Oedipus

Summary

Oedipus is the king of Thebes in Greece who killed his father and married his mother without knowing either. The best-known telling of his story is Sophocles' play Oedipus Tyrannus of the fifth century BCE, and the Library ascribed to Apollodorus gives it briefly. He descends from Cadmus, who founded Thebes.

An oracle of Apollo came to Laius, king of Thebes, that he would die by the hand of a son born to him by his wife Jocasta. When the child was born, before it was three days old, Laius pinned its ankles together and had it thrown on a remote mountain. The herdsman who carried it to Mount Cithaeron took pity and gave it to a herdsman from Corinth, who brought it to Polybus king of Corinth and his wife; they had no child and raised him as their own. The Corinthian herdsman loosed his pierced ankles, and in the play he tells him: "from that misfortune you were named who you are".

When he was grown, a drunken man at a feast told him he was not his father's son. He went to Delphi to ask, was given no answer to his question, and was told that he would lie with his mother and kill his father. He fled Corinth so as never to return to those he took for his parents, and at a place where three roads meet he met an old man in a carriage who thrust him from the road and struck him with his goad; he killed him and those with him. Then he came to Thebes, where the Sphinx sat on the mountain nearby, with a woman's face, a lion's body and a bird's wings, sent by Hera, putting a riddle to the people and devouring whoever failed: what has one voice and becomes four-footed, two-footed and three-footed? Oedipus answered: man, who crawls on four as a baby, walks on two as a man, and leans on a staff when old. The Sphinx threw herself from the citadel, and the Thebans gave him the kingship and the wife of their murdered king, who bore him two sons and two daughters.

Then a plague fell on Thebes. Oedipus sent his brother-in-law Creon to Delphi, who brought back the answer: drive out the killer of Laius. Oedipus set out to find the killer, and each report brought him closer to himself, until the Corinthian herdsman came with news of Polybus' death and revealed that he was not his son, and Laius' herdsman confessed that he had given him the child. Jocasta hanged herself; Oedipus took the brooches from her robe and struck out his eyes with them, and asked to be cast out onto Cithaeron, the mountain his mother and father had appointed as his tomb while he lived.

The idea the story turns on is that what is done to escape the oracle is its road. Laius pierced his son's ankles so that he would die, and the wound stayed in his name and let the herdsman know him; Oedipus fled Corinth to keep away from his parents and walked towards his father. The foot runs through the whole story: the pierced foot that gave him his name, the riddle about feet that only the man with the wounded foot could answer, and the staff that becomes the third foot of Oedipus himself when he goes out blind, led by his daughter Antigone. The whole house of Thebes comes out of the story: the two sons whom their father cursed and who killed each other, and the daughter who buried her brother, as Apollodorus tells.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Oidipous ends in -s, the Greek nominative ending, and before it stands pod-, foot, whose d drops before the s and reappears in the genitive Oidipodos. That leaves two words: oid-, from oidéō, to swell, and pod-, foot; in Greek the name means "swollen foot", and so Sophocles and Apollodorus explain it. The Greek essay reads the first word as awid: in Lane awida is to become crooked or bent, and ādahu al-ḥimlu, the load weighed heavily on him; on this reading Oedipus is the one crooked in the foot, weighed down by what was decreed before he was born. It also reads it as waḍaʿa: in Lane waḍaʿahu is he put it down, and waḍaʿat is she brought forth, so he is the newborn put down on the mountain. We read the second word, as a reading proposed on the method, as fadaʿ: in Lane fadaʿ is a distortion of the wrist or the ankle-joint that turns the foot, so the whole name is "the bent one with the turned foot", which is what Laius did to his ankles.

Linguistic Root

Forms of the name

The Greek explanation

Beekes says the name properly means "with a swollen foot", from oidéō, to swell, an inherited root for swelling with cognates in Armenian aytnum, to swell, and Old High German eiz, abscess, and eittar, pus. The -i- joining the two words in Oidi- is the form Greek uses at the start of compounds in place of a -ro- adjective. In the play the herdsman says he loosed the pierced ankles and that the name came from that misfortune, and Sophocles also plays on the name and oida, I know: Oedipus says he came to the Sphinx, "I, Oedipus the ignorant", and silenced her.

