Oedipus's name is traditionally read as "swollen foot," from the injury inflicted when his parents, King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes, pinned his ankles and left him exposed on a mountainside after an oracle warned that their son would kill his father. A shepherd saved him, and he was raised in Corinth by King Polybus and his wife, believing them his true parents.
The Riddle of the Sphinx
When Oedipus himself heard the prophecy from Delphi, he fled Corinth to avoid it, and on the road unknowingly killed a stranger in a dispute over right of way, a man who was, unknown to him, Laius. Arriving at Thebes, he freed the city from the Sphinx by answering her riddle, and was rewarded with the widowed queen's hand: his own mother, Jocasta.
The Unraveling
Sophocles's Oedipus Rex dramatizes the moment years later when a plague forces Oedipus to investigate Laius's unsolved murder, only to discover it was his own doing, and that his wife is his mother. Jocasta hangs herself; Oedipus blinds himself with the pins from her robe. Sophocles's later play Oedipus at Colonus follows him into a long, blind exile, ending with a mysterious death near Athens that the gods themselves seem to receive with favor.
Parentage
Mortal parent: Laius, king of Thebes (mother: Jocasta)
Wholly mortal parentage; raised unknowingly by King Polybus of Corinth as an adoptive father.
Key Deeds
•Answered the Sphinx's riddle, freeing Thebes from her terror
•Unknowingly killed his father Laius on the road from Delphi
•Married his own mother Jocasta and became king of Thebes
•Discovered the truth and blinded himself
•Died in exile near Athens after years of wandering
Fate
Blinded himself upon learning the truth of his birth; spent his final years in exile, dying near Colonus outside Athens in a death Sophocles presents as strangely favored by the gods.
Primary Sources
Historical texts and references
“O light, may I now look on you for the last time, I who am revealed as cursed in birth, in marriage, in the blood I shed.”
