Oedipus' burial

One of the questions that Prof Kearney raised was the reason for the mysteriousness of Oedipus' burial. Among the answers that we considered was that Oedipus is somehow transformed at the moment of his death, and so must not be associated with a single "place" but with all "places." Just today, I was reading Felix Budelmann's classics work The Language of Sophocles: Communality, Communication, and Involvement (Cambridge) and found his reflection on the choice of Sophocles' language to speak of the buried Oedipus. 

The line to which Budelmann gives attention is Colonus 1760-1763, which reads:

"Girls, that man (keinos) instructed me that no mortal should go near those regions or address the sacred tomb which that man occupies (hen keinos echei)."

Budelmann notes that the use of the indeterminate "keinos" to name Oedipus, who is no longer called by his proper name there, reinforces the sense of a supernatural transformation that occurs with Oedipus (as do the clap of thunder and the divine voice mentioned at 1621-1628). He goes on to say: 

"Oedipus is last named at 1638, around 150 lines before the end....If names are anything to go by, he is not the man he used to be. By failing to name him, Theseus makes Oedipus a rather numinous kind of figure" (p. 43). 

So it seems Sophocles' language of Oedipus from his death afterwards refers to his very being as no longer limited by his proper name, but as transformed into something more like the protective power of the city which he becomes. A strange stranger indeed!

Marina McCoy