ng a family and a polis involved in the process of disintegrating but valiantly struggling against their demise. In Oedipus Rex Sophocles recrafts the famed legend of an outcast who is able to outwit the Sphinx, becomes king and realizes later that he has actually married his mother. In depicting incest and Thebes as a city ravaged by the plague Sophocles appears to be showing a polis torn apart by its own failure to regulate itself. Since Oedipus lacks self-knowledge, his behavior can slip into irrationality and self-destructive actions. After he uncovers the fact that he unknowingly killed his father Laius, Oedipus wanders into a chamber where he finds his wife Jocasta who he now knows also to be his mother dead by hanging. Oedipus takes a brooch from her gown and punctures his eyes, thereby blinding himself.
This act of self-pollution ironically eventually permits Oedipus to enter into a heightened state of self-knowledge symbolized by a wisdom induced by blindness, a trait which he shares with the sightless seer Teiresias. In Oedipus at Colonus O
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