Oedipus

• 1. Introduction

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  Oedipus, the mythical king of Thebes, stands at the center of one of the most harrowing stories ever told. He killed his father without knowing it. He married his mother without knowing it. And when the truth finally surfaced, he tore out his own eyes with a brooch pin ripped from his dead wife's gown. What drives a story like this to survive for more than two and a half millennia? The answer may lie not in the horror of what Oedipus did, but in the impossible bind he was placed in before he could even crawl. King Laius of Thebes had Oedipus's ankles pierced and tied together as an infant, ordering a servant to leave the baby on a mountainside to die. The servant had other plans. That small act of mercy set a prophecy in motion that no one could outrun. How do destiny, free will, and the fragile boundary between knowledge and ignorance play out across three thousand years of retelling? The blind prophet Tiresias knew the truth long before Oedipus ever asked.

• 2. A Name Written in Wounds

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  Oedipus's very name carries the memory of what was done to him. The infant was named after the swelling from the injuries to his feet and ankles, a word that translates to something close to "swollen foot." He was adopted by Polybus and Merope, the king and queen of Corinth, who had no children of their own. For years, the boy grew up believing he belonged to them. The first crack in that story came from a drunk who told him he was a bastard, meaning he was an illegitimate child. Oedipus pressed his foster parents, who denied it. Unwilling to leave the question unanswered, he traveled to the Oracle at Delphi, the same oracle his birth parents had once consulted. What he heard there did not answer his question about his parentage. Instead, the oracle told him he was destined to murder his father and marry his mother. To protect the people he believed were his parents, Oedipus made the decision not to return to Corinth. He turned toward Thebes. At Daulia, where three roads crossed, he met a chariot traveling in the opposite direction. The charioteer tried to run him over, a fight broke out, and Oedipus killed the older man in the chariot. That man was Laius, his birth father, and the only witness was a slave who fled. The oracle's first clause had already been fulfilled.

• 3. The Sphinx and the Throne

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  Thebes was in a desperate state when Oedipus arrived. A creature called the Sphinx had taken up a position on the road into the city and was stopping every traveler with a riddle. Those who answered incorrectly were killed and eaten. The riddle the Sphinx posed was this: "What walks on four feet in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?" Oedipus answered: man. As an infant he crawls on all fours; as an adult he walks on two legs; in old age he uses a walking stick. He was the first to answer correctly. According to most versions of the myth, the Sphinx then committed suicide out of embarrassment, though some accounts say Oedipus killed her. Jocasta's brother Creon had declared that whoever rid the city of the Sphinx would receive the throne and the hand of the recently widowed queen. With the Sphinx defeated, Oedipus became king and married Jocasta. Four children were born of that marriage: sons Eteocles and Polynices, and daughters Antigone and Ismene. None of them, at that point, knew what those children actually were to Oedipus or to Jocasta.

• 4. The Plague and the Reckoning

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  Years into Oedipus's reign, a plague of infertility struck Thebes, affecting all living beings. Oedipus sent Creon to the Oracle at Delphi for answers. The oracle's message was specific: the murderer of old King Laius was still living in Thebes, and the plague would not lift until that killer was brought to justice. Oedipus cursed the unknown murderer in front of the city and vowed to find him, not yet understanding that he had cursed himself. He summoned Tiresias, the blind prophet who was widely respected across Greece. Tiresias tried to refuse, but in the heated exchange that followed, he was provoked into naming Oedipus as the killer. Oedipus dismissed this as a conspiracy by Creon to seize the throne. Jocasta tried to calm him by mentioning, almost in passing, that Laius had been killed at a place where three roads met. That detail struck Oedipus hard. A messenger then arrived from Corinth with news that Polybus had died. Oedipus felt relief, believing one part of the prophecy could no longer be fulfilled. But the messenger, trying to ease his anxiety further, revealed that Oedipus had in fact been adopted, and that it was this very messenger who had found Oedipus as a baby in the pass of Cithaeron and delivered him to Polybus. Jocasta understood everything in that moment. She begged Oedipus to stop his search. He refused, assuming she was ashamed of his possible low birth. She went into the palace and hanged herself.

• 5. After the Truth

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  In Sophocles's version of the story, Oedipus rushed into the palace after Jocasta withdrew and found her already dead. He tore a brooch from her gown and used its pin to blind himself. Bleeding from the eyes, he asked Creon to exile him from Thebes forever. Before he left, he asked to hold his daughters Antigone and Ismene one last time, and Creon allowed it. In the play Oedipus at Colonus, the exiled king wandered with Antigone as his guide until he reached the holy wilderness outside Athens, where Theseus gave him refuge. He died a peaceful death there, and his grave was said to be sacred to the gods. The versions diverge, though. In Euripides's treatment, Jocasta did not kill herself after the revelation, and Oedipus was blinded not by his own hand but by a servant of Laius. In still older sources, including Homer, Oedipus continued to rule Thebes after the revelations and Jocasta's death. The blinding of Oedipus does not appear in sources earlier than Aeschylus, which means it entered the myth at a specific historical moment in the 5th century BC, and was not always the expected ending.

• 6. The Tradition of Retellings

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  Aeschylus won first prize at the City Dionysia in 467 BC with his trilogy based on the Oedipus myth. Of those three plays, only Seven Against Thebes survived. Sophocles wrote what became the standard version across three separate plays written for different festival competitions and never intended as a single connected narrative; they contain inconsistencies among them as a result. Euripides contributed his own Phoenissae, Chrysippus, and an Oedipus of which only fragments survive. In Chrysippus, Euripides developed the backstory of why the gods punished Laius: Laius had kidnapped and violated Chrysippus, the son of Pelops, whom he was meant to be tutoring. His position as both guest and tutor made the violation especially grave, and the Furies took note. In the Latin tradition, Julius Caesar wrote a play on Oedipus that has not survived. Seneca the Younger wrote his own version in the first century AD, and scholars have debated whether it was staged or recited at private gatherings; it has been successfully performed since the Renaissance. John Dryden adapted it into a heroic drama licensed in 1678. Voltaire's 1718 Oedipus was the first play he ever wrote. A 2008 production at the National Theatre starred Ralph Fiennes and Claire Higgins in a version by Frank McGuinness. In the late 1960s, Ola Rotimi published The Gods Are Not to Blame, retelling the myth in the Yoruba kingdom. In 2011, American writer David Guterson published the Oedipus-inspired novel Ed King. In folkloristics, the Oedipus myth is catalogued in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as tale type ATU 931.

• 7. Freud and the Complex

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  Sigmund Freud used the name of this myth to describe what he called the Oedipus complex, a term for a male child's unconscious desire for exclusive possession of his mother, paired with jealousy toward the father and an unconscious wish for that parent's death. Freud was careful to note that Oedipus himself, as the myth portrays him, did not experience this neurosis toward Jocasta, whom he only met as an adult. If anything, Freud observed, such feelings would have been directed at Merope, his foster mother, though the myth gives no indication of that. His argument was about the audience, not the character. The ancient Greek public that heard the story told or watched the plays performed already knew that Oedipus was killing his father and marrying his mother. The story's persistence, its repeated retelling and staging, was for Freud a sign of a shared preoccupation with the very themes the myth dramatizes. That reading has been contested across the decades since Freud proposed it, but the term "Oedipus complex" remains in use, and Pindar's second Olympian Ode from 476 BC, which mentions the sharp-eyed Erinys slaying Oedipus's warlike children at each other's hands, shows how deeply the myth had already settled into Greek cultural consciousness long before Sophocles gave it its definitive shape.