Oedipus

Somewhere in Phocis, where the road bends down toward Delphi, three roads run together in a narrow place between the hills. Pausanias walked through it in the second century and found two graves still sitting in the middle of the junction, heaped over with rough unhewn stones that nobody had bothered to dress. One held a king. The other held the servant who had been driving for him. The people there called the spot the Cleft Way, and they knew whose hand had done it, though the man who swung the blow that day went on down the road with no idea what he had just done.

His name told the story from the start, if anyone had been listening. Oidipous means swollen foot. When he was born in Thebes an oracle had already warned Laius that his own son would kill him, so Laius drove pins through the infant’s ankles and handed him to a herdsman with orders to leave him out on Cithaeron. Cowherds working for Polybus, king of Corinth, found the child on the mountain and carried him to Polybus’s wife Periboea, who healed the punctured ankles, raised him as her own, and named him for the swelling. He grew up a Corinthian prince with a scar on each foot that nobody would explain.

When he was old enough to ask, he asked, and got nothing. So he went to Delphi and put the question to the god directly: who are my parents. The answer that came back did not address the question at all. He would kill his father, the oracle said, and lie with his mother, and he should not go home. He turned his back on Corinth, which he believed was home, and drove north into Phocis. The road narrowed. A chariot came the other way with an old man riding in it and a herald walking ahead, and there was not room for both. There were words about who should give way, then the herald struck at his horses, and by the time the dust settled the old man lay dead in the road with his driver beside him.

He came to Thebes and found a city under siege by something that could not be fought. The Sphinx sat above the road and would not let travellers pass. In the oldest version, a lost epic called the Oedipodea that survives only as quotations in other people’s books, she devoured great and small alike, and her last victim was Haemon, son of the regent Creon, remembered in the one surviving line as the comeliest and loveliest of boys. Losing the heir was what broke Thebes. Creon offered the throne, and the widowed queen with it, to anyone who could rid the city of her. The riddle everyone now remembers, the creature that goes on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening, belongs to the later telling. Oedipus answered it with one word, man, and the Sphinx threw herself from her rock. He had solved with his mind what an army could not solve with spears, and Thebes crowned him for it.

The painters agreed on how to show him. On a cup made in Athens around 470 BC, now in the Vatican and attributed to a painter known only by this scene, he sits on a rock in a traveller’s cloak and wide sun hat, legs crossed, chin propped on one hand, listening to a crowned Sphinx perched on a pillar in front of him. His name is written beside him. He is a man dressed for a long walk who has been stopped and made to think, and that is the whole of him: no armour, no weapon raised, no monster-slaying pose. What the stories insist on instead are the two ends of his body, the ruined ankles at the beginning and the ruined eyes at the end.

The years that followed were good ones, which is the part the story tends to hurry past. Then the plague came. Crops failed, women miscarried, the smell of burning offerings hung over the city, and word arrived from Delphi that the land was poisoned by the unpunished killer of the old king. Oedipus, who was genuinely good at this, opened an investigation. He questioned the blind prophet Tiresias, who told him the truth and was accused of treason for it. He questioned a messenger from Corinth who came with news of Polybus’s death and, meaning to comfort him, let slip that the dead man had not been his father at all, only the man handed a foundling with damaged feet. He questioned the herdsman who had carried the baby up the mountain. He would not stop, and everyone around him begged him to stop.

What happened when he understood is reported at second hand by a messenger, which is how the Greek stage handled such things. Jocasta had gone into the bedchamber and hanged herself in a twisted noose. Oedipus cut her down, pulled the gold-worked brooches out of her dress, lifted them high in both hands and drove them into his own eyes, saying they would never again look on what he had done or on the faces he should never have seen.

