Jocasta

• 1. Introduction

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  Jocasta, queen of Thebes, had two husbands, and the second was the son she had given birth to. The Greeks knew her under more than one name. She appears as Iocaste in some tellings and as Epicaste in others. Her fate is tied to a prophecy that nobody in her household could outrun. Why did a warning meant to prevent a birth guarantee the very disaster it described? And why do the ancient authors, who agree on so much of her tragedy, disagree about when and how she died?

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• 2. Daughter of Thebes

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  Menoeceus, a descendant of Cadmus, the legendary founder of Thebes, was Jocasta's father. Through the Spartoi Echion, her family line reached back even further into the city's origins. The name of her mother has not survived. Jocasta had two siblings, Creon and Hipponome, and she belonged to the ruling class of Thebes. Her exact role before she married Laius, the king, is unknown.

  Antigone, Eteocles, Polynices and Ismene were the four children she bore after marrying Oedipus without knowing who he was. Because their father was also her son, she stood to them as both mother and grandmother. Her first child, though, came from her marriage to Laius, and that marriage began with a warning.

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• 3. The Oracle's Warning

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  Soon after Laius married Jocasta, the Pythia at Delphi gave him an oracle. The gods, she said, did not want him to have a child. If he disobeyed, the son would one day kill him and marry Jocasta. Their descendants would then suffer misfortune forever.

  One night Laius was drunk, and Jocasta became pregnant. She gave birth to a son. Laius still feared the prophecy and demanded that the child be killed.

  Iron spikes were driven through the infant's ankles, and Laius bound them together himself. He then told his shepherd Menoetes to leave the baby exposed on Mount Cithaeron, where the elements would finish the work. The tradition names two possible rescuers: Polybus, king of Corinth, or his wife Periboea. Some versions name a Dorian woman, Merope, as the wife of Polybus who raised the boy. The couple had no children, so they brought him up as their own. They named him Oedipus, after his swollen feet. The boy grew up in Corinth with no idea whose son he really was.

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• 4. The Road to Thebes

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  Rumor ended Oedipus's peace in Corinth. In one account a drunk taunted him and called him a "bastard". In another, jealous young men maliciously insisted he could not be Polybus's son. When he confronted his parents, their answers failed to reassure him. He traveled to the oracle at Delphi, where the Pythia told him he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Hoping to protect the only parents he knew, he fled Corinth and headed for Thebes.

  At a narrow pass in Phocis, Oedipus met Laius riding in a chariot. Laius's herald Polyphontes ordered the young man out of the way, and Oedipus refused. The accounts then split. In one, Laius told the chariot to keep moving, and a wheel crushed Oedipus's foot. In the other, Oedipus began to step aside but too slowly, and a servant of Laius killed one of his horses. Either way, Oedipus killed Laius in his anger. He had unknowingly fulfilled the first half of the prophecy.

  A sphinx was terrorizing Thebes when Oedipus arrived. Creon, Jocasta's brother, was acting as regent, and he announced a reward for anyone who could solve the sphinx's riddle. The prize was the throne and Jocasta's hand in marriage. Oedipus solved the riddle, took the crown, and married the queen, never suspecting she was his mother. That completed the second half of the prophecy. Neither of them yet knew what the marriage had fulfilled.

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• 5. Two Versions of the End

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  Sophocles tells the discovery as a single collapse. A plague struck Thebes, and Oedipus learned that it was divine punishment for killing his father and marrying his mother. When Jocasta heard the news, she hanged herself.

  Euripides gives her a longer ordeal. In his telling, she bore the disgrace of the discovery and kept on living in Thebes. Only later did she take her own life, by hanging or by stabbing. The cause was her failure to reconcile Eteocles and Polynices, who killed each other in a fight over their father's crown.

  Brooches belonging to Jocasta sometimes play a part in what Oedipus does next. In both traditions he blinds himself by gouging out his eyes, and in some tellings he uses her brooches. The aftermath differs again. Sophocles sends him into exile with his daughter Antigone. Euripides and Statius instead have him living inside the walls of Thebes during the war between his sons.

  Odysseus saw Jocasta among the dead when his journey took him through Hades.

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• 6. Boccaccio's Women

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  Giovanni Boccaccio, an author from Florence, wrote De Mulieribus Claris in the early 1360s. The book gathers biographies of women from history and from mythology, and Jocasta is among those remembered there. It remains notable as the earliest book in Western literature given over entirely to the lives of women.

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