Everybody knows the outline. Man kills his father, marries his mother, blinds himself. What gets lost in the summary is that Oedipus is, by some distance, the smartest person in his story. He beats a monster that has killed everyone else who tried. He is a genuinely good king who fixes his city's problems. And when a plague comes, he launches an investigation to find the cause, pursues it with total integrity against everyone's advice to stop, and finds the answer. The answer is him. He is the criminal he's hunting, and he's the one who works it out. That's not a story about a curse. It's a story about intelligence being useless against the one thing you can't examine, and it's the reason Sophocles' version has been performed continuously for two and a half thousand years.
Before Him: The Fates
Peabody opens her chapter with a paragraph about the Fates that frames everything, and it's worth explaining because it's unusually thoughtful. Behind the gods and beyond everything humans do, three sisters sit spinning. Clotho spins the thread of a life. Lachesis measures it out. Atropos cuts it. And here's the part that matters: they don't choose. It isn't for Clotho to decide whether a life's thread will be strong or fragile. Lachesis doesn't pick the pattern. And Atropos, Peabody suggests, must sometimes have wept at having to cut a life short and let it drop half-finished. They are employees. They work for something further back that says of a life, as of a garment, this is how it must be — and neither gods nor men can argue with it. That's the machine Oedipus is caught in. Not divine malice. Something more like structure.
The Prophecy and the Baby
Laius, king of Thebes, and his wife Jocasta were told by an oracle that if they had a son, he would kill his father and marry his mother. They had a son. And they decided to beat it. Laius pinned the baby's feet together and handed him to a herdsman with instructions to leave him on the mountainside to die. The herdsman took the child up Mount Cithaeron and then couldn't do it. Terrified of disobeying the king and unwilling to kill an infant, he compromised — hung the baby by its pierced feet from a tree branch and walked away, leaving the outcome to somebody else. Somebody else arrived. A shepherd in the service of King Polybus of Corinth found the child and brought him home to his master. Polybus and his wife Merope were childless. They took the boy, called him Oedipus — "swollen-foot," after the wound — and raised him as their own son and heir, knowing nothing about where he'd come from. Every single person in this chain acts out of decency. The herdsman spares him. The shepherd rescues him. The royal couple raise him. And every act of kindness moves the prophecy one step closer to completion.
Every person who touched the abandoned child acted out of mercy — and each act of mercy carried the prophecy one step closer to happening.
The Man Who Ran
Oedipus grew up a Corinthian prince. At some point somebody at a dinner suggested he wasn't really Polybus's son, and it lodged. His parents denied it. He went to Delphi to ask the oracle directly. The oracle didn't answer the question he asked. It told him he would kill his father and marry his mother. So he did the only sane thing. He never went back to Corinth. He turned away from the two people he believed were his parents and took the road in the opposite direction — towards Thebes. Peabody's line for this is the best sentence in her chapter: thinking to escape crime, he took the road towards Thebes, so hastening into the very arms of his evil destiny.
The Crossroads
On a narrow road, he met a chariot coming the other way with an older man in it and a small escort. The driver told him to get out of the way. Oedipus, raised as a prince, wasn't inclined to. Words were exchanged, and the charioteer struck one of Oedipus's horses. Oedipus lost his temper and killed them — the driver and the old man both — and walked on without thinking about it again. This is the detail that makes the story land, and Sophocles knows it. It isn't fated in any mystical sense. It's road rage. A young man with a short fuse and a good opinion of himself kills a stranger in a traffic dispute over right of way. It's the most ordinary crime imaginable. The old man was Laius. First half of the prophecy, done.
A quarrel over right of way, not a curse in the moment — the old man in the chariot was Laius, and neither of them knew it.
The Sphinx
Outside Thebes, on a rock above the highway, sat the Sphinx — a creature with the face of a woman, the body of a lion and, in most versions, wings. She asked every traveller the same question. Nobody had ever answered it, and nobody who failed survived to report what the question was, because she threw them off the cliff. Thebes was strangling. Nobody could get in or out. Oedipus came up the road and she put the riddle to him: what creature goes on four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? He thought about it, and said: Man. As a child he crawls on hands and knees. As an adult he walks upright. In old age he needs a staff. The Sphinx screamed, threw herself off the rock, and died. There's a savage joke buried in this and I've never seen it stated plainly enough. The riddle's answer is a human being, described as a life from beginning to end. Oedipus can see the whole shape of a human life clearly enough to solve it in a minute — and he has no idea whose life he is actually living. He can read the species and not the individual. Thebes made him king, and married him to their widowed queen, Jocasta, whose husband had been killed on the road by persons unknown. Second half, done.
