Oedipus Tyrannus

Sophocles

Sophocles the plays and fragments, Part 1: The Oedipus Tyrannus. Jebb, Richard Claverhouse, Sir, translator. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1887.

  1. By her own hand. You will not suffer the worst part of the painful event, since you do not behold the events. Nevertheless, so far as my memory serves,
  2. you will learn that unhappy woman’s fate. When, frantic, she passed within the vestibule, she rushed straight towards her marriage couch, clutching her hair with the fingers of both hands. Once within the chamber,
  3. she dashed the doors together behind her, then called on the name of Laius, long since a corpse, thinking of that son, born long ago, by whose hand the father was slain, leaving the mother to breed accursed offspring with his own child. And she bewailed the marriage in which, wretched woman, she had given birth to a twofold brood,
  4. husband by husband, children by her child. And how she perished is more than I know. For with a shriek Oedipus burst in, and did not allow us to watch her woe until the end: on him, as he rushed around, our eyes were set.