And no one thinks to ask the mother how she feels, until Euripides comes along and gives Jocasta the opening monologue of The Phoenician Women. And the rawness of her pain is almost tangible even years after the events. Laius fathered her son while drunk, and when he realized he’d ignored Apollo’s advice, he pierced the baby’s ankles with a metal pin and handed him over to servants to abandon him on the mountain. This is all the information we need to make sense of the story （it’s pretty much what we get in Sophocles）。 But Euripides gives Jocasta more to say. The shepherds don’t give her child to Polybus, the king. Rather, she says, they take the baby to the queen （Euripides doesn’t name Merope, but let’s call her that） and she passes the baby off as her own. Just this small detail gives us a huge insight into Merope’s life. She and her husband have clearly been trying and failing to conceive: she wants a baby, and for that baby to be thought of as her own child. She and Polybus presumably have sex – because he believes Oedipus is their son – but are not sufficiently close for him to be surprised when she claims to have given birth with no warning. Not only is there a physical gap between them （most people would notice if a woman who had never looked nine months pregnant suddenly produced a child, particularly if they were married to that woman）， there is also an emotional gap: Merope and Polybus both wanted a child, it seems, but she can only have one if she lies to him. Presumably, unlike in Sophocles’ version, he didn’t want to adopt.
And look at the language Jocasta uses to describe what happened: She nursed the child my labour pains produced.12 The physicality of the two women – of Jocasta’s body being wrenched in pain, of Merope’s body producing milk for a child she hadn’t given birth to – is devastating. Jocasta’s terrible loss, the agony of being deprived of her newborn son, is not forgotten, even decades later. Because how could it have been? And how can we blame Merope for anything when her body was crying out for the child she unexpectedly acquired? Do the Corinthian servants know of her desperation? Is that why they bring the child to her rather than Polybus?
Jocasta hurries through the description of Oedipus killing Laius. Why drag it out, she asks. Pais patera kainei: ‘son killed father’。13 And then she goes on to explain that Creon, her brother, had been so keen to get rid of the Sphinx （who was outside Thebes making a nuisance of herself） that he had offered Jocasta in marriage to whoever solved the Sphinx’s riddle. It’s all very well making this kind of blanket offer, but you certainly open yourself up to the risk of having to marry your sister off to a much younger （and, as it transpires, related） man. Creon is another name in the list of men who – for good reasons and bad – have caused Jocasta and Oedipus untold grief.
But there are two more names to add to the list in this Euripidean version of Jocasta’s story: the sons she bore to Oedipus, Polynices and Eteocles. As soon as they are old enough, the shame they feel for their father’s crimes means they decide to lock Oedipus away, a prisoner in his own palace. He is so incensed by this that he issues the unholiest of curses upon them, praying that they should turn on one another. To try and avoid this curse （these sons have apparently learned nothing from their father’s attempts to evade his destiny）， the two young men decide that Polynices should go into voluntary exile for one year while Eteocles has the throne. At the end of a year, they will swap.
They don’t, of course. Eteocles refuses to give up the throne, and Polynices declares war on his city （this is also the plot of Aeschylus’ play Seven Against Thebes. Thebes has seven gates to defend, so seven heroes march against it）。 Jocasta has stepped in to try and resolve the impasse, persuading her sons to meet and talk before all-out war destroys the city. She concludes her opening speech by begging Zeus to intervene and make peace between the two men.
But Zeus doesn’t hear her prayer and discussions between Polynices and Eteocles break down. Jocasta finally gives way to despair, saying: I have given birth to so many sorrows.14 The double meaning is evident. Jocasta takes her daughter Antigone with her to try to reason with her warring sons. But they are too late. The two men kill one another in single combat and Jocasta takes the sword which lies on the ground between them and drives it through her own throat.
Euripides’ version of Jocasta has a great deal more to say than Sophocles’ （and no one speaks in Homer’s version）。 She also has a lot more to do. Because she doesn’t die at the point when her maternal relationship with Oedipus becomes known, and because Oedipus stays in Thebes but behind closed doors, Jocasta acquires a political role. She negotiates with her sons like a high-level diplomat. Her role as their mother is not the only card she plays （she pleads with Eteocles to think what will happen to the young women of Thebes, for example, if the city loses the war he and Polynices are determined to have）。 And when she cannot save her boys, she takes her own life in a masculine way: she dies on the battlefield, using a sword picked up from between the bodies of her sons to end her life. This Jocasta is a very different woman from the one we thought we knew.