The central protagonist of the play, Oedipus is the exiled king of Thebes, who has come to Athens with his daughter Antigone. Led by a prophecy from Apollo that he would find his final “resting place” (Line 88) there, he arrives blind and in rags, seeking sanctuary and offering his body in return. Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, staged in 429 BC, narrated the events that led to Oedipus’s exile: He discovered that he had inadvertently killed his father, married his mother, and had four children with her. In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus argues that he is not to blame for these actions since they resulted from a curse placed on his father, Laius. Further, he claims, he acted in self-defense when he killed Laius, was the passive recipient of Jocasta’s hand in marriage, and could not have known at the time of these events that Laius and Jocasta were his parents.

The play does not resolve the question of Oedipus’s individual responsibility, perhaps because the Greeks saw the individual mortal as inextricably linked with the community and the gods. For the Greeks, no one acts entirely alone because their lives unfold according to fate and the needs of the moment.