Oedipus

King of Thebes, the figure of the tragic stage to whom all later European tragedy refers. Son of Laius and Jocasta — Homer's older name for her is Epicaste — he was exposed on Mount Cithaeron at birth with his ankles pierced, hence Οἰδίπους, 'Swollen-Foot'. Raised in Corinth by the childless royal couple Polybus and Merope, he fled Corinth after an oracle told him he would kill his father and marry his mother, killed Laius in ignorance at the Schiste Hodos near Daulis, answered the Sphinx's riddle, and was given the throne of Thebes and the widowed queen — his own mother — as his reward. By Jocasta he had Polynices, Eteocles, Antigone, and Ismene. Years later a plague forced the investigation that uncovered the truth; Jocasta hanged herself, Oedipus blinded himself with the brooches from her robes. In Homer's older version he continued to rule Thebes afterward; in the Sophoclean tradition he was exiled, wandered long with Antigone, and was summoned into the earth at the grove of the Eumenides at Colonus outside Athens, where his tomb became a civic blessing on the land of Theseus.

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