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OEDIPUS (OiSiirovs, O16tir63i7s, Wine...

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Originally appearing in Volume V20, Page 13 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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OEDIPUS (OiSiirovs, O16tir63i7s, Wines, from Gr. ot&eiv swell, and gobs
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foot, i.e. " the swollen-footed ")
  ' in Greek legend, son of Lalus, king of Thebes, and
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Jocasta (Iocaste) . Lalus, having been warned by an oracle that he would be killed by his son, ordered him to be exposed, with his feet pierced, immediately after his birth . Thus Oedipus grew up ignorant of his parentage, and, meeting Lalus in a narrow way, quarrelled with him and slew him . The country was ravaged by a monster, the Sphinx; Oedipus solved the riddle which it proposed to its victims, freed the country, and married- his own
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mother . In the Odyssey it is said that the gods disclosed the impiety . Epicaste (as Jocasta is called in Homer) hanged herself, and Oedipus lived as king in Thebes tormented by the Erinyes of his mother . In the tragic poets the tale takes a different form . Oedipus fulfils an ancient prophecy in killing his
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father; he is the blind instrument in the hands of
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fate . The further treatment of the tale by Aeschylus is unknown . Sophocles describes in his Oedipus Tyrannus how Oedipus was resolved to pursue to the end the mystery of the
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death of LaIus, and thus unravelled the dark tale, and in horror put out his own eyes . The sequel of the tale is told in the Oedipus Coloneus . Banished by his sons, he is tended by the loving care of his daughters .

He comes to

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Attica and dies in the grove of the Eumenides at Colonus, in his death welcomed and pardoned by the fate which had pursued him throughout his
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life . In addition to the two tragedies of Sophocles, the legend formed the subject of a trilogy by Aeschylus, of which only the Seven against Thebes is extant; of the Phoenissae of Euripides; and of the Oedipus and Phoenissae of
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Seneca . See A . Miler's exhaustive article in Roscher's Lexikon der Mythologic; F . W . Schneidewin, Die Sage von Oedipus (1852); D . Cornparetti, Edipo e la mitologia comparata (1867); M . Brea], " Le Mythe d' Edipe," in Melanges de mythologie (1878), who explains Oedipus as a personification of
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light, and his
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blinding as the disappearance of the sun at the end of the day; J . Paulson in Eranos . Acta philologica Suecana, i, (Upsala, 1896) places the
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original home of the legend in
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Egyptian Thebes, and identifies Oedipus with the Egyptian
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god Seth, represented as the hippopotamus " with swollen
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foot," which was said to kill its father in order to take its place with the mother . 0 . Crusius (Beitrage zur griechischen Mythologie, 1886, p .

21)

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sees in the
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marriage of Oedipus with his mother an agrarian myth (with
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special reference to Oed .
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Tyr . 1497), while Hofer (in Roscher's Lexikon) suggests that the episodes of the
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murder of his father and of his marriage are reminiscences of the overthrow of Cronus by
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Zeus and of the union of Zeus with his own
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sister .
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Medieval Legends.—In the
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Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine (13th century) and the Mystere de la Passion of
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Jean Michel (15th century) and Arnoul Greban (15th century), the story of Oedipus is associated with the name of Judas . The main idea is the same as in the classical account . The Judas legend, however, never really became popular, whereas that of Oedipus was handed down both orally and in written
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national tales (Albanian, Finnish, Cypriote) . One incident (the incest unwittingly committed) frequently recurs in connexion with the life of Gregory the
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Great . The Theban legend, which reached its fullest development in the Thebais of Statius and in Seneca, reappeared in the
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Roman de Thebes (the
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work of an unknown imitator of Benoit de Sainte-More) . Oedipus is also the subject of an
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anonymous medieval
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romance (15th century), Le Roman d' Edipus, fils de Layus, in which the sphinx is depicted as a cunning and ferocious giant . The Oedipus legend was handed down to the period of the Renaissance by the Roman and its imitations, which then fell into oblivion . Even to the
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present day the legend has 1 It is probable that the story of the piercing of his feet is a subsequent invention to explain the name, or is due to a false etymology (from otais), othiiroes in reality meaning the " wise " (from oIha), chiefly in reference to his having solved the riddle, the syllable -revs having no significance . survived amongst the
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modern Greeks, without any traces of the influence of
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Christianity (B .

Schmidt, Griechische Marchen, 1877) . The
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works of the ancient tragedians (especially Seneca, in preference to the Greek) came into vogue, and were slavishly followed by French and
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Italian imitators down to the 17th century . See L . Constans, La Legende d'CEdipe clans l'antiquite, au moyen age, et dans
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les temps modernes (1881); D . Comparetti's Edipo and Jebb's introduction for the Oedipus of Dryden, Corneille and Voltaire; A . Heintze, Gregorius auf dem Steine, der mittelalterliche Oedipus (progr., Stolp, 1897); V . Diederichs, Russische Verwandte der Legende von Gregor auf dem Stein and der Sage von Judas Ischariot," in Russische Revue (188o); S . Novakovitch, " Die Oedipussage in der siidslavischen Volksdichtung," in Archiv fur slavische Philologie xi . (1888) .

End of Article: OEDIPUS (OiSiirovs, O16tir63i7s, Wines, from Gr. ot&eiv swell, and gobs foot, i.e. " the swollen-footed ")
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