Choice Review

Aristotle's canonization of Sophocles's Oedipus as a play with nothing illogical is puzzling. Finding the text with its many apparent inconsistencies completely inconclusive as evidence for Oedipus's guilt, Ahl reconstructs that guilt as a madness for self-conviction. Ahl's analysis of the motivation of the other characters as they assist Oedipus in this mad pursuit sometimes lapses into overly eager suspicion. He seems to insinuate that Creon (a pun on Cleon by labdacism--Labdacus and linguistics are related here!) was aiming all along for a coup d'^D'etat, with Jocasta somehow involved. Despite this overly skeptical tendency, Ahl reads this play in its full cultural perspective, sensitive to its relation to present and future philosophical issues, to contemporary fear of tyranny, and to other plays of the period. His rare knowledge of Statius and Seneca has sharpened his eye for contrasts between Sophocles's play and its Latin offspring. The Greekless reader will understand the puns and anagrams upon which the argument for deliberate ambiguity often depends. This is for general readers and specialists a provocative, sometimes overly suspicious, almost always quite brilliant opening to further careful scrutiny of this play.