The city of Thebes was a place of shadows and mourning when the tragedy of Oedipus reached its zenith. For months, a mysterious and relentless plague had descended upon the Seven-Gated city, withering the crops in the fields, striking down the cattle in the pastures, and claiming the lives of women in labor and children in their cradles. The air was thick with the scent of incense and the sound of lamentation as the citizens gathered before the royal palace, seeking a remedy from the man who had once saved them from the riddle of the Sphinx. Oedipus, a king of unparalleled intellect and perceived virtue, looked out upon his suffering subjects with a heavy heart, vowing to uncover the cause of this divine wrath at any cost.
Oedipus had sent his brother-in-law, Creon, to the Oracle of Delphi to seek guidance from Apollo. When Creon returned, he brought a message that was both clear and terrifying: the plague was a divine punishment for the unpunished murder of the previous king, Laius. The land was polluted by the presence of the killer, and until that murderer was either executed or driven into exile, the gods would not lift the curse. Oedipus, ever the man of action, immediately issued a stern decree. He cursed the murderer, forbidding any citizen from speaking to or harboring the criminal, and he swore a solemn oath to hunt down the man who had struck down Laius as if he were seeking the murderer of his own father.
In his quest for truth, Oedipus summoned Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, who was said to see the mind of Apollo. Tiresias arrived reluctantly, led by a small boy, and his demeanor was one of profound sorrow and hesitation. When Oedipus demanded to know the identity of the killer, Tiresias pleaded to be sent home, warning the king that knowledge was a terrible burden when it brought no profit to the knower. This refusal sparked Oedipus’s legendary temper. He accused the blind seer of being a co-conspirator in the murder of Laius, or perhaps a puppet for Creon, whom Oedipus now suspected of trying to steal the throne. Provoked by these insults, Tiresias finally spoke the truth: 'You are the murderer you seek. You are the polluter of this land, living in shameful intimacy with those you love most.'
Oedipus was enraged, dismissing the prophet’s words as the ramblings of a fraud. However, when Jocasta, the queen, entered to calm the quarreling men, she unintentionally provided the first thread of the king’s undoing. To prove that oracles were unreliable, she told Oedipus the story of how an oracle had once told Laius he would be killed by his own son. To prevent this, they had pinned the infant’s ankles together and left him on a mountain to die. Furthermore, she noted that Laius had not been killed by a son, but by a band of highwaymen at a place where three roads met, just before Oedipus had arrived in Thebes. Instead of being comforted, Oedipus was struck by a sudden, chilling memory. He asked Jocasta for the exact location and the appearance of the late king. When she described a tall man with hair turning white, killed at a triple crossroads in Phocis, Oedipus felt the weight of the heavens beginning to collapse upon him.
Oedipus then shared his own past. He had been raised in Corinth as the son of King Polybus and Queen Merope. One night, a drunkard at a banquet had shouted that he was not his father’s true son. Disturbed, Oedipus had secretly visited the Oracle at Delphi, only to be told a horrifying prophecy: that he was destined to kill his father and lie with his mother. To escape this fate, he fled Corinth and never returned. During his travels, at a triple crossroads near Phocis, he had encountered a carriage and a group of men who tried to force him off the road. In the ensuing struggle, Oedipus had killed them all in a fit of rage. He realized now that the man in the carriage might have been Laius. Desperate for a different outcome, he sent for the one surviving witness—a shepherd who had escaped the massacre.
Before the shepherd could arrive, a messenger from Corinth appeared at the palace with news that seemed, at first, to be a blessing. King Polybus was dead of old age. Oedipus felt a momentary surge of relief; if his father had died of natural causes while he was far away, then the prophecy of patricide must be false. However, the messenger, wishing to put Oedipus’s mind at ease regarding the second half of the prophecy—the marriage to his mother—revealed a secret. Polybus and Merope were not Oedipus’s biological parents. The messenger himself had received Oedipus as an infant from another shepherd on the slopes of Mount Cithaeron and had given the child to the childless royal couple of Corinth. The name 'Oedipus,' meaning 'swollen foot,' came from the fact that the baby’s ankles had been pinned together.
Jocasta, listening to this revelation, immediately understood the horrific truth. She saw the pattern of the pins and the mountain and the timing, and she realized that the man she had married was the son she had abandoned decades ago. She begged Oedipus to stop his inquiry, pleading with him that his life depended on his ignorance. But Oedipus, thinking she was merely worried that he might be of lowly birth, refused to stop until the whole truth was known. Jocasta fled into the palace in a state of silent, absolute despair. Shortly after, the aged shepherd was brought before the king. This shepherd, the same man who had survived the attack at the crossroads, was forced to admit that he had been given a child by Jocasta herself to be left on the mountain. Out of pity, he had instead given the infant to the Corinthian messenger.