*
If the story shifts as it does between Homer and Sophocles, what are the elements that remain intact in both? Son kills father, mother and son marry, the true nature of their relationship becomes known, mother hangs herself. But even those stark details don’t hold up in every version of the myth. When Euripides takes on the story of Jocasta in his Phoinissai – The Phoenician Women – in 409 BCE, he presents us with yet another variant. The play is set some time after the revelation that Jocasta and Oedipus are mother and son, and it begins with a long speech by Jocasta. So right from the outset, we can see a crucial difference between Euripides’ version and the overlapping versions of the story in Sophocles and Homer: in Euripides, Jocasta doesn’t die when the truth about her marriage is revealed. She doesn’t hang herself, she continues to live in the royal palace of Thebes. Her sons, Polynices and Eteocles, are heirs to the throne. Their response to Oedipus’ disgrace and self-blinding was to lock him away in the palace as a prisoner and hope everyone would forget about him. Their mother, on the other hand, has remained a valued member of the royal household. The Phoenician Women was produced about twenty years after Oedipus Tyrannos was performed at the Dionysia, and Jocasta’s opening monologue therefore serves a dual function. It sets the scene for the play we’re about to watch. But it also jolts us into acknowledging that the story we’re watching now isn’t quite what we thought it was （Euripides makes a habit of this, as we’ll see later, with Medea）。
Jocasta begins by telling us the backstory so we know where we are now. She starts with Laius. He and Jocasta were childless, she explains, so he went to consult the Oracle at Delphi. Apollo was quite certain and specific about Laius’ prospects of fatherhood. Have a child, and he’ll kill you, and your whole house will run with blood.11 Pretty unequivocal advice, we might think. But Laius disregarded it when he was drunk. Realizing his error, he arranged for the child to be exposed on the mountains, but servants of Polybus （the king of Corinth） found the baby and gave him to their queen, who tricked the king into believing the child was hers.
It’s interesting just how much more focus there is on the feelings of women in this speech than in any earlier version we have. Euripides was an astonishing writer of women. He wrote more and better female roles than almost any other male playwright who has ever lived. Which is all the more remarkable when we remember that the actors playing female roles in the Athenian theatres would have been young men, and the audience may very well have been all-male too, at least at the Dionysia when these plays were first performed. It’s not just that women in Euripides’ plays have agency and make decisions which advance the plot （although they do）， it’s also that he writes them with a rare insight into areas which simply don’t feature in men’s lives in the same way. The Oedipus story which Sophocles gives us can be read almost as a parable for male anxiety （this, surely, is part of what made it so fascinating to Freud, who liked to theorize about men because he found women such a puzzle）。 Laius is terrified of being overpowered by his son （the fear of literal or metaphorical castration at the hands of sons is a theme throughout Greek myth, as we saw in the last chapter, with Ouranos, Kronos and Zeus）。 Polybus is terrified of not having a male heir and so is willing to take an abandoned child and call it his own. The secrecy which he and Merope maintain over this adoption is part of the problem: if they had been honest with Oedipus about his origins, he might never have left Corinth to consult the Oracle, and then fulfilled his awful destiny. Oedipus’ paranoia and swiftness to anger are revealed early in the play: Creon and Tiresias aren’t conspiring against him, as he initially believes, but his fear that they seek to undermine him is genuine and crippling. We can easily believe this man was provoked to a lethal fury by Laius’ obnoxious driving when they met at the crossroads （Oedipus Tyrannos must be the earliest example of a tragedy caused by road rage）。
At every stage in his Sophoclean story, the destiny Oedipus tries to avoid is brought closer by the actions of men, well-meaning or otherwise: Laius who fathers him and can’t kill him; the shepherd who won’t kill him; the Corinthian messenger who saves him; the drunk man who tells Oedipus he’s adopted; Polybus who lies about the adoption; Laius again, who antagonizes him and assaults him; Tiresias who always knew the truth but refused to divulge it. And underpinning the whole thing, an anxiety which was prevalent throughout the ancient world, as we can see from the laws which restrict women’s behaviour and movement: who is the father of this child? No one ever really knows except the mother.