The Plague and the Truth

Sophocles' Oedipus Rex opens years after the marriage, with Thebes suffering a plague that an oracle blames on an unpunished crime, the unavenged murder of the former king Laius. Oedipus, as determined a investigator of the truth as he was once an unknowing agent of the prophecy, pursues the killer's identity relentlessly even as witness after witness hints at a conclusion he refuses to see coming, and even as his wife Jocasta begs him to stop asking questions once she recognizes where the answers are heading.

The truth arrives from two directions at once: a messenger from Corinth reveals that Oedipus was never truly Polybus and Merope's son, and the shepherd who exposed the infant Oedipus on the mountainside confirms that the child he saved and gave away was Laius and Jocasta's own son. Jocasta hangs herself once she understands what has happened, and Oedipus, finding her body, blinds himself with the pins from her robe rather than look on what he has done. Sophocles returns to the character decades later in Oedipus at Colonus, where an aged, blind Oedipus, having wandered in exile for years with his daughter Antigone, arrives at a sacred grove near Athens and dies there under circumstances the play treats as a mysterious blessing rather than a further curse.