?
Disciple-Mentor on the Rock: Learning through Suffering in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus
Sophocles' “Oedipus at Colonus” features the exile of Oedipus, the king of Thebes, whose whole life was a representation of learning through suffering. Finding himself in Colonus, blind Oedipus exhausted with journey sits down on the rock in Eumenides grove which makes the space that welcomes him as a spectator and performance, the one persecuting and the one persecuted, the right and the guilty. The principal issue of the tragedy is that which distinguishes: who glorifies, and who is shaming «their worthy city» (Soph. OC.929-930), protecting or oppressing Oedipus respectively? The latter disputes are gradually turning into those regarding who should only take other people’s lessons and who has the right to teach them. The opening of the tragedy sees Oedipus positioning himself as an old student – the one who due to age submitted to life lessons and came to Colonus to learn. Further on he evolves into a disciple-prophet – the one driven by the gravity of his life lessons, to become an eternal protection for Colon. The tragedy ends up with him maturing into a student-mentor, who by realizing his life lessons gained the virtue of blindness to explicate it in Colonus. Ordipus’ paideia is the one of the person, who seeks to find the path to himself, showing others the boundaries within which he will instruct himself or act as a mentor for others.
