The House of Labdacus

Cadmus the Phoenician, following the oracle’s cow, sows the dragon’s teeth and founds Thebes; his line runs through Polydorus and Labdacus to Laius, who is warned that any son of his will kill him. The exposed child survives as Oedipus, kills his unknown father at the crossroads, answers the Sphinx, and takes queen and kingdom — his own mother, Jocasta.

Solid lines: parentage · double bar: union · dashed: attested only in later tradition. Tap a name to open its entry.

From that unwitting union: Eteocles and Polynices, who kill each other at the seventh gate; Antigone, who buries her outlawed brother and hangs for it; quiet Ismene; and Creon, Jocasta’s brother, whose rigid decree completes the ruin. Sophocles’ three Theban plays — all in this library — take the story from the plague at Thebes to the grove at Colonus, where the polluted old man becomes, at last, a blessing to the land that receives him.