Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Laius, son of Labdacus and heir of the Cadmeid line at Thebes, spent years in exile while the usurper Lycus (and later Amphion and Zethus) held power. During his wanderings he was received by Pelops at Pisa (or Elis). There, according to a widespread classical strand, Laius conceived a passion for Pelops’s beautiful son Chrysippus and carried the boy off—by chariot, in some tellings after winning a contest. Pelops cursed Laius: that he should never have a son, or that any son born to him would destroy his father. The rape of Chrysippus thus becomes one classical root of the Labdacid curse that later tragedy folds into the house’s inherited pollution. Independently—and often told as the decisive divine warning—Laius, once restored to the Theban throne and married to Jocasta (Iocaste), daughter of Menoeceus, consulted Delphi about offspring. Apollo’s oracle forbade him a child: if a son were born, that son would kill his father (and, in fuller tragic formulations, marry his mother). Apollodorus and the tragic tradition combine these strands: the house is already under a curse; the oracle makes the danger specific and personal. Laius and Jocasta nevertheless conceived a son—whether in a moment of drunken forgetfulness (a motif in some summaries) or by deliberate defiance of the god. The birth of that child, Oedipus, and the attempt to evade the oracle by exposure, open the next chapter of the Theban cycle. The Chrysippus story and the Delphic ban together set the moral and divine machinery: parental crime, divine prohibition, and a doom that human caution cannot outrun.