“They Are My Sons!”

Oedipus and His Daughters

Oedipus and his Daughters
at Colonus

In a previous posting I looked at the working of fate in the Theban plays of Sophocles.1 There I looked at Greek ideas concerning fate and how the idea of the “tragic flaw” that dooms the protagonist of Oedipus the King is in itself flawed given that what actually works out in the play is a tragic fate doomed by our protagonist to suffer from before he was born. Here I will examine another aspect of the plays or more specifically the one called Oedipus at Colonus that is Oedipus and his children.