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Oedipus
[700] That I will do, for I honor you, lady, above these men. Creon is the cause, and the plots he has laid against me. Iocasta
Come, tell me how the argument began. Oedipus
He says that I stand guilty of Laius' blood. Iocasta
On his own knowledge or on hearsay from another? Oedipus
[705] He has made a rascal seer his mouth piece: as for himself, he keeps his lips wholly pure. Iocasta
Then absolve yourself of the things about which you are speaking. Listen to me, and take comfort in learning that nothing of mortal birth shares in the science of the seer. [710] I will give you a pithy proof of this. An oracle came to Laius once—I will not say from Phoebus himself, but from his ministers—saying that he would suffer his doom at the hands of the child to be born to him and me. [715] And Laius—as, at least, the rumor goes—was murdered one day by foreign robbers at a place where the three highways meet. And the child's birth was not yet three days past, when Laius pinned his ankles together and had him thrown, by others' hands, on a remote mountain. [720] So, in that case, Apollo did not bring it to pass that the child should become the slayer of his father, or that Laius should suffer that which he feared, death at the hands of his child: thus the messages of the seer's art had mapped out the future. Pay them no regard. Whatever necessary event [725] the god seeks, he himself will easily bring to light.
Sophocles. The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles. Edited with introduction and notes by Sir Richard Jebb. Sir Richard Jebb. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1887.
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