Oedipus: Our city reeks with the smoke of burning incense, rings with cries for the Healer

and wailing for the dead. I thought it wrong, to hear the truth from others. Here I am
myself— you all know me; the world knows my fame: I am Oedipus.
[Chorus from the audience, slowly rises to enter the stage, saying these lines]
Chorus: Our city— look around you, see with your own eyes. . . Thebes is dying. The plague,
the fiery god of fever hurls down on the city— raging plague in all its vengeance.
Act now—we beg you, best of men! Act, defend yourself, your former glory! You helped us
stand, only to fall once more. Oh raise up our city, set us on our feet.
Oedipus: I know you are sick to death, all of you, but sick as you are, not one is sick as I. Your
pain strikes each of you alone, each in the confines of himself, no other. But my spirit grieves
for the city, for myself and all of you.
Chorus: I will tell you what I heard from the god. Apollo commands us—
“Drive the corrup on from the land, don’t harbor it any longer, past all cure, don’t nurse it in
your soil - Laius, the former king was killed. Pay the killers back – whoever is responsible.”
Reverbera ng screeches of ‘Laius was killed’
Oedipus: Whoever killed the king may decide to kill me too, with the same violent hand—by
avenging Laius, I defend myself. So I will fight for him as if he were my father, stop at nothing,
search the world to lay my hands on the man who shed his blood.
Chorus: Here is the seer, the man of God. The truth lives inside him, him alone. [One of the
Chorus enters as Tiresias]
Oedipus: O Tiresias, master of all the mysteries of our life! Blind as you are, you can feel all
the more what sickness haunts our city. You, my lord, are the one shield, the one savior we
can find.
Chorus: Rescue yourself, your city, rescue me— rescue everything infected by the dead. We
are in your hands.
Tiresias: Is that so! From this day onward speak to no one, not these ci zens, not myself. You
are the curse, the corrup on of the land!
Oedipus: Aren’t you appalled to start up such a story? You think you can get away with this?
You’ve lost your power, stone-blind, stone-deaf—senses, eyes blind as stone!
Tiresias: I pity you, flinging at me the very insults each man here will fling at you so soon.
Oedipus. Riddles—all you can say are riddles, murk and darkness.
Tiresias: Ah, but aren’t you the best man alive at solving riddles?
Oedipus: Take him away. You’re a nuisance here. Out of the way.
Tiresias: I will go, once I have said what I came here to say.
The man you’ve sought so long, the murderer of Laius— he is here. Revealed at last, brother
and father both to the children he embraces, to his mother son and husband both—he sowed
the loins his father sowed, he spilled his father’s blood! [Tiresias merges back with chorus as
he says this and the en re chorus takes up the riddle]
Oedipus: He says I murdered Laius—I am guilty.
Chorus: You murdered Laius—You are guilty.
Oedipus: But my father was Polybus, king of Corinth. My mother, a Dorian, Merope. Some
man at a banquet shouted that I am not my father’s son. I went to mother and father,
ques oned them closely, and they were enraged at the accusa on and the fool who let it fly.
I was sa sfied, but s ll this thing kept gnawing at me.
I set out for Delphi, and the god Apollo spurned me. He flashed before my eyes a future great
with pain, terror, disaster—I can hear him cry. “You are fated to couple with your mother, you
will bring a breed of children into the light no man can bear to see— you will kill your father,
the one who gave you life!” [Oedipus along with chorus says the prophecy]
I heard all that and ran, always running toward some place where I would never see the shame
of all those oracles come true. Wasn’t I born for torment?! I am abomina on—heart and soul!
I must be exiled, and even in exile never see my parents, never set foot on my na ve ground
again. Else I am doomed to couple with my mother and cut my father down.. Polybus who
reared me, gave me life.
[Messenger from Chorus enters]
Messenger: Polybus is dead and gone.
Oedipus: How—murder? sickness?—what? what killed him?
Messenger: A light p of the scales can put old bones to rest.

