In Odyssey 11, Odysseus sees the mother of Oedipus among the dead, and Homer tells the story in six lines: she married her own son unknowing, he killed his father, the gods made it known at once, she hanged herself — and he went on ruling in Thebes, suffering, but on the throne, until he died in battle and was buried with honours.
No blinding. No exile. No wandering. The version everyone knows is Sophocles', staged around 429 BCE, and it is one dramatist's shaping of a tradition that had other shapes. Sophocles' choices — the self-blinding with Jocasta's brooch pins, the demand for exile, the terrible last scene with the daughters — are so overwhelmingly powerful that they have effectively erased the alternatives, and the Homeric ending now reads to most people as an error.
What the play is actually about
Oedipus Tyrannus is not a story about a man who discovers he killed his father and married his mother. That already happened. It is a detective story in which the investigator is the criminal, and its whole action is an inquiry.
Thebes is under plague. Oedipus, the outsider who solved the Sphinx's riddle and was given the city and the widowed queen as a reward, sends to Delphi and is told the pollution is the unpunished murder of the previous king, Laius. He undertakes to find the killer and curses him publicly. Then, step by step, driven by his own intelligence and his refusal to stop asking — Tiresias tells him to stop, Jocasta begs him to stop, the shepherd begs him to stop — he assembles the case against himself.
The dramatic irony is total and continuous: an audience that knew the story watched a man use his greatest quality, the fast intelligence that beat the Sphinx, to destroy himself. Aristotle used the play as his central example in the Poetics for precisely this construction — the reversal and the recognition arriving in the same instant, in the scene where a messenger comes to deliver good news.
The details that carry the plot
- Swollen feet. His name is usually read as oidi-pous, swollen foot, from the pinning of his ankles when he was exposed on Cithaeron as an infant. It can also be read as "know-foot", which would make it a pun on the riddle about what goes on how many feet. Sophocles plays with both.
- The crossroads. He kills Laius in a right-of-way quarrel where three roads meet, near Daulis — a real junction that visitors were shown. The detail that unravels everything is a discrepancy in a witness statement: Jocasta says the king was killed by robbers, plural, and one man survived to report it.
- The shepherd. The same man who was told to expose the infant and did not, and who was the sole survivor at the crossroads, and who has been keeping out of the city ever since. That single character carries both ends of the plot.
- Corinth. He fled Corinth to avoid the oracle, believing Polybus and Merope to be his parents. The messenger arrives with news of Polybus' death, intending to reassure him — which is the moment the trap closes.
Colonus, and the ending Sophocles wrote last
Oedipus at Colonus, written when Sophocles was around ninety and staged after his death, is the other half and is rarely read. The blind old man, led by Antigone, arrives at a grove of the Erinyes at Colonus, outside Athens — Sophocles' own deme — and it is the place he has been told he will die.
He is no longer penitent. He argues, with force, that he is legally and morally innocent: he did not know, he was defending himself on the road, and the prophecy was laid on him before he could act. And he has become valuable: an oracle has said that whoever holds his body will have the advantage in the coming war, so Creon comes to take him back to Thebes and his son Polynices comes to ask his blessing. He refuses both and curses his sons. Theseus receives him, and he is taken up by the gods at a place only the king is permitted to know.
A polluted outcast becomes a protective hero-cult for the city that shelters him. That is a real Greek religious pattern — the dangerous dead are useful if they are buried in the right place — and it is the reason the story's ending is not despair.
The rest of the house
His children are also his siblings, and the curse runs through them: Eteocles and Polynices kill each other in the war of the Seven against Thebes, and Antigone is condemned for burying her brother against Creon's edict. That play, Antigone, was written first, some fifteen years before Oedipus Tyrannus, so the trilogy everyone imagines is not one — the three Theban plays were composed in reverse dramatic order and for separate occasions.
Freud, and what happened to the play
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) Freud named the Oedipus complex and claimed the play's power comes from its enactment of a universal childhood wish. The consequences for how the play is read have been enormous and largely unhelpful.
The objection is not moral but textual: Sophocles' Oedipus does not desire his mother, has no idea who she is, spends the play trying to escape the prophecy, and is depicted as a man of exceptional public virtue destroyed by the accuracy of his own investigation. What the play is about — whether a man is responsible for what he did without knowing, and whether knowledge is worth having — is not the Freudian question at all. Jean-Pierre Vernant's essay "Oedipus without the Complex" (1967) made this case at length and remains the standard rebuttal.
Freud's borrowing did, however, guarantee the play's twentieth-century prominence, and the term is now more widely known than the drama.
The modern life of the story
Seneca's Latin version emphasises the horror; Corneille and Voltaire and Dryden all wrote Oedipus plays; Cocteau's La Machine infernale frames the whole thing as a device built by the gods to destroy a man. Stravinsky and Cocteau made an opera-oratorio in Latin, Oedipus Rex, with a narrator who tells the audience the trap at the start of each scene. Pasolini filmed it in Morocco with a prologue and epilogue set in modern Italy. Rita Dove, Frank McGuinness and Anne Carson have made versions. It is performed constantly, and it is the play most often taught as the exemplar of tragic structure.
Guilt, the riddle, and the hero-cult at Colonus
Did the Greeks think he was guilty?
The question was live and Sophocles wrote both answers. In Oedipus Tyrannus he condemns himself and demands exile; in Oedipus at Colonus he argues he is innocent because the acts were involuntary. Athenian homicide law made a real distinction between intentional and unintentional killing, with different courts for each, so the argument at Colonus is a legally literate one and would have been heard as such.
What was the riddle?
What walks on four legs in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening? The answer is a human being — crawling, walking, and using a staff in old age. It is not in Sophocles' text, which refers to the Sphinx's riddle without quoting it; the wording comes from later sources, and there is a second riddle in some versions about two sisters who give birth to each other, meaning day and night. Oedipus' triumph is in solving a riddle about the human life-cycle, which is also, as it turns out, a riddle about him.
Why does he blind himself?
He says in the play that he could not bear to look at his father in the underworld, or his mother, or his children, or the city. Blinding is also the tragedy's most exact irony: the seer Tiresias, blind, saw everything; the king who saw everything ends blind. Whether he could then have gone on ruling — as Homer's does — is precisely what Sophocles' version forecloses.
Was there really a cult at Colonus?
There is evidence of a hero shrine of Oedipus in Attica, and the Colonus location fits the standard Athenian pattern of adopting a foreign hero's grave as a civic asset — Theseus' bones from Skyros are the parallel case. Other places, including Thebes and Eteonos, also claimed a tomb. Sophocles was a priest of a healing cult himself and was heroised after his death, so the play's interest in a body that protects a city is not incidental.