The Oedipus Myth

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ACCORDING to a Freudian superstition now widely current, King Oedipus of Thebes was pursued by an unconscious desire to kill his father and violate his mother, and the Greeks told this myth with the sole purpose of showing that every little boy is an Oedipus at heart. I am assured by psychologists that Freud never committed himself to this crude interpretation of history, but merely hoped to make his argument respectable by hanging it on a convenient Classical peg. If so, it is a pity that he had not read Plutarch, who records that certain Egyptians loathed the Hippopotamus because “he slew his sire and forced his dam.” Freud might then have enlarged on the “hippopotamus complex” without misrepresenting Oedipus, who had not the least desire, conscious or unconscious, to perform the unethical acts of which he is accused.

In the course of collecting and classifying a great number of Greek myths for a dictionary on modern lines, I have learned to regard them as the plots of dramatic ballets performed by various clans, tribes, or cities of Greece and Greater Greece, and constituting the authority for local religious customs; scenes from these were painted on vases or temple walls and carved on chests. Lucian in his book On the Dance has preserved an impressive list of ballets and the cities in which they were performed. There are not a great many radically different themes, but each city treated them in its own way; and the variations, when disentangled from their usual webs of fable, minstrel romance, civic propaganda, humorous anecdote, allegory, or philosophical speculation, are historically most instructive.

Among the least reliable mythographers were the Athenian dramatists, who set themselves to convert the traditional ballets into psychological or moral drama, and were not above altering the plots for political ends — thus Euripides, when he wrote the Medea, is plausibly said to have been heavily bribed by the Corinthians for freeing their ancestors from the charge of child-murder. An examination of the Oedipus myth, which the dramatists exploited mainly as “good theater,” illustrates, better than most, the problems involved in an interpretative study of mythology. Here is the story, condensed from the accounts given by Hesiod, Homer, Pindar, Ovid, Sophocles, Euripides, Apollodorus, Hyginus, Pausanias, and others: —

Laius, son of Labdacus, married the princess Jocasta and ruled over Thebes. Grieved by his prolonged childlessness, he secretly consulted the Delphic Oracle, which announced that this apparent misfortune was a blessing, because any child born to Jocasta would become his murderer. He therefore put Jocasta away, offering no reason for his decision, which caused her such vexation that, having made him drunk, she inveigled him into her arms again as soon as night fell. When, nine months later, Jocasta was brought to bed, Laius snatched the child from the nurse’s arms, pierced his feet with a nail, and, binding them together, exposed him on Mount Cithaeron. Yet the Fates had ruled that he should reach a green old age. A Corinthian shepherd found the boy, named him Oedipus because his feet were deformed by the nail wound, and brought him to Corinth, where King Polybus was reigning at the time.

According to another version of the story, Laius did not expose Oedipus, but locked him in a chest which was lowered from a ship into the sea. This chest drifted ashore at Sicyon, where Periboea, Polybus’s queen, happened to be on the beach, supervising her laundresses. She picked up Oedipus, retired to a thicket, and pretended to have been overcome by the pangs of labor. Since the laundresses were too busy to notice what she was about, she deceived them all into thinking that he had only just been born. But Periboea told Poly bus the truth and he, also being childless, decided to rear Oedipus as his own son.

One day, taunted by a Corinthian youth with the fact that he did not in the least resemble his supposed parents, Oedipus went to ask the Delphic Oracle what the future held for him. “Away from the shrine, wretch!” the Pythoness cried in disgust. “You are fated to kill your father and marry your mother!”

Since Oedipus loved Polybus and Periboea, and shrank from bringing disaster upon them, he decided against returning to Corinth. But in the narrow defile between Delphi and Daulis he happened to meet Laius, who ordered him roughly to step off the road and make way for his betters; Laius, it should be explained, was riding in a chariot and Oedipus was traveling on foot. Oedipus retorted that he acknowledged no betters except the gods and his own parents.

“So much the worse for you!” shouted Laius, and told his charioteer Polyphontes to drive on.

One of the wheels bruised Oedipus’s foot and, transported by rage, he killed Polyphontes with his spear. Then, flinging Laius on the road entangled in the reins, and whipping up the team, he made them drag him to death. It. was left to the King of Plataeae to bury both corpses.