Oedipus: Sickness then—poor man, it wore him down. But my mother’s bed, I fear—
Messenger. What makes you so afraid?
Oedipus: Apollo told me once—it is my fate— I must make love with my own mother, shed
my father’s blood with my own hands. So for years I’ve abandoned Corinth.
Messenger: Don’t you know? You’ve really nothing to fear.
Oedipus: But why? If I’m their son—Merope, Polybus?
Messenger: You were a gi , years ago—know for a fact he took you from my hands. I stumbled
on you, down the woody flanks of Mount Cithaeron. Your ankles were pinned together. I set
you free.
Oedipus: Dear god, who did it?— mother? father? Tell me.
Messenger: I don’t know. The one who gave you to me, he’d know more.
Oedipus: What? You took me from someone else? You didn’t find me yourself?
Messenger: No sir, another shepherd passed you on to me.
Oedipus: Who? Do you know? Describe him.

Messenger: He called himself a servant of . . . if I remember rightly—Laius.

Oedipus: Does anyone know that herdsman, the one he men oned? Anyone seen him in the
fields, here in the city? Out with it! The me has come to reveal this once for all.
Chorus: Stop—in the name of god, if you love your own life, call off this search!
[Shepherd enters from the Chorus]
Oedipus: You, old man, come over here— look at me. Answer all my ques ons. Did you ever
serve King Laius?
Messenger: Come, tell me. You gave me a child back then, a boy, remember? A li le fellow to
rear, my very own.
[Silence]
Oedipus: Did you give him that child? He’s asking.
Shepherd: I did . . . I wish to god I’d died that day.
Oedipus: Where did you get it? Your house? Someone else’s?
Shepherd: It wasn’t mine, no, I got it from . . . someone.
Oedipus: Which one of them?
Shepherd: the child came from the house . . . of Laius.
Oedipus: A slave? or born of his own blood?
Shepherd: Oh no, I’m right at the edge, the horrible truth—I’ve got to say it!
Oedipus: And I’m at the edge of hearing horrors, yes, but I must hear.
Shepherd: All right! His son, they said it was—his son! But the one inside, your wife, she’d tell
it best.

Oedipus: My wife—she gave it to you?

Shepherd: Yes, yes, my king.
Oedipus: Why, what for?
Shepherd: To kill it.
Oedipus: Her own child, how could she?
Shepherd: She was afraid— frightening prophecies.
Oedipus: What?
Shepherd: They said— he’d kill his parents.
Oedipus: But you gave him to this old man—why?
Shepherd: I pi ed the li le baby, master, hoped he’d take him off to his own country, far away,
but he saved him for this, this fate. If you are that man believe me, you were born for pain.
Oedipus. O god— all come true, all burst to light! O light—now let me look my last on you! I
stand revealed at last— cursed in my birth, cursed in marriage, cursed in the lives I cut down
with these hands.
Chorus: Is there a man more agonized? More wed to pain and frenzy? Not a man on earth,
the joy of your life ground down to nothing.
Oedipus: “You, you’ll see no more the pain I suffered, all the pain I caused! Too long you looked
on the ones you never should have seen, blind to the ones you longed to see, to know! Blind
from this hour on! Blind in the darkness—blind!” [Messenger and Shepherd covers Oedipus
eyes with their palms.
Chorus: [All slowly walk to Oedipus and all palms cover his eyes, as they say] O the terror—
the suffering, for all the world to see, the worst terror that ever met my eyes. What madness
swept over you? What god, what dark power leapt beyond all bounds, beyond belief, to crush
your wretched life?— godforsaken, cursed by the gods! I pity you but I can’t bear to look. I
shudder at the sight.
Dreadful, what you’ve done . . . how could you bear it, gouging out your eyes?
Oedipus: [with his eyes covered by all palms, blind] I’d never have come to this, my father’s
murderer—never been branded mother’s husband, all men see me now! Now, loathed by the
gods, son of the mother I defiled coupling in my father’s bed, spawning lives in the loins, that
spawned my wretched life. What grief can crown this grief? It’s mine alone, my des ny—I am
Oedipus!
Chorus [looks at audience]: People of Thebes, my countrymen, look on Oedipus. He solved
the famous riddle with his brilliance, he rose to power, a man beyond all power. Who could
behold his greatness without envy? Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him.
Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day, count no man happy ll he dies, free of pain
at last.
[hums the tune from the beginning]