The Other Oedipus

The Riddle of Oedipus

Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 10.456b

"There walks on land a creature of two feet, of four feet, and of three; it has one voice, but sole among animals that grow upon land or in the sea, it can change its nature; nay, when it walks propped on most feet, then is the speed of its limbs less than it has ever been before."

Homer's Oedipus

Iliad XXIII 679-80

[Mekisteus] who once came to Thebes and the tomb of Oedipus after he fell in battle, and there [in the funeral games at boxing] defeated all the Cadmeians.

Odyssey XI 272-277

And I saw the mother of Oedipus, beautiful Epicaste. What a monstrous thing she did, in all innocence - she married her own son... who'd killed his father, then he married her! But the gods soon made it known to all mankind. So he in growing pain ruled on in beloved Thebes, lording Cadmus' people - thanks to the gods' brutal plan - while she went down to Death who guards the massive gates. Lashing a noose to a steep rafter, there she hanged aloft, strangling in all her anguish, leaving her son to bear the world of horror a mother's Furies bring to life.

Fate and Furies

Pindar, Second Olympian Ode for Theron of Akragas in 476 (lines 34-42)

Many are the streams that come to men, now with the heart's delight, and now with sorrow. So Fate, with heaven-born joy brings grief, itself to turn about with time; Ever since his doomed son encountered Laios and killed him, fulfilling the oracle spoken in Pytho long before. The sharp-eyed Fury saw and destroyed the warrior-race in slaughter one of another.

Oedipal Dreams

Herodotus Histories VI.107-8

Now the man who guided the barbarians was Hippias, son of Pisistratus, and he guided them to Marathon In the previous night he had a dream, and the dream was this: he thought that he was lying with his own mother. His reading of the dream's meaning was that he would return to Athens and, having established his rule there, would die in his own country, an old man....

When the barbarians had disembarked, it was he that put them in order of battle. While he was busy about all this, there came upon him a fit of coughing and sneezing greater than he was wont. As he was an old man, most of his teeth were shaky, and with the violence of the cough, one of the teeth fell out. It fell in the sand, and he tried exceedingly hard to find it again. When the tooth did not appear, he groaned heavily and said to the onlookers, 'This land is not ours, nor shall we subjugate it; for the share of it that was mine - the tooth has it.' Thus Hippias saw the dream as being fulfilled.

Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus, 980-982

As to your mother's marriage bed, - don't fear it. Before this, in dreams too, as well as oracles, many a man has lain with his own mother. But he to whom such things are nothing bears his life most easily.

(http://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/oedipus.html)