Laius had been about to ask the Oracle how he might rid Thebes of the Sphinx. This monster, a daughter of Typhon and Echidne or, some say, of the Dog Orthus and the Chimaera, had flown to Thebes from the uttermost part of Ethiopia. She was easily recognized by her woman’s head, lion’s body, serpent’s tail, and eagle’s wings. Hera had recently sent her to punish Thebes for Laius’s abduction of the boy Chrysippus from Pisa; and, settling on Mount Phicium, close to the city, the Sphinx now asked every Theban wayfarer a riddle taught her by the Muses: “What being, with only one voice, has sometimes two feet, sometimes three, sometimes four, and is weakest when it has the most?” Those who could not solve the riddle, she throttled and devoured on the spot; among these unfortunates was Jocasta’s nephew Haimon, whom the Sphinx made haimon, or “bloody,” indeed.

Oedipus, approaching Thebes fresh from the murder of Laius, guessed the answer. “Man,” he replied, “because he crawls on all fours as an infant, stands firmly on his two feet in his youth, and leans upon a staff in his old age.” The mortified Sphinx leaped from Mount Phicium and dashed herself to pieces in the valley below. At this, the grateful Thebans acclaimed Oedipus king, and he married Jocasta, unaware that she was his mother.

Plague then descended upon Thebes, and the Delphic Oracle, when consulted once more, replied: “Expel the murderer of Laius!” Oedipus, not knowing whom he had killed in the defile, pronounced a curse on Laius’s murderer and sentenced him to exile.

Blind Tiresias, the most renowned seer in Greece at this time, now demanded an audience with Oedipus, and revealed to him the will of the gods: that the plague would cease only if a Sown Man died for I he sake of the city, .locasta’s father Menoeceus, one of those who had risen out of the earth when Cadmus sowed the serpent’s teeth, at once leaped from the walls, and all Thebes praised his devotion.

Tiresias then announced further: “Menoeceus did well, and the plague will cease. Yet the gods had another of the Sown Men in mind, one of the third generation: for he has killed his father and married his mother. Know, Queen Jocasta, that it is your husband Oedipus!”

At first, none would believe Tiresias, but his words were soon confirmed by a letter from Periboea at Corinth. She wrote that the sudden death of King Polybus allowed her to reveal the circumstances of Oedipus’s adoption; and this she did in damning detail. Jocasta then hanged herself for shame and grief, while Oedipus blinded himself with a pin taken from her garments.

Some say that, although tormented by the Furies, who accused him of having brought about his mother’s death, Oedipus continued to reign over Thebes for a while, until he fell gloriously in battle. According to others, however, Jocasta’s brother Creon expelled him; but not before he had cursed Eteocles and Polyneices — who were at once his sons and his brothers — when they insolently sent him the inferior portion of the sacrificial beast: namely, haunch instead of shoulder. They watched dry-eyed as he left the city which he had delivered from the Sphinx’s power. After wandering for many years through country after country, guided by his faithful daughter Antigone, Oedipus finally came to Colonus in Attica, where the Furies, who have a grove there, hounded him to death, and Theseus buried his body in the precinct of the Solemn Ones at Athens, lamenting at Antigone’s side.

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THE account of Oedipus’s birth is a familiar one. At least a dozen Greek myths concern the same variously named royal infant, who has been exposed on a mountain, often at the command of an oracle, but is miraculously suckled by a she-wolf, she-bear, bitch, mare, hind, wild goat, wild cow, or some other sacred beast. He is found and reared by shepherds, goatherds, cattlemen, or horseherds, and eventually gains a kingdom. Sometimes he has a twin. Sometimes he is sent floating down a river in an ark, or cast adrift in the open sea, rather than exposed on a mountain. This story is not confined to Greek mythology: Cyrus the Persian, Moses the Egyptian, and Romulus of Rome with his twin Remus, all belong to the same ritual drama as the Greeks Hippothoiis, Paris, Amphion, Aegisthus, Pelias with his twin Neleus, Oedipus, and Zeus himself. The ritual survived at Eleusis in Attica until Christian times, and we know from hints let drop by initiates that shepherds carried a male infant into the shrine at the New Year ceremony and there acclaimed him as the son of the Virgin-goddess Brimo — a mystical rite that has colored the Christian Nativity story. He symbolized the prosperity of the ensuing year, which depended on a due performance of certain magical rites in honor of the Great Goddess.

