|
|
The Oedipus Myth
Written by David Adams Leeming
“King Laios and Queen Jocasta of Thebes learned from an oracle that their newborn son would kill his father and marry his mother. Horrified by this prediction, they gave their baby to a shepherd with orders to leave the infant to die on a nearby mountainside with his ankles pinned together. But the shepherd took pity on the baby. Instead of abandoning him, he gave him to a Corinthian shepherd, who in turn gave the baby to the childless king and queen of Corinth. They named him Oedipus, which means “swollen foot” or “club foot,” and raised him as their son. They never told him he was adopted.
When Oedipus was a young man, he learned of the prediction that made his true parents forsake him. Believing the king and queen of Corinth to be his real parents, he ran away from home to avoid such a terrible fate. In the course of his travels, he encountered an arrogant old man who tried to run him off the road with his chariot. Because honor was at stake, the two men fought, and Oedipus killed the stranger. Thinking no more of the incident—such occurrences were probably common on the roads in those days—Oedipus continued on his journey to the city of Thebes.
At the outskirts of the city, he encountered the Sphinx, a terrible monster with the wings of an eagle, the body of a lion, and the head of a woman. This Sphinx had been menacing Thebes by lying in ambush for travelers and then challenging them to answer to a riddle. If they could answer the riddle, which went like this: “What creature goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?” Oedipus immediately guessed that the answer was “man”: He crawls on all fours as an infant, walks on two legs as an adult, and leans on a cane in old age. Upon hearing Oedipus’s answer, the defeated Sphinx leaped into the sea.
When Oedipus arrived in Thebes, the people welcomed him as their savior. Since Laios, their king, had recently been killed, they offered Oedipus their throne and the young widowed queen, Jocasta, as his bride. So Oedipus became king of Thebes, married Jocasta, and had four children with her: two sons, Polyneices and Eteocles; and two daughters, Antigone and Ismene.
All went well for many years until a plague struck Thebes. Desperate to learn the cause, Oedipus sent Jocasta’s brother, Creon, to consult the great oracle at Delphi. The oracle warned that the plague would not end until Thebes had punished the murderer of King Laios, who lived among them undetected. Oedipus vowed to save Thebes once again by finding this murderer. After questioning several people, including the blind prophet Teiresias, he discovered that the man he had killed on the road years before was none other than King Laios. Furthermore, he learned that he was not the son of the king and queen of Corinth, but rather the son of Laios and Jocasta. Thus Oedipus had in fact fulfilled the oracle—he had killed his father and married his mother. When Oedipus and Jocasta discovered this horrible truth, she killed herself and he gouged out his eyes to punish himself for having been blind to the truth.
After these disasters, Creon took over as regent (acting ruler) of Thebes, and after several years he decided to exile Oedipus. Accompanied only be his daughter Antigone (in some versions of the myth, also by Ismene), Oedipus wandered the countryside as a beggar until he reached the sanctuary of Colonus, where he died.
Antigone returned to Thebes, where her two brothers had agreed to rule in alternate years. Eteocles’ turn came first, but when it ended, he refused to give up his throne to Polyneices. Polyneices fled to the city of Argos, where he raised an army and attacked the seven gates of Thebes. The Thebans repulsed each assault, but in the course of the battle, Eteocles and Polyneices killed each other.
Creon then became king of Thebes and gave Etecoles, his ally, a hero’s burial. Creon considered Polyneices a traitor, so he decreed that his body be left unburied, to rot in the sun outside the city gates. To the Greeks, this was a terrible punishment: Their holiest laws demanded that certain burial rites be performed, or else the soul of the dead person would be condemned to eternal unrest."
|
|