Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When the truth is out, Jocasta hangs herself in the palace (Homer calls her Epicaste). Oedipus finds her body, takes the brooches (or pins) from her clothing, and strikes out his own eyes—so that they may never again look on the children born of that marriage, nor on the city he has polluted, nor on the parents he has wronged. Blind, bloody, and broken, he begs to be shown to the people and then cast out, fulfilling both Apollo’s command against the murderer and his own earlier curse. In Sophocles’ *Oedipus Tyrannus*, Creon becomes guardian; exile is imminent but not fully staged within the play—Oedipus pleads to touch his daughters Antigone and Ismene and to be sent to Cithaeron, the mountain meant for his death as an infant. Apollodorus and the broader tragic cycle complete the expulsion: Oedipus is driven from Thebes (at once, or later when his sons are grown and quarrel over the throne). The Erinyes of mother and father pursue him. His daughters, especially Antigone, attend him in wandering; his sons Eteocles and Polynices incur his anger by failing to support him (a motive developed fully in *Oedipus at Colonus*). Thus the king who saved Thebes from the Sphinx becomes the outcast whose blindness is both punishment and paradoxical insight. The Homeric variant—Oedipus remaining as a suffering king—stands as a meaningfully different early epic line; the Attic and Apollodorean path of blinding plus exile is the one that leads to Colonus and to the wars of his sons.