus is pleading to Thebes, a human, to help him with his journey finding the truth about the oracle. This demonstrates the bridge this story creates because we see that gods are still involved through the oracle telling, but the gods are no longer directly involved in the character’s journey and struggle. However, by the time we get to “Lysistrata”, direct god-human interaction completely disappears. It states, “…If all the women come together here--/ Boeotians, Peloponnesians, and the rest--/ And us – together we can salvage Greece” (Lysistrata 39-41). The story is essentially about the queens of the Peloponnesian War gathering together to find a solution to the conflict, and eventually concluding to withholding sex from their king husbands until a treaty is signed. Throughout the whole story, the gods never get involved, but rather the human characters resolve the conflict without the help of the gods. This is a huge difference from the “Iliad”, and the “Odyssey”, because in those first two stories, the gods intervene in almost every step of the characters’