Oedipus Rex: Personification 1 key example

The city of Thebes is both personified and compared to a ship struggling through a storm. Sophocles frequently compares Thebes to a ship and leading Thebes to captaining a ship, especially a ship in a storm. At the same time, the city is personified as a "she." This makes the suffering of the city—which is ultimately the collective suffering of many individual people—that much more visceral, ensuring that the human element of individual suffering is not lost in the grand figurative language describing the city.

The fact that the priest urges Oedipus to "see" emphasizes the ensuing metaphor while also conveying the importance of sight in a play that ends with blindness. The play has just begun, but already a religious figure is suggesting that Oedipus is in some way blind to the suffering that is occurring. In fact, the personification of the ship also suggests that the city is blind. The ship "cannot lift her head from the depths," or the ship's figurative head is stuck below the water. The Theban people's inability to escape the plague is metaphorically conveyed through this early instance of figurative language. At the beginning of the story, both Oedipus and the people of Thebes are figuratively blind.