by Sophocles
I must outplot him and strike first.
If I pause and do nothing, he
will take charge, and I will have lost. 730
KREON
What do you want? My banishment?
OEDIPUS
No. It’s your death I want.
KREON
Then start by defining “betrayal”. . .
OEDIPUS
You talk as though you don’t believe me.
KREON
How can I if you won’t use reason?
OEDIPUS
I reason in my own interest.
KREON
You should reason in mine as well.
OEDIPUS
In a traitor’s interest?
KREON
What if you’re wrong?
OEDIPUS
I still must rule. 740
KREON
Not when you rule badly.
OEDIPUS
Did you hear him, Thebes!
KREON
Thebes isn’t yours alone. It’s mine as well!
LEADER
My Lords, stop this. Here’s Jokasta
leaving the palace—just in time
to calm you both. With her help, end your feud.
Enter JOKASTA from the palace.
JOKASTA
Wretched men! Why are you out here
so reckless, yelling at each other?
Aren’t you ashamed? With Thebes sick and dying
you two fight out some personal grievance? 750
Oedipus. Go inside. Kreon, go home.
Don’t make us all miserable over nothing.
KREON
Sister, it’s worse than that. Oedipus,
your husband, threatens either to drive me
from my own country or to have me killed.
OEDIPUS
That’s right. I caught him plotting to kill me,
Lady. False prophecy was his weapon.
KREON
I ask the gods to sicken and destroy me
if I did anything you charge me with.
JOKASTA
Believe what he says, Oedipus. 760
Accept the oath he just made to the gods.
Do it for my sake too, and for these men.
LEADER
Give in to him, Lord, we beg you.
With all your mind and will.
OEDIPUS
What do you want me to do?
LEADER
Believe him. This man was never a fool.
Now he backs himself up with a great oath.
OEDIPUS
You realize what you’re asking?
LEADER
I do.
OEDIPUS
Then say it to me outright. 770
LEADER
Groundless rumor shouldn’t be used by you
to scorn a friend who swears his innocence.
OEDIPUS
You know, when you ask this of me
you ask for my exile—or my death.
LEADER
No! We ask neither. By the god
outshining all others, the Sun—
may I die the worst death possible, die
godless and friendless, if I want those things.
This dying land grinds pain into my soul—
grinds it the more if the bitterness 780
you two stir up adds to our misery.
OEDIPUS
Then let him go, though it means my death
or my exile from here in disgrace.
What moves my pity are your words, not his.
He will be hated wherever he goes.
KREON
You are as bitter when you yield
as you are savage in your rage.
But natures like your own
punish themselves the most—
which is the way it should be. 790
OEDIPUS
Leave me alone. Go.
KREON
I’ll go. You can see nothing clearly.
But these men see that I’m right.
KREON goes off.
LEADER
Lady, why the delay? Take him inside.
JOKASTA
I will, when you tell me what happened.
LEADER
They had words. One drew a false
conclusion. The other took offense.
JOKASTA
Both sides were at fault?
LEADER
Both sides.
JOKASTA
What did they say? 800
LEADER
Don’t ask that. Our land needs no more trouble.
No more trouble! Let it go.
OEDIPUS
I know you mean well when you try to calm me,
but do you realize where it will lead?
LEADER
King, I have said this more than once.
I would be mad, I would lose my good sense,
if I lost faith in you—you
who put our dear country
back on course when you found her
wandering, crazed with suffering. 810
Steer us straight, once again,
with all your inspired luck.
JOKASTA
In god’s name, King, tell me, too.
What makes your rage so relentless?
OEDIPUS
I’ll tell you, for it’s you I respect, not the men.
Kreon brought on my rage by plotting against me.
JOKASTA
Go on. Explain what provoked the quarrel.
OEDIPUS
He says I murdered Laios.
JOKASTA
Does he know this himself? Or did someone tell him?
OEDIPUS
Neither. He sent that crooked seer to make the charge 820
so he could keep his own mouth innocent.
JOKASTA
Then you can clear yourself of all his charges.
Listen to me, for I can make you believe
no man, ever, has mastered prophecy.
This one incident will prove it.
A long time back, an oracle reached Laios—
I don’t say Apollo himself sent it,
but the priests who interpret him did.
