IN desperation, Creon promised the Theban throne to any man who could confound the riddling sphinx. Oedipus took up the challenge, and the sphinx was so dismayed by his quick-fire answer to her very hardest riddle that she threw herself into a chasm.
Creon kept his word. Oedipus became king of Thebes, fulfilling his tragic doom by taking Laius’s widow Jocasta as his queen. She bore him four children.
Ignorance was bliss for Oedipus, but the gods were outraged. They afflicted Thebes with a devastating plague, and Oedipus was told that the city could be saved only by avenging the blood of Laius. Still unsuspecting, Oedipus ordered a hard-hitting investigation into the old king’s murder.
When at last the dreadful truth was uncovered, poor Jocasta took her own life. King Oedipus blinded himself, and resigned his throne, but ended his days peacefully in the grove of the Eumenides at Colonos near Athens, cared for to the last by his devoted daughter Antigone.*
The Eumenides or Erinyes are the Furies, the goddesses of vengeance. In Sophocles’s play ‘Oedipus at Colonos’, it is indicated that Colonus was a rather smart area of Athens, and that the Furies had accepted Oedipus’s sufferings as an offering. The favour of the gods now went with him, and Creon’s Thebes lost its place to Athens.