Who is the "Sea-queen" mentioned in "Oedipus", and why is she referenced?

Question

Towards the beginning of Oedipus Tyrannus, the chorus calls out to various gods, including Apollo, Artemis, and Athena, asking them to drive away the plague from Thebes. As part of this, there are mentions of driving it into the sea:

Drive him back!—the fever, the god of death
that raging god of war
not armored in bronze, not shielded now, he burns me,
battle cries in the onslaught burning on—
O rout him from our borders!
Sail him, blast him out to the Sea-queen’s chamber
the black Atlantic gulfs
or the northern harbor, death to all
where the Thracian surf comes crashing.
_{Oedipus the King, Parados, translation by Robert Fagles (1982), lines 218–227}

Who is the "Sea-queen" referenced here? Why is she not named, and why is she invoked rather than, say, Poseidon? I would have expected a reference to the ruler of the ocean to refer to Poseidon, the god of the sea; why, then, is this "Sea-queen" invoked instead?

Answer 1

The original text names Amphitrite:

ἔπουρον, εἴτ᾽ ἐς μέγαν θάλαμον Ἀμφιτρίτας

borne by a favorable wind to the great chamber of Amphitrite

_{Sophocles (c. 429 BCE). Oedipus Tyrannus, line 194. Translated by Richard Jebb (1887). Perseus Digital Library.}

I do not know why Fagles used “Sea-queen” in his translation. I have two theories: first, he interpreted “great chamber of Amphitrite” as being a poetic way of saying “the ocean” and so the actual identity of the goddess was not so important; second, he thought his readers might not know who she was, and so would not understand the implication of the line. (But could he not have used both “sea-queen” and “Amphitrite”?) I note that he also does not name Ares in line 190.

The chorus mention Amphitrite not because she is the ruler of the ocean, but because her chamber (being the ocean, or in the ocean) is far away from Thebes. The chorus are praying that Ares, the god of destruction and death, will “turn his back in speedy flight from our land” (line 193) and take the plague far away with him, to the chamber of Amphitrite, or to the “Thracian waves” (line 196). Fagles adds the glosses “black Atlantic gulfs” for the former and “northern harbor” for the latter. Note that these are in opposite directions from Thebes: the chorus don’t care which direction Ares goes, as long as he goes far away.

Some commentators take “great chamber of Amphitrite” to be the ocean itself, not a specific location in the ocean where the goddess lives, but this is poetry, so we can read the phrase in both senses.

θάλαμον Ἀμφιτρίτας History tells us, that the intensity of the Attic plague-heat drove numbers to seek death by plunging into rivers and fountains (Thucydides 2.49.5); it is not therefore surprising that poetry gets rid of its embodied essence by plunging it into waters of still greater magnitude. Musgrave, Dindorf and Wunder, understand by the above expression the Atlantic Ocean

_{T. Mitchell (1841). Note to line 194. In Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, page 48. Ocford: John Henry Parker.}

μέγαν θάλαμον Ἀμφιτρίτας] Probably either the Ocean or Mediterranean, as Θρήκιον κλύδωνα is the Euxine: i.e. ‘let him depart to west or east.’

_{William Basil Jones (1869). Note to line 195. In The Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, page 70. Oxford: Clarendon.}