Investigating Among the Greek Gods

In ancient Greece, what if Oedipus was not the murderer of Laius? And what if Antigone did not commit suicide but was actually murdered? These are the questions posed by the authors of the book “Cold cases in ancient Greece” directed by Pierre Bayard and Zoé Angelis and published by CNRS Editions.

“Oedipus the King,” a founding text of detective fiction and police criticism, can be considered as a pioneer. Pierre Bayard, who had already devoted a book to the famous ancient Greek play in “Oedipus Is Not Guilty,” published in 2021 by Les Éditions de Minuit, states, “It is undoubtedly one of the first times in the history of literature that there is an almost police-like investigation conducted by an investigator, with the terrifying conclusion that he would be the criminal himself.”

Voltaire, reinterpreting Sophocles’ play, points out a major inconsistency regarding the supposed murder of Laius by Oedipus, where there was a witness who never wavered in his statements, always claiming that there were multiple assailants. By highlighting this major inconsistency, Voltaire establishes police criticism.

By emphasizing material or psychological inconsistencies in Sophocles’ text, we are forced to question the validity of Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretations of this Greek parricide. According to Pierre Bayard, these new interpretations of this founding text allow us to search for other complexes, such as that of Jocasta, adding, “perhaps one of the major elements of our psyche is not parricide, but infanticide.”

The texts in this collective book respond to a practice that is both playful and serious about anachronism, as the literature professor explains. Encouraging an approach that applies to any work of fiction as long as one “maintains a certain playful spirit,” Pierre Bayard emphasizes the importance of posing questions to the text of the time that the authors did not consider, making it an interesting practice applicable to all works of fiction.