Laius

• 1. Introduction

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  Laius, king of Thebes, is a key personage in the Theban founding myth, and his story ends on a road he never finished travelling. Greek tradition remembers him less for what he ruled than for what he was told. A voice at Delphi gave him a warning, and the whole fate of his city seems to hang on how he answered it. The tellers disagree about the details. Some say he was cursed for a crime against a guest. Others say the curse was older than he was. Why was a king afraid of his own child, and what did that fear cost him? And why did a disease fall on Thebes long after he was buried?

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• 2. Smuggled Out of Thebes

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  The trouble began when Labdacus died and left his young son Laius in the care of a regent named Lycus. Two men, Amphion and Zethus, then seized the throne of Thebes. Some Thebans wanted the line of Cadmus to survive, so they spirited the boy out of the city before the attack came. Lycus was killed in that attack, and the usurpers took power. The exiled Laius found shelter with Pelops, king of Pisa in the Peloponnesus. It was a kindness that Laius would repay in the worst possible way, through Pelops's own son, Chrysippus.

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• 3. The Host's Son

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  Chrysippus was the son of the man who had taken Laius in. According to some sources, Laius abducted and raped the boy and carried him off to Thebes. One account says this happened while Laius was teaching him to drive a chariot. Hyginus places it at the Nemean Games instead. Because of this act, many consider Laius the originator of pederastic love, and the first pederastic rapist. The abduction is thought to be the subject of a lost tragedy by Euripides. Meanwhile Amphion and Zethus had both died during his absence, so Laius returned to Thebes and became its king. Soon he would take a wife, and with her came an oracle.

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• 4. A Forbidden Child

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  Jocasta, daughter of Menoeceus and a descendant of the Spartoi, became Laius's wife after the affair with Chrysippus. An oracle from Delphi then told the king that he must not have a child. If he did, the child would kill him and marry his wife. Aeschylus records a different version, in which Laius is warned that he can save the city only by dying childless. Yet one night Laius was drunk, and Oedipus was conceived. On the king's orders the baby was exposed on Mount Cithaeron with his feet bound. Some tellers say the feet were instead staked to the ground. A shepherd found the infant but lacked the means to keep him. The child passed to King Polybus and Queen Merope of Corinth, whom one version calls Periboea, and they raised him to adulthood.

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• 5. The Meeting at Cleft Way

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  Oedipus grew up believing Corinth was his home, until he asked the Delphic Oracle about his parentage. The answer told him not to go home, or he would kill his father and marry his mother. Believing he came from Corinth, he turned toward Thebes to escape that fate. At a place called Cleft Way he met Laius, who was travelling to Delphi because omens suggested that his son might return to kill him. Laius's attendants ordered Oedipus to give way, and he refused. The angry king either rolled a chariot wheel over his foot or struck him with a whip. Oedipus killed Laius and every attendant but one, and that survivor claimed a gang of men had done it. Damasistratus, king of Plataea, buried Laius on the spot where he fell. Thebes was later cursed with a disease because the murderer had gone unpunished.

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• 6. Whose Curse

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  Laius left a family history that few of his descendants escaped, and the sources do not agree on why. One explanation is that he broke the laws of hospitality and marriage by raping the son of his host. Another is that he ignored the Oracle's warning not to have children. A third possibility is a combination of both. A different theory blames the entire line of Cadmus. In one telling, Ares cursed it after Cadmus killed his serpent. In another, Hephaestus did, resenting that Cadmus had married Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, who was Hephaestus's own straying wife. Whichever cause is true, many of Cadmus's descendants met tragic ends. Laius himself was only one of them, and his killer was the son he had once tried to abandon on a mountainside.

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