previous next

Chorus
Look, there comes our lord, Theseus son of Aegeus, [550] at the sound of your voice, to do that for which he was summoned.

Enter Theseus.

Theseus
Through hearing from many in the past about the bloody marring of your sight, I recognized it was you, son of Laius; and now on coming here, through sight I am more fully certain. [555] For your clothing and that heart-rending face alike assure me that it is you. And in all compassion I ask you, ill-fated Oedipus, with what petition to the city and to me have you taken your place here, you and the poor maiden at your side. Declare it. Dire indeed must be the fortune which you tell, [560] for me to stand aloof from it; since I know that I myself also was reared in exile, just as you, and that in foreign lands I wrestled with perils to my life, like no other man. [565] Never, then, would I turn aside from a stranger, such as you are now, or refuse to help in his deliverance. For I know well that I am a man, and that my portion of tomorrow is no greater than yours.

Oedipus
Theseus, in a few words your nobleness has come to such a point [570] that I need make only a brief reply. You have said who I am, from what father I am sprung, and from what land I have come; and so nothing else remains for me but to speak my wish, and the tale is told.

Theseus
[575] Then inform me of this very thing, so that I may learn it.

Oedipus
I come to offer you my care-worn body as a gift—not one fine to look on, but the gains from it are better than beauty.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Notes (Sir Richard C. Jebb, 1899)
load focus Greek (Francis Storr, 1912)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (5 total)
  • Commentary references to this page (3):
    • Sir Richard C. Jebb, Commentary on Sophocles: Antigone, 526
    • Sir Richard C. Jebb, Commentary on Sophocles: Ajax, 1168
    • Sir Richard C. Jebb, Commentary on Sophocles: Electra, 78
  • Cross-references to this page (1):
    • Herbert Weir Smyth, A Greek Grammar for Colleges, PARTICLES
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: