Oedipus Rex — who's who

The central figure of the play and the most fully drawn man in classical drama. He arrived in Thebes a stranger, solved the riddle no one else could solve, and was given the throne and the widowed queen as reward. He is intelligent, fearless, and impatient. The plague is killing his city; he will find the cause whatever it costs. Every quality that made him a good king — and a good detective — becomes the instrument of his destruction. He is the man who pursues the truth honestly to the end and finds himself there.

Wife of Oedipus and, before him, of Laius. The most fully drawn woman in Sophocles. She is pragmatic, shrewd, and tries throughout the middle of the play to talk her husband down from his fears. The story she tells him to dismiss prophecy — the infant exposed, Laius killed at the crossroads — is the story that destroys her. She understands the truth in the Fourth Episode, two scenes before Oedipus does. She begs him to stop. When he refuses, she goes into the palace and hangs herself in the bridal chamber.

Oedipus's brother-in-law and political deputy. He goes to Delphi at the start and brings back Apollo's command. In the middle of the play he is wrongly accused by Oedipus of conspiring with Tiresias to seize the throne; he defends himself with a calm, almost philosophical speech about the unattractiveness of being king when one already shares power without the burden. Acquitted by Jocasta's intercession, he returns at the end as the only authority left standing. He leads the blinded Oedipus indoors with restraint that is its own kind of dignity.

The aged seer of Thebes. Blind, summoned reluctantly, he refuses at first to speak. Oedipus accuses him of complicity in the murder; only then does Tiresias name Oedipus as the killer of Laius and deliver the prophecy that frames the rest of the play — the man so proud of his sight will be blind before nightfall. He leaves with a parting riddle that no one in the room understands. Sophocles uses his blindness as a deliberate counterpoint to Oedipus's clear-eyed pride; by the end, the inversion is complete.

An older priest who opens the play at the altar steps before the palace, leading the suppliants of Thebes — children, elders, fellow priests — who have come to beg Oedipus to do something about the plague. His speech describes the plague in precise terms and sets the entire investigation in motion. He addresses Oedipus as the man who saved the city once before, from the Sphinx, and asks him to save it again. He does not appear after the Prologue.

An old man who arrives at the palace with what seems to be good news: Polybus, king of Corinth, has died of old age, and the Corinthians wish Oedipus to come and reign there. Trying to ease the king's residual fear of the prophecy, he reveals that Polybus was not Oedipus's blood father — he himself received the infant Oedipus on Mount Cithaeron from one of Laius's herdsmen and gave him to the childless Corinthian king. The disclosure, meant as a kindness, is what closes the circle.

An old slave of the house of Laius, and the only survivor of the attack at the crossroads. Years before, he was given the infant Oedipus by Jocasta with orders to expose the child on Mount Cithaeron, and instead, out of pity, handed it to a Corinthian shepherd he met on the slopes. Summoned in the Fourth Episode and confronted with the Corinthian, he tries to refuse to speak. Oedipus threatens him with torture; he tells everything. His testimony is the last evidence Oedipus needs, and it closes the circle.

A servant of the palace who emerges in the Exodos to report what no one on stage has seen — Jocasta's suicide and Oedipus's blinding. Greek dramatic convention forbids violence on stage; the messenger's narration is therefore one of the most carefully constructed speeches in the play. He describes Jocasta locking the bridal-chamber doors and calling on Laius's name as she hangs herself, and Oedipus, finding her, driving the brooches from her gown into his own eyes again and again with a black storm of blood.

A group of older men of Thebes who sing between every episode. They open with a prayer to Apollo to lift the plague. They defend the king when Tiresias names him; they defend the gods when Jocasta dismisses prophecy. They resist the truth longer than anyone but Oedipus himself, because accepting it means accepting what their king has unknowingly done. Their odes are some of the most quoted lyrics in Greek drama. Their last lines, as Oedipus is led away blind, are the play's last words: count no man happy until he has crossed the boundary of life free from pain.