Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Years into Oedipus’s reign, a plague and barrenness waste Thebes—crops fail, herds die, women miscarry. The people beseech their king. Oedipus has already sent Creon to Delphi. Creon returns with Apollo’s word: the land is polluted by the unpunished murder of Laius; the killer must be cast out or killed. Oedipus lays a solemn curse on the unknown murderer and launches an inquiry, swearing to hunt the guilty as if Laius were his own father. Teiresias, the blind seer, summoned under pressure, at first refuses, then names Oedipus himself as the pollution—killer of Laius and partner of his own mother. Oedipus, enraged, accuses Teiresias and Creon of conspiracy. Jocasta tries to calm him by scoffing at oracles: an oracle once said Laius would die by his son’s hand, yet Laius was killed by robbers at a crossroads, and the infant was exposed. Her “comfort” freezes Oedipus: he remembers the old man he killed at a fork of three roads. A messenger from Corinth announces Polybus’s death and offers Oedipus the Corinthian throne; seeking to reassure him about Merope, the messenger reveals that Polybus and Merope were not his blood parents—that he himself once received the infant from a Cithaeron herdsman. Jocasta, seeing the truth, begs Oedipus to stop; he presses on. The aged Theban herdsman—the same who was to expose the child and who survived Laius’s party—is brought. Under threat he confesses: the infant was Laius and Jocasta’s son; he gave him away rather than leave him to die. Oedipus knows at last that he is the cursed son, the killer of his father, the husband of his mother. The investigation that began as royal duty ends as self-recognition. (Jocasta’s suicide and Oedipus’s blinding follow in the next entry.)