![tyranny do you need to support the chorus line tyranny do you need to support the chorus line](https://res.cloudinary.com/signature-theatre/image/upload/v1571685040/acl-playbill.jpg)
When questioning Jocasta about his appearance, he asks her whether he travelled alone or with an escort-not “like a king” but “like one in authority” ( archegetes, 751). Oedipus describes his reign as a tyrannis (128) and calls him a tyrannos at lines7. Creon calls him “a leader” ( hegemon, 103). Everywhere else in the play, Laius receives other appellations. There is only one other occurrence of basileus in the play, at line 257, where Oedipus himself applies it to his predecessor, Laius. The movement from one to the other is lost on readers of the play in English if they have experienced Oedipus as a king all along. So Theseus is basileus of Athens as son of Aegeus, who reigned before him ( OC 67-69). The bestowal of the title by the Chorus here occurs immediately after he has discovered who he is-no longer the tyrannos who arrived in Thebes and gained the throne, but the son of the dead king, his rightful heir. Rendering tyrannos as “king” diminishes the impact of lines 1202/03, the one place in the play where Oedipus is called basileus. It is different in Greek: the messenger wouldn’t ask after “Oedipus the tyrant” (925) and Oedipus himself wouldn’t apply the same word to his predecessor (799, 1043 cf. The reason for this is the pejorative connotation that “tyrant” always has in English. The five translators cited in my bibliography agree in rendering the four occurrences of tyrannos as if it were basileus. Oedipus is called or referred to as a “tyrant” four times in the play, first by Tiresias (408), again by Creon (514), and twice by the Messenger from Corinth (925, 939). Rendering it as “king” instead of “tyrant” obscures a crucial dramatic development which is clear in Greek but not translatable into English without the help of notes. In one respect, Rex is a reasonable translation: the idea of “king” was anathema for centuries in the Roman Republic, but tyrannos has resonances in Greek that rex in Latin and “tyrant” in English lack. The play that has come down to us in the manuscript tradition as Oidipous tyrannos is best known in English as Oedipus the King, a translation of the Latin Oedipus Rex.