In this sculpture by French artist Antoine-Denis Chaudet (1763-1810), the shepherd Phorbas tends the infant Oedipus, entrusted to him by a servant in the court of Laius, King of Thebes. Oedipus was not told that he was the King’s son, and Laius was not told that his strict instructions that the boy be ‘exposed’ - left outside to die - had been deliberately disobeyed.
Part 1 of 2
WHEN Laius, King of Thebes,* heard it foretold that his baby son would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother, he ordered that he be left outside to die. But a tender-hearted courtier entrusted the baby to a shepherd and his wife instead.
Many years later, the boy they had named Oedipus ran away, for men whispered that he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother. As he went, he bumped into an old man, who haughtily cuffed him into a ditch. Oedipus whirled his staff, and whack! the old man was dead.
Oedipus fled without learning that the haughty old man was Laius.
Creon, the king’s brother-in-law, was sorry to hear the news. But finding the culprit was not as urgent as the fact that he, Creon, was now responsible for the sphinx.* She was a truly maddening creature foisted on Thebes by Hera, who sat by the city gates propounding riddles, and throttling anyone giving an unsatisfactory solution.
This is the ancient Greek city in Boeotia, a more northerly region of the peninsula on which Athens stands; see Google maps. Another Thebes, Thebes of the Hundred Gates, was at one time capital of the New Kingdom of Egypt. Another ancient Greek city named Thebes lay in Thessaly further north.
In Greek tradition, the sphinx had a woman’s head and the back parts of a lioness; sometimes she was depicted as having wings. The Egyptian sphinx, famous for the statue among the Great Pyramids, was male.
Précis
It was prophesied that baby Oedipus would one day murder his father Laius, King of Thebes, and marry his mother. He was given away to a shepherd and his wife, but later ran away to save his foster-parents from the same fate, only to kill Laius in an accident, and fulfil half of the prophecy he was trying to evade. (60 / 60 words)
Part Two
The sphinx propounds her unanswerable riddle from atop a column at the gates of Thebes, and Oedipus gives her his best attention. The scene was painted onto a cup in about 470 BC, the year in which Socrates was born.
IN desperation, Creon promised the Theban throne to any man who could confound the riddling sphinx. Oedipus took up the challenge, and the sphinx was so dismayed by his quick-fire answer to her very hardest riddle that she threw herself into a chasm.
Creon kept his word. Oedipus became king of Thebes, fulfilling his tragic doom by taking Laius’s widow Jocasta as his queen. She bore him four children.
Ignorance was bliss for Oedipus, but the gods were outraged. They afflicted Thebes with a devastating plague, and Oedipus was told that the city could be saved only by avenging the blood of Laius. Still unsuspecting, Oedipus ordered a hard-hitting investigation into the old king’s murder.
When at last the dreadful truth was uncovered, poor Jocasta took her own life. King Oedipus blinded himself, and resigned his throne, but ended his days peacefully in the grove of the Eumenides at Colonos near Athens, cared for to the last by his devoted daughter Antigone.*
The Eumenides or Erinyes are the Furies, the goddesses of vengeance. In Sophocles’s play ‘Oedipus at Colonos’, it is indicated that Colonus was a rather smart area of Athens, and that the Furies had accepted Oedipus’s sufferings as an offering. The favour of the gods now went with him, and Creon’s Thebes lost its place to Athens.
Précis
Laius’s brother Creon offered the Theban throne to anyone who could rid Thebes of the deadly sphinx. Oedipus duly won both the crown and Queen Jocasta. Eventually the awful the truth, that he had unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, came out, and he gave up his throne, dying in exile. (53 / 60 words)
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