Oedipus fled a terrible prophecy and ran straight into it
His name means swollen foot, a reminder of the pierced ankles his father gave him before abandoning him on a mountain. Everything Oedipus did to escape the oracle's warning about killing his father and marrying his mother only carried him closer to it, making him the Greek model of a hero undone by fate.
King Laius of Thebes had been told by Apollo's oracle at Delphi that any son of his would kill him. When Queen Jocasta bore a boy, Laius had the baby's ankles pinned together and ordered him exposed on a hillside. A servant took pity and handed the child to a shepherd from Corinth, and he was raised as a prince by the childless King Polybus and Queen Merope. Years later a drunk sneered that he was not their real son. Oedipus consulted Delphi himself, heard the same dreadful prediction and, believing it meant his foster parents, headed away from Corinth toward Thebes.
At a meeting of three roads near Daulia a chariot tried to force him aside. In the fight he killed its passenger, who was Laius. Outside Thebes he faced the Sphinx, which devoured travellers who could not solve her riddle: what goes on four feet at dawn, two at midday and three at dusk? He answered that it was a person, who crawls as a baby, walks upright as an adult and leans on a stick when old. The defeated monster killed herself. Creon had promised the throne and the widowed queen to whoever freed the city, so Oedipus married Jocasta and fathered four children.
When a plague of barrenness later struck Thebes, he vowed to find Laius's murderer. The blind seer Tiresias named him, and a messenger from Corinth revealed he had been adopted. In Sophocles's version Jocasta hanged herself, and Oedipus blinded himself with a pin from her gown before wandering in exile, guided by his daughter Antigone, to die at Colonus. Euripides told it differently, and Homer even let him keep ruling.
His sons Eteocles and Polynices later killed each other fighting over the kingdom. Aeschylus built a trilogy on the family in 467 BC that won first prize at the City Dionysia, though only Seven Against Thebes survives. Sigmund Freud borrowed the name for his Oedipus complex.
Source: Oedipus
