Third Episode

Jocasta and Oedipus are alone. She asks what has unsettled him so deeply; he tells her Creon has named him as the murderer of Laius through a corrupt prophet. She moves to reassure him. No mortal, she says, has any share in the art of prophecy. Here is the proof: an oracle once came to Laius — saying he would be killed by his own son. Instead, Laius was killed by foreign robbers at a crossroads, and the son she bore him was exposed as an infant on a mountainside, his ankles pinned. Apollo, she concludes, did not bring either of those things to pass.

Oedipus has stopped listening. The phrase where three roads meet has caught in him. He asks her where Laius was killed. How long ago. How Laius looked. The descriptions match a man Oedipus killed himself on the road from Delphi a few months before he came to Thebes. He tells Jocasta everything for the first time. He was raised in Corinth as the son of King Polybus and Queen Merope. A drunken man at a feast once called him a foundling. The oracle at Delphi told him he would kill his father and marry his mother. He fled. On a road in Phocis, where three ways met, an arrogant old man in a chariot had tried to push him off the path. He killed the old man and all his attendants in fury.

The story closes the gap between them by half. He may be the man he is hunting. He clings to one thread of doubt: the surviving witness had reported that robbers, plural, attacked the king. If there were many killers, Oedipus is not one. He sends for the witness, the old herdsman. The investigation is now investigating its investigator.