Our actions have consequences, but that doesn’t mean that a particular action will lead to a particular consequence: it means that one action might cause something quite different to happen, which will nevertheless be linked in some way to our lives. And thus he would (or at least could) have avoided killing his father and fulfilling the prophecy. In the tragedians’ version of the tale, it is Oedipus’ hubris, his pride, that contributes to the altercation on the road between him and Laius, the man who turns out to be his real father: if Oedipus was less stubborn, he would have played the bigger man and stepped aside to let Laius pass. What the moral of the Oedipus story is perhaps depends on which version we read, too. In solving her riddle, the Sphinx is vanquished, and she dies. However, the riddle she poses to Oedipus (‘what goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at midday, and three legs in the evening?’) is solved by our hero, who gives her the correct response, ‘man’ (we’ll say why this is the solution later on there was also another riddle posed by the Sphinx in some alternative versions of the Oedipus myth, which asks, ‘There are two sisters: one gives birth to the other and she, in turn, gives birth to the first. The Sphinx posed riddles to people when they failed to solve them, she ate them. In doing so, he unwittingly fulfilled the first half of the prophecy: he has killed his own father.Īrriving at Thebes, Oedipus was confronted by the Sphinx: a monster that was half woman and half lion. When Laius’ herald ordered Oedipus to stand aside and make way for the King to pass, Oedipus grew angry and killed both the herald and Laius. On a road (variously, the road back from Delphi, where he’d consulted the oracle or on his way to steal those horses or on his way to Thebes, where he intended to make sure he was as far away from Polybus as possible so he couldn’t fulfil the prophecy), Oedipus came up against Laius, King of Thebes and Oedipus’ biological father. In some versions, the Delphic oracle warned Oedipus that there was a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother believing Polybus to be his real father (in this version of the story), Oedipus fled home, worried that he would kill Polybus. When Oedipus asked Polybus about this, Polybus confirmed that he was not his biological father. In the tragedies, someone told Oedipus – in order to insult him – that he was a foundling and Polybus was not his real father. In the oldest versions of the myth, he left home to go and steal horses, which isn’t very noble. His motives for doing so, interestingly, vary from telling to telling. ![]() When Oedipus grew up and reached adulthood, he left home, and his adoptive parents, behind. ![]() This kind, named Polybus, raised Oedipus as his own son. In every version of the Oedipus myth, the common element here is that Oedipus is rescued, and taken in by a king who has no children of his own. Laius then had the child disposed of, either by throwing him into the sea (where he was rescued by fishermen) or by giving him to a servant to take to the mountains and leave there (where he was rescued by shepherds).
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