Awid and waḍaʿa

The Greek essay reads the first word from awwada, harmed and made crooked, or from waḍaʿa, lowered in standing, and says his tragedy rests on what was laid down for him before his birth. In Lane awida is to become crooked or bent, said of a stick or an arrow; ādahu, he bent it; ādahu al-ḥimlu, the load weighed on him; awid, crooked; and maʾāwid, calamities. The letters: the hamza stands for the vowel that begins the Greek name, w for the o of oi, and d is d. Waḍaʿa has w and ḍ; the emphatic ḍ becomes plain d in Greek, which has no emphatics, and the ʿ drops, as in the laws of the Juthoor project; Lane gives waḍaʿat, she brought forth, and waḍaʿa minhu, he lowered his rank. The tests: the form is attested; the letters of awid answer without substitution except the i of oi, which the reading does not account for; Lane gives crookedness and weight, which are in Oedipus' foot and in his fate, but not the swelling the Greek explanation gives.

Swelling and udra

The sense of swelling is in Arabic on the same nucleus, hamza and d: in Lane adira is said of a man with udra, a swelling of the scrotum. These are the letters of oid- with the r that Beekes reconstructs in the other form of the Greek word, -ro-. The nucleus ʾ-d carries crookedness in Arabic awida and swelling in adira, and swelling in Greek. This is a comparison of meaning on the nucleus, not a reading of the name.

The foot and fadaʿ

We read pod-, as a reading proposed on the method, as fadaʿ. In Lane fadiʿat qadamuhu is said when the foot has fadaʿ, a distortion of the wrist or the ankle-joint that turns the hand or foot inward, or a deflection between the foot and the shank; afdaʿ is the man who has it. The letters: f answers p by the first law of the Juthoor project, d is d, and ʿ drops in Greek. The story is that of two ankles pierced and bound. The weak point is that poús is the Greek word for any foot, with cognates in Latin pēs and Sanskrit pad-, so the reading would read the word for foot itself, not only Oedipus' name, and fadaʿ is a crooked foot, not every foot.

Key Mythic Narratives

Oedipus at Colonus

Apollodorus says Oedipus was driven from Thebes after he had put out his eyes and cursed his sons, who saw him cast out without lifting a hand to help him, and came with his daughter Antigone to Colonus in Attica, where the precinct of the Eumenides is; he sat there as a suppliant, Theseus received him kindly, and he died not long after. His two sons then fought for the throne of Thebes and each killed the other. The man thrown on the mountain as a baby to die outside the city died a stranger outside his city as well, but in a land that took him in.

Theatre and catharsis

The other Greek essay reads Greek tragedy as a collective therapy: Aristotle says tragedy brings about catharsis, and the essay says that the spectator who watches Oedipus kill his father and marry his mother faces his deepest fears in a safe place, in a theatre that held thousands.

Symbolic Reading

The Greek essay reads Oedipus as the story of a decree that precedes birth, and sets it beside the idea of decree and destiny in the Abrahamic tradition: a man whose fate was written before he was born. The story itself puts the decree in the body, in the foot pierced before he could walk on it, and puts knowledge in the question about feet: the man who solved the riddle of man does not know who he is. In this he belongs to the stories of the exposed child who returns to the place he was cast out from, and differs from most of them in that his return does not restore the kingship but uncovers what is in it.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In the story of Paris his mother Hecuba dreams that she bears a firebrand that burns the city, so Priam has him exposed on Mount Ida; a bear suckles him for five days and a servant raises him, and he returns to Troy bringing the ruin his exposure was meant to avert.

In the story of Perseus the oracle tells Acrisius that his daughter's son will kill him, so he casts him and his mother into the sea in a chest; the child lives, and years later kills him with a discus thrown at games without meaning to, as Oedipus killed his father without knowing him.

In India Kaṃsa hears a voice telling him that the eighth child of his sister Devakī will kill him, so he kills her children; Krishna is carried across the Yamunā to a herdsman's house and later returns and kills Kaṃsa.

In Mesopotamia Sargon is cast into the river not knowing his father and becomes king. The father who fears his son in Oedipus answers Kronos, who swallowed his children because he was told one of them would overthrow him, so that Rhea hid Zeus on Crete.