It seems that in the neolithic society where this drama originates, the King, identified with the infant, by the rebirth ritual of his coronation, reigned one year only. He then died, sacrificed to the Goddess for the good of his tribe, or city, and became an oracular hero. His sovereignty, meanwhile, had been strictly limited; he was at first no more than the Queen’s chosen lover — the Queen being the High Priestess — hedged in by taboos and representative of tribal virility. If sometimes appointed to act as her deputy, he wore her robes and imitated her womanly gait. The manner of his death varied locally, like the circumstances of his advent or the nature of his animal foster-mother. There is evidence, for instance, that at Sparta he was drowned in a river pool; at Athens, thrown off a cliff into the sea; at Abdera, torn to pieces by women disguised as mares; at Corinth, burned to death; and at Mycenae, beheaded with an axe.

A common form of royal death was to be pricked in the foot by a poisoned arrow. The heroes Chiron, Pholus, Philoctetes, Paris, Achilles, and Talos are all said to have died in the same manner; and in Talos’s case an alternative instrument is mentioned by one mythographer: a nail, manipulated by Medea, Queen of Corinth. This perhaps gives a clue to the incident which is told to account for Oedipus’s name: “Swollen Foot.” But in Welsh myth the New Year Child, who arrives by water (like Moses, or like Oedipus in Hyginus’s version), is called Merddin, “Dweller in the Sea,” or Dylan, “Son of the Wave”; and it seems that the Oedipus myth originally concerned a sacred king named Oedipais, “Son of the Wave,” who was fetched from the sea in the New Year drama and killed, when his term ended, by the Priestess of the Corinthian goddess Medea, who drove a poisoned nail into his foot. As the infant Moses represented the riches brought down by the Nile floods at the Egyptian New Year, so the infant Oedipais represented the fishing harvest on which Corinth largely depended — in some cities of the Isthmus he arrived on the back of a dolphin. This myth was apparently transplanted to the inland city of Thebes, whose inhabitants depended for their food on flocks and herds, and altered to suit the changed situation. The child was now said to have been exposed on a mountain, rather than washed up on the seashore; and be no longer died in the Corinthian manner. Through careless repetition, the story became confused and Oedipus’s swollen foot was connected with his advent rather than his demise.

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LAIUS’S death, though disguised by the detail of the narrow pass, also belongs to a familiar pattern. Oenomaus, Glaucus, and Hippolytus all met their doom in a chariot crash wished on them by their enemies, and all are connected in mythology with the Isthmus of Corinth. It seems that the King had to drive a chariot around an elliptical stadium, representing the annual course of the Sun, and that the linchpin of one wheel was pulled out, so that the chariot collapsed at the first turn and the horses dragged him to death, entangled in the reins. This novelty, dating from the latter half of the second millennium B.C., may have been introduced by Palestinian immigrants; for several Corinthian myths recall stories from Genesis and the Book of Judges, and “horses of the Sun” were kept at Jerusalem under the late Jewish monarchy. Oedipus, in fact, will have killed Laius only in so far as he succeeded to the throne after his predecessor (in religious theory, his father) had been sacrificed in the customary chariot crash; and married his mother only in so far as his wife, the Queen, was titular head of the clan into which he had been reborn at his installation as King. Yet the Sphinx’s death suggests that Oedipus was a revolutionary figure, like Sisyphus of Corinth who, in defiance of local convention, refused to die when his reign had come to an end.

Classical mythographers, I believe, deduced Oedipus’s meeting with the Sphinx from an icon showing the winged goddess Hera of Thebes, whose composite body represented the two parts of the Theban year — lion for the waxing part, serpent for the waning part — and her adoration by the new King. The Sphinx is an emanation of Hera, not a separate creature. That she was called the daughter of Orthrus the Dog, or of Typhon, means that her sacrifices took place “in the Dog Days,”when Sirius had risen and when Typhon, the spirit of the Sirocco, enjoyed his greatest power.

It seems also that the riddle which the Sphinx learned from the Muses has been invented to explain a sacred picture of an infant, a warrior, and an old man, all worshiping the Goddess as ruler of the entire life-span, from early spring to late winter. But the Sphinx, defeated by Oedipus, committed suicide, and so did her priestess Jocasta. Was Oedipus a thirteenth-century Corinthian invader of Thebes, who suppressed the old Minoan cult of the Goddess and reformed the calendar?

