Figures

Oedipus

Kings

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Oedipus." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/figures/oedipus.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Oedipus. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/figures/oedipus

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-oedipus,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Oedipus},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/figures/oedipus},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Oedipus is the king of Thebes whose entire story runs on a prophecy given before his birth, that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Exposed on a mountainside as an infant to avoid the prophecy and raised instead by the king and queen of Corinth as their own, he leaves home as a young man on learning of the prophecy from an oracle, unaware his true parents are not the ones he is fleeing, and kills a stranger at a crossroads who turns out to be his birth father Laius. He then answers the riddle of the Sphinx, ending her reign of terror over Thebes, and is rewarded with the widowed queen's hand, unknowingly marrying his own mother Jocasta. Years later, investigating a plague on the city, Oedipus discovers the truth of what he has done and blinds himself in horror; Sophocles later gives him a second, gentler ending, dying at Colonus under a mysterious blessing after years of exiled wandering.

Facts

Identity

Gender

Male 1

Life

Place of Activity

The Library (Bibliotheca), attributed to Apollodorus, recounts his exile from Thebes after the truth of his parentage and his marriage to his own mother, Jocasta, came to light, following the same essential outline later dramatized by Sophocles. 1

Manner of Death

Taken up without dying, as the tradition holds 1Ancient Greek Religion

Manner of Death Detail

Blinds himself on discovering the truth of Laius and Jocasta; dies years later in exile at Colonus under circumstances Sophocles treats as a mysterious blessing 1Ancient Greek Religion

Attestation

Historicity

Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record 1

Origins

Place of Origin

Biologically a Theban, born to Laius and Jocasta, though raised in Corinth by King Polybus and Queen Merope, who took him in without revealing his true parentage, the separation from his birthplace the whole tragedy turns on. 1

Origin of the Name

His name, from the Greek for swollen foot, recalls the wound Apollodorus says he received as an exposed infant: his ankles pierced and pinned together before he was left on the mountainside, a mutilation the shepherd who rescued him could not fully heal. 1

Position Profile

Key Text

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus 1Ancient Greek Religion

Attributions

Mythic Association

Fulfills a prophecy given before his birth by unknowingly killing his father Laius and marrying his mother Jocasta; solves the riddle of the Sphinx to become king of Thebes 1Ancient Greek Religion

Tradition

His story belongs to the Theban Cycle, the same mythological complex surrounding Cadmus, his sons Eteocles and Polyneices, and the house of Laius, one of Greek myth's most sustained explorations of a single doomed lineage. 1

Practice

Lineage

Named son of Laius and Jocasta, King and Queen of Thebes, whose exposure of him as an infant on Mount Cithaeron to thwart a prophecy failed to prevent it; his later, unwitting marriage to his own mother Jocasta made their four children, Antigone, Ismene, Eteocles and Polynices, simultaneously his children and his own half siblings. 1

Learn More

The Riddle of the Sphinx

Warned by an oracle that he is fated to kill his father and marry his mother, the young man raised in Corinth as Oedipus flees the city rather than risk it, not knowing that Polybus and Merope, the king and queen who raised him, are not his birth parents at all. On the road he quarrels with an older man at a narrow crossroads over right of way and kills him along with most of his retinue, not recognizing the man as Laius, king of Thebes and his true father, sent away at birth on a prophecy identical to the one Oedipus is now fleeing.

Continuing toward Thebes, Oedipus meets the Sphinx, a winged lion bodied creature with a woman's face who has been killing every traveler unable to answer her riddle, what walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening. Oedipus answers correctly, man, who crawls as an infant, walks upright in his prime and leans on a staff in old age, and the Sphinx, defeated, destroys herself. Thebes, freed from her terror and left without a king after Laius's unexplained death, gives Oedipus the throne and the hand of the widowed queen Jocasta in marriage, completing the second half of the prophecy exactly as unknowingly as the first.

The Plague and the Truth

Sophocles' Oedipus Rex opens years after the marriage, with Thebes suffering a plague that an oracle blames on an unpunished crime, the unavenged murder of the former king Laius. Oedipus, as determined a investigator of the truth as he was once an unknowing agent of the prophecy, pursues the killer's identity relentlessly even as witness after witness hints at a conclusion he refuses to see coming, and even as his wife Jocasta begs him to stop asking questions once she recognizes where the answers are heading.

The truth arrives from two directions at once: a messenger from Corinth reveals that Oedipus was never truly Polybus and Merope's son, and the shepherd who exposed the infant Oedipus on the mountainside confirms that the child he saved and gave away was Laius and Jocasta's own son. Jocasta hangs herself once she understands what has happened, and Oedipus, finding her body, blinds himself with the pins from her robe rather than look on what he has done. Sophocles returns to the character decades later in Oedipus at Colonus, where an aged, blind Oedipus, having wandered in exile for years with his daughter Antigone, arrives at a sacred grove near Athens and dies there under circumstances the play treats as a mysterious blessing rather than a further curse.

Cross-Tradition Connections