Oedipus
Solver of the Riddle
ED-ih-pus
Answered the riddle no one else could and walked straight into the one he was living in.
The Story
Given a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, he left the parents he knew to avoid it, not knowing they had adopted him. On the road he quarrelled with an old man at a crossroads and killed him. Then he answered the Sphinx, freed Thebes, and was given the crown and the widowed queen as the reward.
Sophocles's play is not about the crime but about the investigation: a plague forces him to find the old king's killer, and every witness he calls tightens the case against himself. Jocasta hangs herself; he puts out his own eyes with the pins from her dress. He had the sharpest mind in Thebes and it only ever ran him faster toward the thing he was fleeing.
Did You Know?
- Freud named the complex in 1899, and the play has been read through him ever since, despite Sophocles's Oedipus doing everything possible to avoid the fate rather than desiring it.
- His name means swollen foot, from the pin driven through his ankles when he was exposed as an infant. He carries the evidence of his own story around with him and never reads it.
- Sophocles wrote a sequel in his late eighties. Oedipus at Colonus, in which the old man dies and becomes a protective spirit of Athens, was staged after his death.