We are told that Laius had abducted a beautiful prince named Chrysippus, with whom he fell in love, which so displeased the Sphinx that she demanded human sacrifice, including a prince of the royal house. A similar abduction by Zeus of young Ganymedes, who was borne on eagle’s wings to heaven, apparently refers to a custom of offering an annual boy victim in place of the King, after temporarily investing him in the regalia, and by this stratagem prolonging the King’s reign from one year to eight. At Corinth, as in Palestine, the boy victim was burned: at Thebes he appears to have been strangled in honor of the Goddess—for “Sphinx” means “Strangler.” Put at last the King was obliged to die in person.

Though Theban patriots, loath to admit that Oedipus was a foreigner who took their city by storm, preferred to make him the lost heir to the kingdom, the truth is revealed by the death of Menoeceus, a member of the pre-Hellenic race that celebrated the Peloria festival in memory of the Earth-Dragon of Creation from whose teeth they claimed to have sprung. Menoeceus leaped to his death in the desperate hope of placating the Goddess; and a similar sacrifice was offered during the War of the “Seven Against Thebes.”However, he must have died in vain; otherwise the Sphinx and her chief Priestess would not have committed suicide.

The story of Jocasta’s death by hanging is probably an error; Helen of the olive trees, like Erigone and Ariadne of the vine cult, was said to have died by hanging — perhaps to account for figurines of the Moon-goddess which were suspended dangling from the boughs of orchard trees, as a fertility charm. Similar figurines have been found at Thebes; and when Jocasta committed suicide, she will have leaped from a rock, as the Sphinx did.

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Two incompatible accounts of Oedipus’s end survive. According to Homer, he died gloriously in battle. According to Apollodorus and Hyginus, he was banished by Jocasta’s brother, a member of the Cadmean royal house, and wandered as a blind beggar through the cities of Greece until he came to Colonus in Attica, where the Furies hounded him to death.

Oedipus’s remorseful self-blinding has been interpreted by psychologists to mean castration; but though the blindness of Achilles’ tutor Phoenix was said by Greek grammarians to be a euphemism for impotence, primitive myth is always downright, and the castration of Uranus and Attis continued to be recorded unblushingly in Classical textbooks. Oedipus’s blinding, therefore, reads like a theatrical invention rather than original myth. Furies were personifications of conscience, but conscience in a very limited sense: aroused only by the breach of a taboo imposed by the Mother-goddess. To kill a father or brother did not expose one to the Furies: purification and subsequent exile were sufficient atonement. Yet to kill a mother, however vile, or even deliver her to public justice (which seems to have been the extent of Orestes’ notorious crime), or to insult the Goddess, or to murder suppliants who claimed the protection of a tribal hearth sacred to her — all these were unforgivable acts. The non-Homeric story, therefore, is that Oedipus’s defiance of the City-goddess was punished by exile, and that he eventually died a victim of his own superstitious fears. It is probable that his innovations were repudiated by a body of Theban conservatives headed by the Queen’s brother, who, under the old matrilineal system, will have been the chief executive officer at Thebes; and, certainly, his sons’ and brothers’ unwillingness to award him the shoulder of the sacrificial victim amounted to a denial of his divine authority; the shoulder blade was the priestly perquisite at Jerusalem, and Tantalus set one before the goddess Demeter at a famous banquet of the gods.

Did Oedipus, like Sisyphus, try to substitute patrilineal for matrilineal laws of succession, and get banished by his subjects? It seems probable. Theseus of Athens, another patriarchal revolutionary from the Isthmus, who destroyed the ancient Athenian clan of Pallantids, is associated by the Athenian dramatists with Oedipus’s burial and was similarly banished at the close of his reign.

Tiresias here figures dramatically as the prophet of Oedipus’s final disgrace, but the story, as it survives, seems to have been turned inside out. Originally it is possible that it ran something like this: —

Oedipus of Corinth conquered Thebes and became King by marrying Jocasta, a priestess of Hera. Afterwards he announced that the kingdom should henceforth be bequeathed from father to son in the male line, as among the Achaeans, instead of remaining the gift of Hera the Throttler. Oedipus confessed that lie felt himself disgraced for having let chariot horses drag to death Laius, who was accounted his father, and for having married Jocasta, who had enroyaled him by a ceremony of rebirth. But when he tried to change these customs by force, Jocasta committed suicide in protest, and Thebes was visited by a plague. Upon the advice of an oracle, the Thebans then withheld from Oedipus the sacred shoulder blade and banished him. He died in a fruitless attempt to regain his throne by force.