We know about Oedipus, who lived three generations before Odysseus in mythic Greek history, primarily from pieces of his story in the Greek tragedies of fifth century BC Athens. Playwrights drew on an epic about him and the other kings of Thebes called the Thebiad, which has survived only in fragments.
Greek plays featuring members of Oedipus’ family include not only the familiar three by Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus Rex, and Oedipus at Colonus but also Euripides’ Phoenician Women, in which Jocasta, Oedipus’ wife (and mother) dies in different circumstances than by suicide as dramatized in Oedipus Rex, and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, about hers and Oedipus’ sons Eteocles and Polyneices battling it out to rule Thebes, as well as many other plays that today exist in name only.
The Thebiad portrayed the ruling family of Thebes descended from Cadmus and his wife Harmonia: Pentheus and later Laius, Jocasta and her brother Creon, Oedipus, his and Jocasta’s children Antigone, Ismene, Polyneices, and Eteocles and their two sons. The Roman poet Statius published his own Thebiad in Latin in 90 AD, so evidently the Greek version was still available in Rome.
The original would date from the early Bronze Age, composed in roughly the eighth century BC from much older stories told by rhapsodes or bards, as were Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Other legends and lost epics about the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus survive, a handful relating to Odysseus found at the Egyptian cache of papyri at Oxyrinchus when excavations began there in 1896, famously revealing a complete poem of Sappho, the earliest female poet.
The stories of Cadmus and his Theban descendants not only take place earlier in mythic history but are more scattered than Homer’s, whose poems were preserved from antiquity. Only one central character moves from the story of Oedipus to the Iliad: Diomedes, a captain of Epigoni led by Polyneices’ son Thersander who destroy Thebes, then ruled by Eteocles’ son Laodamos.
Diomedes becomes a leading warrior of the Greeks fighting Troy. Homer includes him in many scenes of the Iliad, due to his battle experience and his character. Diomedes, second only to Achilles on the battlefield, is one of the few Greeks to make it home safely. He returns to ruling Argos until departing to form colonies in Magna Graecia, modern day Italy, and is mentioned in The Aeneid by the Roman poet Virgil.
Oedipus’ family line ends after the deaths of his two grandsons.
Even though he lived and died long before Odysseus was born, Oedipus makes an indirect appearance in the Odyssey. In Book XI when Odysseus descends into Hades, he encounters Jocasta (called Epicaste). She tells him how she hung herself for sorrow after discovering she had married and born four children to her son Oedipus. He, however, continued to rule despite his pain.
That might be all we would know about Oedipus if not for the surviving plays of classical Athens, notably those by Sophocles, who wrote at least two more now-lost dramas about Theban rulers. In the next generation, Aristotle uses Oedipus Rex as his model of a well-constructed tragedy in his Poetics, adding a significant place in dramatic theory to its stage legacy. Homer’s epics can be endlessly reread, as with Emily Wilson’s recent translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, and reconsidered, as with Christopher Nolan’s recent version of the Odyssey on the big screen, However Oedipus, for better or for worse, has been chiefly memorialized by Sigmund Freud.
If you are curious to know more about Oedipus and his family, they play a big role in my novel Serpent Visions. In Part II, ‘Riddling the Sphinx,’ Teiresias, the gender-switching protagonist, becomes the blind seer who reveals the murder and incest Oedipus committed unknowingly and carries the story on for the two generations left to the ruling house of Thebes. Reflecting the oral tradition of early Bronze Age Greece, my novel takes the form of Teiresias telling his long-secret life story to his daughter Manto in hopes that she will pass it on. Intriguingly, I came across a theory that she was the author of the Thebiad. Manto is mentioned in mythic history as one of Teiresias’ three daughters, a seer herself and the mother of a seer named Mopsus. In my novel I include Odysseus’ much later descent into Hades to consult Teiresias on how to get home in an epilogue in her voice.