It said that Laios was destined to die
at the hands of a son born to him and me. 830
Yet, as rumor had it, foreign bandits
killed Laios at a place where three roads meet.
OEDIPUS reacts with sudden intensity to her words.
But the child was barely three days old
when Laios pinned its ankle joints together,
then had it left, by someone else’s hands,
high up a mountain far from any roads.
That time Apollo failed to make Laios die
the way he feared—at the hands of his own son.
Doesn’t that tell you how much sense
prophetic voices make of our lives? 840
You can forget them. When god wants
something to happen, he makes it happen.
And has no trouble showing what he’s done.
OEDIPUS
Just now, something you said made my heart race.
Something . . . I remember . . . wakes up terrified.
JOKASTA
What fear made you turn toward me and say that?
OEDIPUS
I thought you said Laios was struck down
where three roads meet.
JOKASTA
That’s the story they told. It hasn’t changed.
OEDIPUS
Tell me, where did it happen? 850
JOKASTA
In a place called Phokis, at the junction
where roads come in from Delphi and from Daulis.
OEDIPUS
How long ago was it? When it happened?
JOKASTA
We heard the news just before you came to power.
OEDIPUS
O Zeus! What did you will me to do?
JOKASTA
Oedipus, you look
heartsick. What is it?
OEDIPUS
Don’t ask me yet. Describe Laios to me.
Was he a young man, almost in his prime?
JOKASTA
He was tall, with some gray salting his hair.
He looked then not very different from you now. 860
OEDIPUS
Like me? I’m finished! It was aimed at me,
that savage curse I hurled in ignorance.
JOKASTA
What did you say, my Lord? Your face scares me.
OEDIPUS
I’m desperately afraid the prophet sees.
Tell me one more thing. Then I’ll be sure.
JOKASTA
I’m so frightened I can hardly answer.
OEDIPUS
Did Laios go with just a few armed men,
or the large troop one expects of a prince?
JOKASTA
There were five only, one was a herald.
And there was a wagon, to carry Laios. 870
OEDIPUS
Ah! I see it now. Who told you this, Lady?
JOKASTA
Our slave. The one man who survived and came home.
OEDIPUS
Is he by chance on call here, in our house?
JOKASTA
No. When he returned and saw
that you had all dead Laios’ power,
he touched my hand and begged me to send him
out to our farmlands and sheepfolds,
so he’d be far away and out of sight.
I sent him. He was deserving—though a slave—
of a much larger favor than he asked. 880
OEDIPUS
Can you send for him right away?
JOKASTA
Of course. But why do you need him?
OEDIPUS
I’m afraid, Lady, I’ve said too much.
That’s why I want to see him now.
JOKASTA
I’ll have him come. But don’t I have the right
to know what so deeply disturbs you, Lord?
OEDIPUS
So much of what I dreaded has come true.
I’ll tell you everything I fear.
No one has more right than you do
to know the risks to which I’m now exposed. 890
Polybos of Korinth was my father.
My mother was Merope, a Dorian.
I was the leading citizen, when Chance
struck me a sudden blow.
Alarming as it was, I took it
much too hard. At a banquet,
a man who had drunk too much wine
claimed I was not my father’s son.
Seething, I said nothing. All that day
I barely held it in. But next morning 900
I questioned Mother and Father. Furious,
they took their anger out on the man
who shot the insult. They reassured me.
But the rumor still rankled; it hounded me.
So with no word to my parents,
I traveled to the Pythian oracle.
But the god would not honor me
with the knowledge I craved.
Instead,
his words flashed other things—
horrible, wretched things—at me: 910
I would be my mother’s lover.
I would show the world children
no one could bear to look at. I
would murder the father whose seed I am.
When I heard that, and ever after,
I traced the road back to Korinth
only by looking at the stars. I fled
to somewhere I’d never see outrages,
like those the god promised, happen to me.
But my flight carried me to just the place 920
where, you tell me, the king was killed.
Oh, woman, here is the truth. As I approached
the place where three roads joined,
a herald, a colt-drawn wagon, and a man
like the one you describe, met me head-on.
The man out front and the old man himself
began to crowd me off the road.
The driver, who’s forcing me aside,
I smash in anger.
