Smote full upon my head with the fork’d goad;
But got more than he gave, for by a blow
From this right hand, smit with my staff, he fell,
Instantly rolled out of the car supine.
When the full revelation of his accursed destiny came home to Oedipus, he was so overwhelmed with grief, remorse and terror that he became for the time insane. But in the Oedipus Coloneus he has once more regained his reason. He argues[51] with himself and with others as a rational Theban or Athenian of the historical era. What, he asks, was his crime? The guilt lies with the Curse and the Fates who accomplished it. Has he committed incest? No, for he did not know that his wife was his mother. Why, therefore, should he be punished? One crime only has he committed, yet not with malice and deliberation. He had slain an old man ‘with dark locks just sprinkled o’er with grey,’[52] and this old man was no slave or serf, but a free man and a prince. For this deed, according to Greek law, Oedipus must become an exile. But was the exile to last for ever? We have quoted from Plato[53] what we believe to have been the Greek legal penalty for slaying in a passion, namely a period of exile which sometimes extended to two, and sometimes to three, years, according to the degree of malice in the act. But we have argued that in such cases the duration of the exile depended in theory, if not in practice, on the consent of the relatives of the slain. Now Plato says that in no circumstances, not even in self-defence, was it lawful for persons to slay their parents.[54] Hence the legal position of Oedipus is a complex one. Objectively, he was guilty of wilful parricide; subjectively, he pleaded guilty to extenuated homicide. Such complex issues were not provided for in ancient law, not even in Plato’s penal code.
If therefore we find that Euripides[55] speaks of Oedipus as ‘imprisoned’ in Thebes, and that Sophocles speaks of Oedipus as an exile in Athens, and mentions also a projected arrangement by which Oedipus might live near Thebes—not in it, but just outside it[56]—may we not see in these accounts the efforts of legend-makers to keep their creations in harmony with legal facts, and may we not suppose that their failure to agree with one another, and especially with the Homeric narrative, was due to the twofold aspect, subjective and objective, of the deed of Oedipus? The Homeric account of the subsequent rule of Oedipus at Thebes could only be retained, in the ‘pollution’ era, by assuming that his act was not parricide, but homicide, that it was not wilful, but quasi-involuntary, and that the kinsmen of Laius unanimously consented to his return from temporary exile. If his act was conceived, objectively, as parricide, it would have been necessary to assume (1) that Laius ‘forgave’ him before he died and (2) that his kinsmen consented to his return. But no legend suggests that Laius forgave his slayer. Furthermore, the legends seem to have emphasised the fact that the kinsmen of Laius were not unanimous in consenting to the return of Oedipus. Hence the Homeric story of his continued existence at Thebes had, in the ‘pollution’ era, to be abandoned.
In the Oedipus Coloneus Oedipus protests against his continued banishment from home, because, he maintains, his deed was involuntary. Thus, he says[57]:
If,
Born as I was to misery, I encountered