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Updated: June 2, 2025
At this reply the Sphinx uttered a cry, sprang headlong from the rock into the valley below, and perished. Oedipus had guessed the answer. When he came to the city and told the Thebans that their torment was gone, they hailed him as a deliverer. Not long after, they married him with great honor to their widowed queen, Jocasta, his own mother. The destiny was fulfilled.
"This story of yours, friend Edie, is an absolute enigma, and would require a second OEdipus to solve it who OEdipus was, I will tell you some other time if you remind me However, whether it be owing to the wisdom or to the maggots with which you compliment me, I am strongly disposed to believe that you have spoken the truth, the rather that you have not made any of those obtestations of the superior powers, which I observe you and your comrades always make use of when you mean to deceive folks."
To know the hideous truth, to watch its gradual dawn upon one after another of the characters, to see Oedipus at last alone in ignorance, to recognise clearly that he too must know, to witness his struggles, his distraction, his growing terror, and, at the inevitable moment, the appalling revelation few things can be more terrible than this.
Ulysses says to Alcinous, You bid me tell what various ills I bore, That the sad tale might make me grieve the more. And Oedipus says to the chorus, 'Tis pain to raise again a buried grief. But Euripides on the contrary, How sweet it is, when we are lulled in ease, To think of toils! when well, of a disease! True indeed, but not to those that are still tossed, still under a misfortune.
Against a background of suns dying on the other side of Aldebaran any mole trodden upon by some casual hoof may appear as significant a personage as an Oedipus or a Lear in his last agony.
In early popular religion the only examples of a deity's deliberately inflicting on innocent persons the punishment of another's wrongdoing are connected with the old conception of tribal and national solidarity OEdipus, Achan, David, and others, by their crimes, bring misfortune on their peoples; when the guilty have received their punishment the innocent are relieved.
All religion has been evidently founded upon Fatalism. Among the Greeks they supposed men were punished for their necessary faults, as may be seen in Orestes, in Oedipus, &c. who only committed crimes predicted by the oracles.
This, answered Oedipus, is Man; and most fearfully did he realize it in his own life! In the mysteries of the Eleusinia there is the same prominence of human sorrow, only here the Sphinx propounds her riddle in its religious phase; and in the change from the mystæ to the epoptæ, in the revelation of the central self, was the great problem symbolically realized.
"It would take Oedipus himself all his time to do that," said Gervase, forcing a laugh which had no mirth in it, for he was conscious of a vaguely unpleasant sensation a chill, as of some dark presentiment, which oppressed his mind. "When you know I do not believe in the soul, why do you talk to me about it? The soul of a fiend, the soul of an angel, what are they?
"There is no OEdipus to solve the enigma of life. We are whence came we? We are not whither do we go? All things in our existence have their object: existence has none. We live, move, beget our species, perish and for what? We ask the past its moral; we question the gone years of the reason of our being, and from the clouds of a thousand ages there goes forth no answer.
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