Oedipus
Greek mythology · king · fate, knowledge, self-blinding
King of Thebes who solved the Sphinx's riddle and doggedly investigated a plague's cause, only to find it was himself: the man who had unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. He put out his own eyes with her brooches.
Stories
Oedipus the King
Thebes rots under a plague, and its king vows to unmask the killer whose crime pollutes the city. The investigation leads through prophecy and denial to himself: the man who killed his father at a crossroads and married his mother. The queen hangs herself, and Oedipus puts out his own eyes.
Antigone's Defiance
The new king decrees that the rebel dead shall lie unburied. Antigone scatters dust over her brother's body anyway, answering that no royal edict outranks the unwritten laws of the gods, and goes to her death rather than unsay it.