The LitCharts ThemeTracker is a mini-version of the entire LitChart. The ThemeTracker provides a quick timeline-style rundown of all the important plot points and allows you to track the themes throughout the work at a glance.
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- King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes receive a prophecy that their son will grow up to kill his father. When their son is born, they fix his ankles together and give him to a servant, a shepherd, with orders to leave him to die in the wilderness of Mt. Cithaeron.
- Instead, the shepherd gives the baby to a messenger who brings him to Corinth and gives him to the king and queen. They raise him as their child and call him Oedipus.
- As a young man, Oedipus travels to the oracle of Apollo to learn about his past. He is told that he is destined to kill his father and sleep with his mother. To prevent this from happening, he never returns to Corinth.
- In self-imposed exile, traveling along the road, Oedipus gets in a fight with several men and kills them.
- Oedipus arrives at Thebes, solves the riddle of the Sphinx, frees the city, and is made king. He marries Jocasta, the widow of the previous king, Laius, who was killed while on a journey, under circumstances that aren’t entirely clear.
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1-339
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- The priests of Thebes tell Oedipus about the plague and other miseries suffered by the people of Thebes. They ask Oedipus to help them lift the curse that seems to have fallen on the city.
- Creon, Oedipus’s brother-in-law, brings news from the oracle at of Apollo at Delphi. The oracle says that murderer of King Laius lives in Thebes and must be punished before the plague will lift.
- Oedipus curses the murderer and says he will find the killer.
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340-708
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- Tiresias, the blind seer, comes to the palace at Oedipus’s request.
- Tiresias refuses to tell Oedipus what he knows about the murder. Oedipus insults Tiresias and Tiresias tells him that he—Oedipus—is the murderer of Laius.
- Oedipus accuses Tiresias of inventing this false accusation and of plotting with Creon to overthrow him.
- Convinced that Creon is plotting against him, Oedipus threatens to kill or banish his brother-in-law. Creon protests his innocence.
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709-997
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- Jocasta and the chorus (representing the citizens of Thebes) support Creon’s claims of innocence. Oedipus reluctantly backs off from his threat to execute Creon.
- Jocasta says seers and prophets aren’t trustworthy. She tells the story of the prophecy about her son killing Laius, which she says didn’t come to pass. Laius was killed by an unknown stranger.
- Oedipus grows nervous when he hears where Laius was killed—it’s the same place where he killed several men before he came to Thebes. He sends for the one surviving eyewitness to the old king’s death—an old shepherd.
- Oedipus tells Jocasta about the prophecy he received as a young man—about killing his father and sleeping with his mother.
- Jocasta tries to calm Oedipus and again tells him not to put any stock in prophecies.
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998-1310
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- A messenger arrives from Corinth with the news that the king—whom Oedipus thinks is his father—has died of natural causes. This news relieves Oedipus because it seems to contradict the prophecy. But he’s still concerned because his mother is alive in Corinth.
- The messenger assures Oedipus not to worry: the queen of Corinth is not really his mother. The messenger says he brought Oedipus as a baby to the king and queen of Corinth after receiving the infant from a Theban shepherd.
- Jocasta begs Oedipus not to search further into his origins. Oedipus insists on knowing the truth. Jocasta flees into the palace, mad with grief, which Oedipus mistakes as shame at the possibility that he is the son of a shepherd.
- The shepherd arrives. The messenger confirms that this is the man who gave him the baby. The shepherd doesn’t want to say anything. Only under threat of death does he admit that Oedipus is the child of Laius and Jocasta. Oedipus realizes that the prophecy has come true. He has killed his father and married his mother.
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1311-1688
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- The chorus chants about Oedipus’s former greatness and this terrible fall from grace.
- The messenger announces that the queen has killed herself and Oedipus has gouged out his own eyes.
- Oedipus pleas with Creon to be banished from Thebes. Creon agrees.
- Oedipus says goodbye to his daughters.
- The chorus chants about the power of fate to destroy even the greatest of men. The chorus says only death can bring an end to suffering.
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