Oedipus was a legendary king of the Greek city of Thebes. The literature of the ancient Greeks includes several versions of his life story, in each of which he is the victim of terrible misfortune. In the most famous account, Oedipus killed his father and married his mother.
The earliest account of Oedipus is in the epic* poems of Homer. The Iliad mentions Oedipus only as a king of Thebes who most likely died in battle. The Odyssey provides a few more details, mentioning that Oedipus unknowingly married his mother, who killed herself when his identity became known.
Other epic poems contained longer, more detailed versions of the story of Oedipus. Although these poems are now lost, references to them in other works indicate that they presented Oedipus as an outcast who was doomed by an ancient curse. The lost epics helped create the image of Oedipus and his family that appears in the tragic dramas of three great Greek playwrights. Sophocles told the most detailed version of the tale in three of his plays: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone. Aeschylus and Euripides also wrote plays about the life of Oedipus.
* epic long poem about legendary or historical heroes, written in a grand style
According to Sophocles’ version of the story, King Laius of Thebes kidnapped the son of an enemy. This act brought upon Laius a curse that was to torment several generations of his family. After Laius married a woman named Jocasta, an oracle* warned Laius that if his wife bore a son, that son would kill Laius. Jocasta did indeed have a son, and King Laius took the baby to a mountainside, drove a spike through his ankles, and left him there to die. A shepherd from Corinth rescued the baby and named him Oedipus, which means “swollen feet.” King Polybus of Corinth, who had no children, adopted the infant.
When Oedipus became a young man, people pointed out that he resembled neither King Polybus nor his wife. Curious about his real parents, Oedipus questioned the oracle at Delphi. The oracle replied that Oedipus was doomed to kill his father and marry his mother. Thinking that the king and queen of Corinth were his parents, the horrified Oedipus decided not to return there. As he wandered toward Thebes, he argued with a stranger at a crossroads and killed him. Upon reaching Thebes, Oedipus learned that King Laius had just been killed and that the Sphinx, a creature with the body of a lion but a human head, was terrorizing the city. The Sphinx challenged people with a riddle: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?” The creature killed all those who answered the riddle incorrectly. Oedipus defeated the Sphinx by giving the correct answer to the riddle. The answer was: “A man, who crawls as a baby, walks when grown, and leans on a stick when old.” Happy to be rid of the Sphinx, the people of Thebes made Oedipus their king, and he married Jocasta, the widow of King Laius.
Oedipus and Jocasta had four children. A plague* then struck Thebes, and, according to the oracle at Delphi, the city would be saved only if the people drove out Laius’s murderer. Oedipus investigated the matter, and he soon realized that the man he had killed at the crossroads was King Laius. He also learned that Laius was his father. Just as the oracle at Delphi had predicted, Oedipus had killed his father and married his mother. Shocked and horrified at this revelation, Jocasta hanged herself. Oedipus blinded himself with pins and left Thebes as an outcast and a victim of fate.
The Greek playwrights composed various accounts of later events in Oedipus’s life. In most versions, he cursed his sons, who later went to war against each other. In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus’s daughter Antigone leads the aged, blind man to a sacred grove of trees near Athens, where he dies. His ghost was said to protect Athens from any attack by Thebes. (See also Drama, Greek; Epic, Greek; Myths, Greek.)
* oracle priest or priestess through whom a god is believed to speak; also the location (such as a shrine) where such utterances are made
* plague highly contagious, widespread, and often fatal disease
THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
"Oedipus complex” is a term for an unconscious desire for the exclusive love of the parent of the opposite sex. It was first used by Sigmund Freud, the Austrian physician who helped to pioneer the field of psychiatry in the early A.D. 1900s. He took the name from the legendary Greek tragic figure, Oedipus.
Freud believed the Oedipus complex was a stage in normal development between the ages of two and six, when a child begins to experience the conflicting emotions of love and hate, yearning and jealousy, and fear and anger. Freud believed most people outgrew the Oedipus complex, but that a few did not.