The old man watches me,
he measures my approach, then leans out 930
lunging with his two-spiked goad
dead at my skull. He’s more than repaid:
I hit him so fast with the staff
this hand holds, he’s knocked back
rolling off the cart. Where he lies, face up.
Then I kill them all.
But if this stranger and Laios . . . were the same blood,
whose triumph could be worse than mine?
Is there a man alive the gods hate more?
Nobody, no Theban, no foreigner, 940
can take me to his home.
No one can speak with me.
They all must drive me out.
I am the man—no one else—
who laid this curse on myself.
I make love to his wife with hands
repulsive from her husband’s blood.
Can’t you see that I’m evil?
My whole nature, utter filth?
Look, I must be banished. I must 950
never set eyes on my people, never
set foot in my homeland, because . . .
I’ll marry my own mother,
kill Polybos, my father,
who brought me up and gave me birth.
If someone said things like these
must be the work of a savage god,
he’d be speaking the truth. O you
pure and majestic gods! Never,
never, let the day such things happen 960
arrive for me. Let me never see it.
Let me vanish from men’s eyes
before that doom comes down on me.
JOKASTA
What you say terrifies us, Lord. But don’t lose hope
until you hear from the eyewitness.
OEDIPUS
That is the one hope I have left—to wait
for this man to come in from the fields.
JOKASTA
When he comes, what do you hope to hear?
OEDIPUS
This: if his story matches yours,
I will have escaped disaster. 970
JOKASTA
What did I say that would make such a difference?
OEDIPUS
He told you Laios was killed by bandits.
If he still claims there were several,
then I cannot be the killer. One man
cannot be many. But if he says: one man,
braving the road alone, did it,
there’s no more doubt.
The evidence will drag me down.
JOKASTA
You can be sure that was the way
he first told it. How can he take it back? 980
The entire city heard him, not just me.
Even if now he changes his story,
Lord, he could never prove that Laios’
murder happened as the god predicted.
Apollo
said plainly: my son would kill Laios.
That poor doomed child had no chance
to kill his father, for he was killed first.
After that, no oracle ever
made me look right, then left, in fear.
OEDIPUS
You’ve thought this out well. Still, you must 990
send for that herdsman. Don’t neglect this.
JOKASTA
I’ll send for him now. But come inside.
Would I do anything to displease you?
OEDIPUS and JOKASTA enter the palace.
CHORUS
Let it be my good luck
to win praise all my life
for respecting the sky-walking laws,
born to stride
through the light-filled heavens.
Olympos
alone
was their father. 1000
No human mind could conceive them.
Those laws
neither sleep nor forget—
a mighty god lives on in them
who does not age.
A violent will
fathers the tyrant,
and violence, drunk
on wealth and power,
does him no good. 1010
He scales the heights—
until he’s thrown
down to his doom,
where quick feet are no use.
But there’s another fighting spirit
I ask god never to destroy—
the kind that makes our city thrive.
That god will protect us
I will never cease to believe.
But if a man 1020
speaks and acts with contempt—
flouts the law, sneers
at the stone gods in their shrines—
let a harsh death punish
his doomed indulgence.
Even as he wins he cheats—
he denies himself nothing—
his hand reaches for things
too sacred to be touched.
When crimes like these, which god hates, 1030
are not punished—but honored—
what good man will think his own life
safe from god’s arrows piercing his soul?
Why should I dance to this holy song?
Here the chorus stops dancing and speaks the next strophe motionless.
If prophecies don’t show the way
to events all men can see,
I will no longer honor
the holy place untouchable:
Earth’s navel at Delphi.
I will not go to Olympia 1040
nor the temple at Abai.
You, Zeus who hold power, if Zeus
lord of all is really who you are,
look at what’s happening here:
prophecies made to Laios fade;
men ignore them;
Apollo is nowhere
glorified with praise.
The gods lose force.
JOKASTA enters from the palace carrying a suppliant’s branch and some smoldering incense. She approaches the altar of Apollo near the palace door.
JOKASTA
Lords of my country, this thought 1050
came to me: to visit the gods’ shrines
with incense and a bough in my hands.
Oedipus lets alarms of every kind
inflame his mind. He won’t let past
experience calm his present fears,