Exile of Oedipus
event · 3 works · 3 mentions · 8 anchored passages
Oedipus's banishment · Oedipus's departure into exile · banish himself · banished · beggar · cast me out · driven from the land · exile · lead me from the land · outcast
in the texts
Phoenissae
Creon's banishment of Oedipus from Thebes, followed by Oedipus's departure with Antigone toward his fated death at Colonus.
for Teiresias clearly said that the city would never prosper as long as you made your home here.
I escaped from that— would that Cithaeron had sunk into hell’s yawning abyss, because it did not destroy me, but.
Oedipus:
Oedipus at Colonus
Oedipus' expulsion from Thebes and long wandering, which frames his arrival, supplication, and hostility to Theban claims.
No, they saw me sent forth homeless, and heard the crier proclaim my sentence of exile.
But when my fierce anger had spent its force, and seclusion in the house was sweet to me, it was then that you thrust me from the house and cast me from the land.
We have come to learn as foreigners from the townsmen, and to bring to completion whatever we hear.
Oedipus Tyrannus
The removal Oedipus demands for himself as the polluted parricide and incestuous man who must not remain in Thebes.
He cries for some one to unbar the gates and show to all the Cadmeans his father’s slayer, his mother’s—the words must not pass my lips— in order to banish himself from the land and not to put the house under his own curse by waiting here.
Hurry, friends, lead me from the land, lead me from here, the utterly lost, the thrice-accursed, the mortal most hateful to the gods!
Oh, am I not utterly unclean, seeing that I must be banished, and in banishment neither see my own people, nor set foot in my own land, or else be joined in wedlock to my mother, and slay my father Polybus, who sired and reared me?