Oedipus

Oedipus was the son of Laius, king of Thebes, and a daughter of Menoeceus. Apollodorus's Library says some call her Jocasta and some Epicasta. An oracle had warned Laius not to father a son, because that son would kill him. Laius fathered one anyway, pierced the baby's ankles with brooches, and gave him to a herdsman to expose on Mount Cithaeron. Herdsmen of Polybus, king of Corinth, found the child. The queen of Corinth raised him as her own and named him Oedipus for his swollen feet. Apollodorus calls her Periboea, while in Sophocles she is Merope. Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes frames the oracle differently. There Apollo told Laius three times at his Pythian seat that Thebes would be saved if he died childless, and Laius disobeyed.

In Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus, a drunken guest at a Corinthian banquet taunts the young man that he is not his father's true son. His parents deny it, but the rumor rankles, so he goes to Delphi without telling them. Apollo leaves his question unanswered. Instead the god foretells that he will share his mother's bed and kill the father who sired him. Believing Polybus and Merope to be his parents, he turns away from Corinth for good. Near a place where three roads meet, an old man in a carriage and his escort try to force him off the path. He strikes back and kills them all. Apollodorus adds that the herald Polyphontes had killed one of his horses. The old man was Laius.

He reached Thebes while the Sphinx was killing every Theban who failed to answer her riddle. Apollodorus says Creon, ruling after Laius's death, offered the kingdom and Laius's widow to whoever solved it. Oedipus answered that the riddle meant man, and the Sphinx threw herself from the citadel. The full episode is told in Oedipus and the Sphinx. His reward made him king and, unknowingly, his mother's husband. Apollodorus names their children as Polynices, Eteocles, Ismene and Antigone.

Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus stages the discovery years later. A plague lays waste to the city, and the king hunts for the man who killed Laius. A messenger from Corinth reveals that Polybus was not his father. An old Theban servant then admits that Jocasta herself handed him the baby to destroy, out of fear of the prophecies. Oedipus cries out that everything has come true. Jocasta hangs herself in the palace. He takes the golden brooches from her dress and strikes his own eyes with them again and again. The play ends with him begging Creon to cast him out, while Creon waits to consult the god first.

The oldest surviving account is shorter and quite different. In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus sees the mother of Oedipus among the dead and calls her Epicaste. She married her son in ignorance, and the gods made the truth known straightway. Homer then says Oedipus went on ruling the Cadmeans in Thebes, suffering through the gods' designs. Epicaste hanged herself and left him the woes that a mother's avengers, the Furies, bring about. The Iliad also places his end at Thebes, mentioning Mecisteus, who once came there for the burial of Oedipus. Neither poem mentions blinding or exile. Hesiod's Works and Days remembers the Theban war simply as a fight over the flocks of Oedipus.

The mother of his children is also disputed. Pausanias used Homer's line to argue that Oedipus had no children by his mother at all. If the gods revealed the marriage at once, he asked, how could she have borne four children? He names their mother as Euryganeia, daughter of Hyperphas, citing the lost epic Oedipodia and a painting by Onasias at Plataea. Apollodorus records the same alternative, spelling her Eurygania.

Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus follows the blind exile, guided by Antigone, to a grove of the Awful Goddesses at Colonus near Athens. Apollo had promised him his last rest at such a shrine. There he curses his son Polynices to die by a brother's hand, the curse that plays out in the Seven Against Thebes. Aeschylus also has him curse both sons, praying they would divide his property with iron. In Sophocles his death is a mystery that only Theseus witnessed. Apollodorus likewise has him die at Colonus after Theseus received him kindly. Pausanias saw a monument to Oedipus in Athens and learned that his bones had been brought from Thebes. He says Homer's funeral at Thebes kept him from believing Sophocles's account of the death.

Sigmund Freud drew on Sophocles's play for his theory of childhood desire. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) he argued that the play still moves audiences because the oracle's curse could have fallen on any of them. He introduced the term Oedipus complex itself in a paper of 1910. His collaborator Carl Jung later proposed an Electra complex as a counterpart for girls, which Freud rejected.

The ancient hero fits the theory awkwardly. In every ancient account he acts without knowing who Laius and Jocasta are. In Oedipus at Colonus he insists that he did not marry his mother willingly. Freud's reading turns an unwitting act into a hidden wish, a modern reinterpretation rather than anything the myth itself states.