Homer knew a different ending. In the Odyssey, Odysseus meets the shade of Epikaste, which is the older name for Jocasta, and hears that she hanged herself when the gods brought the marriage to light, but that Oedipus stayed on ruling the Cadmeans in Thebes, suffering by the designs of the gods. The Iliad mentions almost in passing that a hero once travelled to Thebes for the funeral of fallen Oedipus and beat every Theban at the games. In that version there is no blinding on stage, no exile, no beggar on the roads. He dies a king and gets athletic contests over his grave. Pausanias, setting Homer beside the tragedies, went further and doubted that Jocasta bore the four famous children at all, since the gods exposed the marriage almost at once. The sons, he said, were born to a second wife, Euryganeia, and the poet of the Oedipodea says so plainly; there was a painting at Plataea by Onasias showing Euryganeia bowed with grief over her sons fighting each other.

Hesiod, older still, does not treat him as a case of anything. In the Works and Days the heroes of the fourth age die in two great slaughters, at Troy for the sake of Helen and at seven-gated Thebes fighting over the flocks of Oedipus. The earliest surviving Greek memory of him is a quarrel about livestock that killed a generation.

Sophocles gave him one more scene, staged after the poet’s own death. A filthy blind old man arrives at a grove outside Athens sacred to the Eumenides, leaning on his daughter Antigone, and turns out to be carrying something valuable: the ground that takes his body will be defended by it. Theseus alone is shown the place, on condition he tell only his heir. Athens gets the blessing. Thebes, which threw him out, gets the curse.

His gifts were real and they were all of one kind. He was faster than other people, and willing to keep asking a question long after the answer had become dangerous, and he was the only man to look at the Sphinx and hear an ordinary description of a human life. His limitation was the same faculty pointed the wrong way. Every decisive move he made to escape the oracle was a move along it: leaving Corinth put him on the one road where Laius was, and answering the riddle put him on the throne beside his own mother. He could see everything except what was directly in front of him, and when he finally saw it he put the seeing out.

That last shape is largely the work of Sophocles, and it has been hardened by a much later reader. Sigmund Freud, who had seen the play performed, published The Interpretation of Dreams at the end of 1899 and used the myth as evidence for a universal childhood wish, then coined the phrase Oedipus complex in a paper of 1910. The name has travelled so far from Thebes that most people who use it have never heard of the Cleft Way, or the flocks, or Euryganeia. The stones over the two graves in Phocis were still piled there when Pausanias came through, put up by a king of Plataea who found the bodies in the road and did not know who they were either.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Oedipus in Greek mythology?

Oedipus was a king of Thebes who unknowingly killed his father, Laius, and married his mother, Jocasta. He was exposed as an infant because of an oracle, raised in Corinth by King Polybus and his wife Periboea, and returned to Thebes as an adult without knowing where he had been born.

What was the riddle of the Sphinx, and how did Oedipus answer it?

The Sphinx asked what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening, and Oedipus answered: man, who crawls as an infant, walks upright as an adult, and leans on a stick in old age. The Sphinx destroyed herself, and Thebes gave Oedipus the throne and the widowed queen as his reward. This version of the riddle belongs to the later tradition; the earliest surviving fragments describe the Sphinx simply as a devourer whose last victim was Creon’s son Haemon.

Why did Oedipus blind himself?

Oedipus blinded himself after discovering that the man he had killed at the crossroads was his father and that his wife was his mother. In the account given in Sophocles, he found Jocasta hanged in the bedchamber, took the gold brooches from her dress and drove them into his own eyes so they would never again look on what he had done.

Did Oedipus die in exile?

That depends on which version is being told. In Homer he is not exiled at all: Jocasta hangs herself, but Oedipus goes on ruling in Thebes and dies there, and funeral games are held for him. In the tragic tradition, followed by Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus, he wanders as a blind beggar and dies at a grove outside Athens, where his grave becomes a protection for the city that received him.

Were Antigone and her brothers really the children of Jocasta?

Ancient writers disagreed. Pausanias argued that they were not, on the grounds that Homer says the gods revealed the incest almost immediately, and cited the lost epic Oedipodea as evidence that the children were born to a second wife named Euryganeia. The familiar version, in which Antigone, Ismene, Eteocles and Polynices are all children of Oedipus and Jocasta, comes from Attic tragedy.

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Antigone, Sphinx, Cadmus, Echion, Semele, Dionysus, Niobe, Arion, Pelops, Apollo, Python, Theseus, Ares