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Updated: May 18, 2025
As a baby he had been left to die lest he should live to fulfil the doom, but had been rescued by an old shepherd and brought up at the court of Corinth. Fleeing from there that he might not murder him whom he believed to be his father, he had come to Thebes, and on the way had met Laius, his true father, the king, and killed him.
On the road he was insulted by an old man in a chariot who thrust him rudely from his path; in anger he smote the man at the place where three ways met. If then this man was Laius, he had imprecated a curse on himself; his one hope is the solitary survivor whom he had sent for; perhaps more than one man had killed Laius after all.
The messenger himself found him on Cithaeron in his infancy, his feet pierced through. He had him from a shepherd, a servant of Laius, the very man whom Oedipus had summoned. Suddenly turning to Jocasta, the King asks her if she knows the man. Appalled at the horror of the truth which she knows cannot be concealed much longer she affects indifference and beseeches him search no further.
OEdipus at first believes that the aged prophet is merely the tool of others, who are engaged in a conspiracy to expel him from the throne; but when Jocasta, in her innocence, informs him of the death of Laius, names the mountain pass in which he fell, slain, as was supposed, by a robber band, and describes his dress and person, OEdipus is startled at the thought that he himself was the slayer, and he exclaims,
In this condition the infant was found by a peasant, who carried him to his master and mistress, by whom he was adopted and called OEdipus, or Swollen-foot. Many years afterwards Laius being on his way to Delphi, accompanied only by one attendant, met in a narrow road a young man also driving in a chariot.
Besides, in what way was this action, which is certainly within the rights of a man's own will, in what way was it contrary to the ethics of a gentleman? When so many persons are forced to pay annuities to others, what more natural than to pay one to his own best friend? But Laius is dead
For, according to our way of thinking, nothing could be more improbable than that Oedipus should, so long, have forborne to inquire into the circumstances of the death of Laius, and that the scars on his feet, and even the name which he bore, should never have excited the curiosity of Jocasta, &c.
While the princes contend, the queen, Jocasta, enters. She chides their quarrel, learns from Oedipus that Tiresias had accused him of the murder of the deceased king, and, to convince him of the falseness of prophetic lore, reveals to him, that long since it was predicted that Laius should be murdered by his son joint offspring of Jocasta and himself.
Laius, the king, hoping to learn from the oracle at Delphi the answer to the riddle, had ridden off in his chariot; but the people grew more excited still, when a messenger came running into the town, and said that the king and all his servants had been killed by robbers, and that their dead bodies had been found in the middle of the road.
The old man, indignant at this deed of violence, stepped out of his chariot and attacked OEdipus. Now, the young man did not know that it was his father Laius whom he thus met for the first time, so he fell upon and killed him also.
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