Oedipus at Colonus as a divine comedy

Abstract

Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus was the last play written just before the playwright’s death in 406 B.C. This particular play of the most powerful Greek writer was not performed until five years after his death. He was born in the village of Colonus, and in the last month of his long life he turned back to the figure of Oedipus whom he had once portrayed as the ideal type of Athenian intelligence and daring. He wrote about the same hero’s old age, the recompense he received for his sufferings in Oedipus at Colonus, and in doing so he left this timeless masterpiece to the world of literature. Certainly a great number of critics wrote about this specific play of Sophocles as one of the most beautiful Greek tragedies throughout the centuries. And it is also doubtless that many scholars will discuss the same play again as a masterpiece tragedy of its writer. However, in a deeply made analysis of Oedipus at Colonus it is highly possible that the play fits into the category of divine comedies. Oedipus at Colonus deserves to be considered and studied as a work of divine comedy for it has almost all the characteristics of the so-called genre.