Oedipus Tyrannus

Sophocles

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

  1. He has made a rascal seer his mouth piece: as for himself, he keeps his lips wholly pure.
Iocasta
  1. Then absolve yourself of the things about which you are speaking. Listen to me, and take comfort in learning that nothing of mortal birth shares in the science of the seer.
  2. I will give you a pithy proof of this. An oracle came to Laius once—I will not say from Phoebus himself, but from his ministers—saying that he would suffer his doom at the hands of the child to be born to him and me.
  3. And Laius—as, at least, the rumor goes—was murdered one day by foreign robbers at a place where the three highways meet. And the child’s birth was not yet three days past, when Laius pinned his ankles together and had him thrown, by others’ hands, on a remote mountain.