Jocasta- Greek FigureMortal"Queen of Thebes"

Lineage and the Labdacid Curse

Jocasta was a daughter of Menoeceus and sister of Creon, born into the royal house of Thebes. She married Laius, the last king of the Labdacid line, whose house already carried the weight of ancestral transgression. During his years of exile in the Peloponnese, Laius had been hosted by King Pelops but violated hospitality and abducted Pelops's son Chrysippus. Pelops cursed him: Laius would be killed by his own son.

When Laius consulted Apollo's oracle at Delphi, the god confirmed the curse. Any son born to him would kill him. A son was conceived despite the warning.

The Exposure of Oedipus

When Jocasta bore a son, Laius was determined to thwart the prophecy. He pierced the infant's ankles with a pin and ordered a shepherd to expose the child on the wild slopes of Mount Cithaeron. In Sophocles, Jocasta speaks of the exposure without grief or protest.

The shepherd could not bring himself to leave the infant to die. He gave the child to a Corinthian herdsman, who carried him across the mountains to King Polybus and Queen Merope. They adopted the boy and named him Oedipus for his swollen, pierced ankles. For years, Jocasta and Laius believed their son was dead and the prophecy averted.

The Prophecy Fulfilled

Years later, Laius traveled to Delphi. At a narrow crossroads near Daulis in Phocis, where three roads met, he encountered a young man. A quarrel erupted over right of way, and in the violence that followed, the young man killed Laius and all but one of his attendants. That young man was Oedipus. The oracle at Delphi had told him he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother. He had fled Corinth to protect the parents he believed were his own.

Meanwhile, the Sphinx terrorized Thebes: a winged creature with a woman's head and a lion's body. She posed her riddle to all who approached. "What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?" Those who failed were devoured. Creon promised the throne and Jocasta's hand to whoever could defeat her. Oedipus answered: "Man." The Sphinx hurled herself from the city walls. He was crowned king and married his own mother. Neither knew.

Queen and Mother-Wife

Jocasta and Oedipus ruled Thebes for years and had four children. The city prospered. Nothing suggested to Jocasta that her second husband was her first husband's killer, or her own son.

In Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Jocasta emerges during the crisis as a woman who tries to comfort Oedipus and halt his investigation into Laius's murder. She dismisses the reliability of oracles. She tells Oedipus that Apollo's prophecy about Laius had apparently failed: the king was killed by robbers at a crossroads, and their son had been exposed long ago. She means to reassure him. Instead, every detail she offers brings him closer to the truth: the crossroads, the surviving witness.

The Revelation

When plague struck Thebes, Oedipus sent Creon to Delphi. The oracle declared the city polluted by the unavenged murder of Laius. Oedipus vowed to find and punish the killer. He did not know he was cursing himself. The blind prophet Tiresias, summoned by Oedipus, revealed that the king himself was the murderer. Oedipus accused Tiresias and Creon of conspiracy.

Jocasta tried to halt the investigation. When a messenger from Corinth announced the death of King Polybus, Jocasta saw vindication: Oedipus had not killed his supposed father. But the same messenger revealed that Oedipus had been a foundling. The pieces fell together. Jocasta understood before Oedipus did.

Her final plea: "In the name of the gods, if you have any care for your own life, stop this search. My suffering is enough." Oedipus refused. Jocasta rushed into the palace without another word.

Death

In Sophocles, Jocasta hanged herself in the royal bedchamber with a rope twisted from the ceiling. When Oedipus burst in and found her body, he tore the golden brooches from her robe and drove their long pins into his own eyes. He cried out that he could no longer bear to look upon the children of their union or the world that had witnessed such horror.

Homer tells a sparer version. In the Odyssey's Nekyia, Odysseus meets the shade of "Epicaste," a woman who married her own son, learned what she had done, and hanged herself. Homer leaves Oedipus alive to suffer what the Erinyes brought.

In Euripides's Phoenician Women, Jocasta does not die at the revelation. She survives and endures the shame. Her sons Eteocles and Polynices turn on each other over the throne, and when both brothers kill each other in single combat during the war of the Seven Against Thebes, Jocasta rushes to the battlefield. She takes a sword from one of their bodies and drives it into her own throat over their corpses.