OEDIPUS.
When Jocasta, wife of the Theban king Laius, gave birth to a son, Laius ordered the infant killed because an oracle had predicted that the child would kill its father. A spike was driven through the baby’s foot and he was given to a shepherd to be exposed. This man, however, gave the newborn to another shepherd, who placed him in the care of the king and queen of Corinth. They raised the boy as their own son, naming him Oedipus (“swollen foot”).
      When Oedipus grew to manhood, he visited the oracle at Delphi, which again prophesied that he would murder his father and marry his mother. He therefore fled Corinth. Coming upon the road to Thebes, by chance he met Laius; they quarreled and fought, and Laius was killed.
      Approaching Thebes, Oedipus encountered the monstrous Sphinx that besieged the city. He solved the Sphinx’s deadly riddle and destroyed her, for which service he was made king of Thebes. He married Laius’s widow and fathered two sons, Eteocles and Polyneices, and two daughters, Antigone and Ismene. When Thebes was subsequently beset by a plague and famine, the oracle revealed that the calamity would be lifted only when the murderer of Laius was brought to justice. Oedipus promised terrible punishments for the guilty man and any who sheltered him. The seer Tiresias was sent for and unwillingly revealed the truth: Oedipus himself had murdered his father, wed his mother, and fathered his own sisters and brothers. In horror, Jocasta hanged herself; Oedipus put out his own eyes and was exiled from the city, wandering through Greece led by his daughter Antigone and hounded by the Furies.
      Homer names Oedipus' mother Epicasta. In Euripides’ version of the legend, Jocasta lived on and Oedipus continued to rule in Thebes. His sons scorned him, provoking his curse that they would divide their inheritance by the sword. The battle of the Seven against Thebes fulfilled the curse.
      Postclassical treatments of the Oedipus myth derive primarily from the tragedies of Sophocles, or from Seneca’s version of the Greek original. Adaptations and translations of these works, especially of those by Sophocles, have been popular throughout the postclassical period.
      
      
       See also the following headings: Oedipus and the Sphinx and Oedipus at Colonus