Oedipus
[330]
What are you saying? Do you know the secret and refuse to tell it? Will you betray and destroy the state?
Teiresias
I will grieve neither myself nor you. Why do you ask these things in vain? You will not learn the answers from me.
Oedipus
Will you not, basest of the base—
[335]
you would anger a stone—speak out? can nothing touch you? Will you never make an end?
Teiresias
You blame my anger, but do not perceive your own: no, you blame me.
Oedipus
Who would not be angry hearing such words,
[340]
with which you now are slighting the city?
Teiresias
The future will come of itself, though I shroud it in silence.
Oedipus
Since it must come anyway, it is right that you tell it to me.
Teiresias
I will speak no further: rage, if you wish, with the fiercest wrath your heart knows.
Oedipus
[345]
In my anger I will not spare to speak all my thoughts. Know that you seem to me to have helped in plotting the deed, and to have done it, short of performing the actual murder with your own hands: if you had eyesight, I would have said that you had done even this by yourself.
Teiresias
[350]
In truth? I order you to abide by you own decree, and from this day forth not to speak to these men or to me: you are the accursed defiler of this land.
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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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