Oedipus Tyrannus
Sophocles
Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 1: The Oedipus Tyrannus. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1887.
- Pan, the mountain-roaming father? Or was it a bride of Loxias that bore you? For dear to him are all the upland pastures.
- Or perhaps it was Cyllene’s lord, or the Bacchants’ god, dweller on the hill-tops, that received you, a new-born joy, from one of the nymphs of Helicon, with whom he most often sports.
- Elders, if it is right for me, who have never met the man, to guess, I think I see the herdsman we have been looking for for a lone time. In his venerable old age he tallies with this stranger’s years, and moreover I recognize those who bring him, I think, as servants of mine.
- But perhaps you have an advantage in knowledge over me, if you have seen the herdsman before.
- Yes, I know him, be sure. He was in the service of Laius—trusty as any shepherd.
- I ask you first, Corinthian stranger, if this is the man you mean.
- He is, the one you are looking at.
- You, old man—look this way and answer all that I ask—were you once in the service of Laius?
- I was—not a bought slave, but reared in his house.
- Employed in what labor, or what way of life?
- For the better part of my life I tended the flocks.
- And what regions did you most frequently haunt?
- Sometimes Cithaeron, sometimes the neighboring ground.
- Are you aware of ever having seen this man in these parts?
- Doing what? What man do you mean?
- This man here. Have you ever met him before?
- Not so that I could speak at once from memory.
- And no wonder, master. But I will bring clear recollection to his ignorance. I am sure he knows well of the time we dwelled in the region of Cithaeron
- for six month periods, from spring to Arcturus, he with two flocks, and I, his comrade, with one. And then for the winter I used to drive my flock to my own fold, and he took his to the fold of Laius.
- Did any of this happen as I tell it, or did it not?