Oedipus at Colonus

Aged and blind, Oedipus reaches a grove outside Athens on his daughter Antigone's arm and asks the city for shelter. Word has come that where he dies will hold power for whoever keeps his grave, so the people he fled reappear: Creon presses him toward Thebes, and his son Polynices comes seeking a blessing before civil war. Protected by Theseus, Oedipus refuses them both, and is claimed by an end no one witnesses. Sophocles wrote the play late in life; it was staged after his death.

For a clinician it sets down how a person keeps custody of an old act after the question of blame has gone quiet, and what that long tenancy does to a temperament. It watches a family return not in tenderness but for what the dying man is worth, and it follows a curse handed from father to sons as plainly as property. The ending treats death as something conferred, a bequest that outlasts the man who carries it rather than only a loss.