Oedipus

Exposed as an infant, raised in Corinth, and fleeing an oracle he misread, Oedipus killed his father at the crossroads and won his mother with the answer to the Sphinx: man. As king he vows to find Laius’s killer and prosecutes the search against every warning until the answer is himself; the queen’s brooches take his eyes. “Count no man happy until he is dead,” the chorus concludes.

Yet Sophocles returned to him at ninety: at Colonus outside Athens the blind beggar, purified by suffering, is claimed by the gods themselves, and his grave becomes a hidden blessing to the land — the poet’s last word, written in the deme of his own birth.