Oedipus was a mythical king of Thebes and a tragic hero who unwittingly fulfilled a prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, bringing disaster on his city and house. Best known from Sophocles's Theban plays — Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone — he solves the Sphinx's riddle, rules Thebes, and upon discovering the truth blinds himself and goes into exile. The legend gave Sigmund Freud the name and mythic precedent for the Oedipus complex.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Oedipus" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Basics of the myth
Born to Laius and Jocasta of Thebes, Oedipus was exposed on Mount Cithaeron after an oracle warned that Laius's son would kill him. A shepherd spared the infant; he was adopted by Polybus and Merope of Corinth. Learning from Delphi that he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother, and believing Polybus and Merope to be his parents, he fled toward Thebes. At a place where three roads met he quarreled with an older man — Laius, unknown to him — and killed him.
At Thebes he answered the Sphinx's riddle ("What walks on four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three at night?" — man), won the throne and the widowed queen Jocasta, and fathered Eteocles, Polynices, Antigone, and Ismene. Years later a plague forced him to hunt Laius's killer; the investigation revealed that he himself was the murderer and Jocasta's son. Jocasta hanged herself; Oedipus blinded himself with pins from her dress and was exiled, guided by Antigone, dying at Colonus under Theseus's protection in Sophocles's account.
II.Ancient literary sources
Fragments and allusions appear in Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar; Homer's Odyssey already knows Oedipus as having married his mother and continuing to rule after her death — a sharper contrast with the Sophoclean exile. Aeschylus wrote a Theban trilogy culminating in Seven Against Thebes. Sophocles's three Theban plays, written years apart and not a true trilogy, became the canonical narrative: discovery and blinding in Oedipus Rex, sacred death at Colonus, and the aftermath of the brothers' war in Antigone.
Euripides's Phoenissae and lost Oedipus vary details — Jocasta surviving longer, Oedipus blinded by Laius's servants, or different motives at the crossroads. Later handbooks such as the Bibliotheca preserve the Sphinx's riddle in poetic form.
III.Aftermath and the Theban house
Oedipus's sons agreed to alternate the Theban throne yearly; when Eteocles refused to yield, Polynices attacked with the Seven Against Thebes and the brothers killed each other. Creon's ban on burying Polynices and Antigone's defiance form the core of Sophocles's Antigone. The curse on the house is variously traced to Laius's crimes (including the rape of Chrysippus in some plays) as well as to Oedipus's own doom.
Themes of flawed humanity, reluctant destiny, and knowledge that destroys the knower made Oedipus a central figure for later philosophy, psychoanalysis, and drama from Seneca to the modern stage.