Laius

It happened somehow that my son, Oedipus, guessed the Sphinx’s song;

They call me Jocasta, for so my father named me, and I am married to Laius.

and so did Laius, my husband, seeking to learn if the child he had exposed was dead.

Oedipus:

Laius, my lord, was the leader of our land before you assumed control of this state.

He was slain, and the god now bids us to take vengeance on his murderers, whoever they are.

for the matter is combined and “cofated”—so he calls it, because it is so fated both that Laius will lie with his wife and that he will beget Oedipus by her—' just as, if it had been said, “Milo will wrestle at Olympia,” and someone should rejoin, “Therefore, whether he has an adversary or has not, he will wrestle,” he would be in error;

And, to omit the loves of women, to whom nature has granted greater license, who either doubts about the rape of Ganymede what the poets mean, or does not understand what Laius in Euripides both says and desires?

yet, though I have judgment, nature forces me" — that is, his having become given over to the passion.

and Oedipus, reared at home, would not have killed Laius, knowing that he was his own son.

Just as they say of that Laius, the lover of Chrysippus, who, having come to Delphi, asked the god how children might be born to him.

This would date from about the time of Laius the son of Labdacus, grandson of Polydorus and great-grandson of Cadmus.

In such a way does Fate, who keeps their pleasant fortune to be handed from father to son, bring at another time some painful reversal together with god-sent prosperity, since the destined son met and killed Laius, and fulfilled the oracle of Pytho, spoken long before.

—Of your father?

Do you know of a son of Laius?

and I may not return, since I am guilty of a father’s blood.