希腊罗马神话 俄狄浦斯.ppt

Many years afterwards Laius being on his way to Delphi, accompanied only by one attendant, met in a narrow road a young man also driving in a chariot. On his refusal to leave the way at their command the attendant killed one of his horses, and the stranger, filled with rage, slew both Laius and his attendant. The young man was Oedipus. Constantly taunted by his Corinthian playmates about his real parentage, he went to Delphi and learned that he would kill his father and marry his mother. In great horror, he fled Corinth to escape this fate, believing his foster parents to be his real parents. By killing Laius, he thus unknowingly became the slayer of his own father. Shortly after this event the city of Thebes was afflicted with a monster which infested the highroad. It had the body of a lion and the upper part of a woman. It lay crouched on the top of a rock, and arrested all travellers who came that way, proposing to them a riddle, with the condition that those who could solve it should pass safe, but those who failed should be killed. Not one had yet succeeded in solving it, and all had been slain. Oedipus was not daunted by these alarming accounts, but boldly advanced to the trial. The Sphinx asked him, “What animal is that which in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?” Oedipus replied, “Man, who in childhood creeps on hands and knees, in manhood walks erect, and in old age with the aid of a staff.” The Sphinx was so mortified at the solving of her riddle that she cast herself down from the rock and perished. The gratitude of the people for their deliverance was so great that they made Oedipus their king, giving him in marriage their widowed queen Jocasta. Oedipus, ignorant of his parentage, had already become the slayer of his father; in marrying the queen he became the husband of his mother. Oedipus and his daughter Antigone These horrors remained undiscovered, till at length Thebes wa