Prologue

The play opens at dawn at the altar steps before the palace. Suppliants of every age — children barely able to walk, old priests, the flower of the Theban youth — sit with olive branches wreathed in wool, and the smell of incense lies heavy over the city. Oedipus comes out to meet them. The Priest of Zeus speaks first. He describes the plague in detail: blighted harvests, herds dying in the fields, women dying in childbirth, the city wasted. He addresses Oedipus as the man who once saved Thebes from the Sphinx and asks him to save it again.

Oedipus replies that he has not been idle. The grief of the city has been his grief; he has wept for them more than for himself; and he has already sent his brother-in-law Creon to Delphi to ask the gods what is to be done. As he speaks, Creon is sighted on the road, returning. He arrives garlanded with laurel, a sign that the news is good. He suggests speaking privately. Oedipus tells him to speak in front of the suppliants — what is at stake belongs to all of them.

Creon delivers the oracle. The land is polluted; a murderer lives in it; the murderer of Laius is the source of the plague, and Thebes will not heal until he is found and either killed or driven out. The few facts Creon can supply are scant. Laius was killed years ago at a place where three roads meet; the killers were said to be foreign brigands; only one of his attendants survived to bring back the story; the city, occupied at the time with the Sphinx, never investigated. Oedipus pledges to take the case up himself, immediately. He does not yet know he is investigating his own life.