arrives back from the oracle with the news that only bringing Laius's murderer to justice will end Thebes's devastating plague, Oedipus first offers leniency and then, when nobody comes forward to confess, angrily decrees a harsh penalty for the murderer, even should he be a member of Oedipus's own family.

To Oedipus's credit, once the truth becomes clear to him, he does not try to evade responsibility for his actions. He could have fallen back on the fact that he did not know he was killing his father or marrying his mother, but he realizes that doesn't matter. He did what he was fated to do and must suffer the consequences, which include his own blindness and exile, as well as Jocasta's suicide.

Can there be a more tragic situation than what this play presents? When he learns that despite the precautions his birth parents took, fate intervened so that he murdered his father and married his own mother, Oedipus is horrified. He doesn't try to deny the truth or shirk his responsibility. He says:

I stand a wretch, in birth, in wedlock cursed,
A parricide, incestuously, triply cursed!

Equally horrified at what has happened, Jocasta, the wife/mother of Oedipus, commits suicide. Mourning over her body, Oedipus takes pins out of her hair and plunges them into his own eyes, blinding himself.

"No more shall ye behold such sights of woe,
Deeds I have suffered and myself have wrought;
Henceforward quenched in darkness shall ye see
Those ye should ne'er have seen; now blind to those
Whom, when I saw, I vainly yearned to know."

He asks Creon to let him go into exile and begs him to take care of his children.