Fifteen Good Years
Here's the part that almost every retelling underplays. He was a good king. For years. He and Jocasta had four children — Antigone, Ismene, Eteocles and Polynices. Thebes prospered. He was loved. He had solved the city's problem and governed it well and nobody had any complaint about him at all. That's what makes the discovery unbearable. It isn't a wicked man exposed. It's a happy household that has been built on something that will destroy it the moment anyone looks.
The Investigation
Then plague came. Crops failed, animals died, women miscarried, people died in the streets. Oedipus sent to Delphi and was told the plague came from an unpunished murder: the killer of Laius was living in Thebes, and the city would not recover until he was found and expelled. So the king opened a murder investigation. And what Sophocles does with it is why Oedipus Rex is still the model everyone points to. It runs like a detective story in which the detective is the murderer and doesn't know it. Every witness he calls brings him closer. Every person who tries to protect him — the prophet Tiresias, who says outright that Oedipus should stop; Jocasta, who works it out before he does and begs him to leave it; the old herdsman, who says he wishes he'd died before this day — makes it worse. And Oedipus will not stop. He pushes, and threatens, and demands the truth from people who are on their knees asking him not to make them say it. His integrity is the instrument of his destruction. He's a good investigator and it ruins him. The herdsman finally admits what he did on the mountain. Everything closes.
She worked it out first and begged him to stop asking questions. His integrity would not let him.
The End
Jocasta went into the palace and hanged herself. Oedipus found her, took the gold pins from her dress, and put out his own eyes. Sophocles gives him a reason for the choice, and it's the most articulate thing in the play. He doesn't kill himself because he can't face his parents in the afterlife. And he blinds himself because there is nothing left in the world he could bear to look at. Peabody, writing for children, gives it two sentences: Jocasta died, and Oedipus took the doom upon himself and left Thebes, blinded by his own hand.
Antigone
He wandered as a beggar, exiled, and he had one companion. Antigone, his daughter, went with him and led him and stayed until he died. Peabody's line: she was the truest happiness in his life of sorrow, and she never left him. Sophocles wrote the ending in Oedipus at Colonus, at the age of about ninety, and it's astonishingly gentle. Oedipus arrives at a grove near Athens, is taken in by Theseus, and is finally called away by a voice and vanishes — his burial place kept secret, and made a blessing on the land that sheltered him. The city that showed him mercy is protected by him afterwards. Antigone went back to Thebes and got her own tragedy, which is the third play and one of the greatest ever written.
Of everyone in the story, only his daughter stayed — and led him, on foot, for the rest of his life.
What the Myth Is Asking
There's a question this story has generated for two millennia and it hasn't been settled: is Oedipus guilty? He did the acts. He also did not know, could not have known, and had actively arranged his entire life to avoid doing them. The Greeks distinguished between miasma — a ritual pollution that attaches to a deed regardless of intent, like a stain — and moral guilt in our sense. Oedipus is unquestionably polluted. Whether he's culpable is genuinely open, and Oedipus at Colonus has him argue forcefully that he isn't. There's also a strand about the futility of avoidance. Three separate people try to defeat the prophecy: Laius, Jocasta and Oedipus. All three succeed at what they attempted, and all three attempts are the mechanism by which it happens. If Laius had kept the baby, none of it works. And there's the limit of intelligence. He beats the Sphinx with pure reasoning. He conducts a flawless investigation. Neither helps, because the one fact he needed was about himself, and there was no way to reason his way to it.
About the Oedipus Complex
Freud named his theory after this story in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and the label has done the myth no favours. Freud's claim is about unconscious desire in early childhood. Oedipus has no desire for his mother whatsoever — he doesn't know who she is, and when he finds out, the horror is total and immediate. The two things share a plot summary and nothing else. Worth knowing if only so you can tell the difference between the play and the psychology.
