And when that day of reckoning finally comes, Oedipus’ celebrated cleverness is at the very core of the play. The chorus beg him to help lift the plague, to help solve the crime of who killed Laius, because he is famously clever. Both the priest at the beginning of the play and Oedipus himself mention his brilliance in solving the riddle of the Sphinx. And yet it is Jocasta, long before Oedipus, who realizes the truth of who they both are: wife and husband, mother and son. She is the cleverest person in the room and we barely notice it because we’re too busy concentrating on Oedipus. She has time to withdraw into the palace, make the decision to take her own life and carry that out, all before he works out what she realizes immediately.
And when Jocasta hangs herself, she is making an explicit statement. In Greek myth, hanging is usually the method of suicide employed by virginal girls （it is the method Antigone, the daughter of Jocasta and Oedipus, will employ in Sophocles’ Antigone, for example）。 So when Jocasta hangs herself, she is not only ending what she perceives to be a cursed life and marriage. She is also wishing herself back to the time before Oedipus was conceived, to when she had never been married, never had a child, never had sex.
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Why has it been so easy for audiences to overlook the terrible fate which befalls Jocasta? We’re encouraged, certainly, to focus on Oedipus: he has more than five times as many lines as any other character in the play. And the character who has the second-largest number of lines isn’t Jocasta, it’s Creon. In this 1,530-line play, Jocasta has just over 120 lines: not even a tenth of the whole. So perhaps it’s inevitable that we respond more to Oedipus’ predicament. Also, he is still alive at the end of the play. His face （or theatrical mask, as it would have been in fifth-century BCE Athens） is a ruin of blackened sockets and pain. Jocasta’s hanging takes place offstage, so we aren’t made to confront the horror of what has happened to her in quite the same way.
This strange fate of Jocasta’s – to be overlooked, even as she is demolished by the same destiny that overtakes her son – is one which seems to follow her through history. But it didn’t begin like that. In her earliest incarnation, we meet her when she is already dead. In Book Eleven of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus visits the Underworld. He needs to consult the now-dead Tiresias about his best route home, and while he’s there he sees a parade of the famous dead. Among them is kalēn Epikastēn, beautiful Epicaste, the mother of Oedipus.8 She committed a grave act in ignorance, Homer tells us. She married her son. The whole story takes Homer ten short lines to explain: Oedipus killed his father and married her. The gods immediately made these things known to men. Oedipus lived in Thebes among the Cadmeans, suffering greatly at the hands of the gods. She went down to Hades, having fastened a noose to the lofty roof, overwhelmed by grief, leaving many sorrows behind for him.
The differences between this earliest extant version of the myth and the Sophocles version are important. Firstly, Jocasta has a different name: Epicaste isn’t a variant spelling. It’s definitely the same woman, though, as we can see from the description of what happened to her. But then the story deviates from the version we know: the gods make things known aphar – ‘immediately’。9 In Sophocles’ version of the myth, Oedipus and Jocasta have four children before their incest is revealed. The Oracle had told Oedipus he would produce incestuous offspring when he went to consult Apollo at Delphi all those years earlier. But this is obviously not part of the story Homer is telling: here, the revelation takes place as soon as Oedipus and Epicaste are married. There is also no mention of Oedipus being blinded, or banished: he remains living among the Cadmeans （a poetic word for Thebans: Thebes was founded by Cadmus）。 Epicaste hangs herself, as in Sophocles, and Oedipus is left with a raft of sorrows. Brief as it is, the story is told from both perspectives in roughly equal amounts; it starts and ends with Epicaste.
The issue of whether Oedipus and Jocasta/Epicaste have children has provoked debate for millennia. Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, doesn’t believe that Oedipus and Jocasta had children together, quoting the above passage from Homer to back up his argument.10 Rather, he says, the children’s mother was a woman named Eurygeneia, the daughter of Hyperphas. This is made quite clear, Pausanias adds, by the author of the Oedipodeia. Sadly, for those of us who would like to know more about this version of events, the Oedipodeia – an epic poem about Oedipus written around the same time as the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed – does not survive. But still, we can glean from Pausanias （who, living in the second century CE, could presumably lay his hands on a copy） that Oedipus and Jocasta marry, have their incestuous relationship revealed immediately, or near enough, and then Oedipus goes on to remarry and father children with a second wife.