Such language, but because I justly dread
Thy evil genius will destroy this land.
And Oedipus refers to the Apolline oracle which foretold that he would die in Athens (an oracle which Sophocles also mentions[187]) when he says[188]:
The oracle of Phoebus is fulfilled ...
That in Athens an exile I shall die.
But in Euripides it is clear that Oedipus is not banished before the death of Eteocles and Polyneices. A number of years is known to have elapsed during which he still lived in Thebes. But he was imprisoned all the time, and, as this suggestion is not implied in the Homeric story, we must suppose that some legend invented this novel device by which part at least of the Homeric facts could be brought into harmony with the requirements of the post-Homeric doctrine of ‘pollution.’ It supposed that Oedipus continued to live in Thebes, not however as a king or as a free citizen with full civic rights, but as an imprisoned criminal who by the very fact of his imprisonment did not pollute the State. Jocasta, who, in accordance with the Homeric narrative, is represented as living in Thebes for many years after the crimes[189] of Oedipus were committed, says:
Soon as he learned
That I whom he had wedded was his mother,
The miserable Oedipus, o’erwhelmed
With woes accumulated, from their sockets