Pride, also
called , is the cause of 's downfall. On a human level, it is pride that causes Oedipus to
unknowingly kill his father, Laius, on the road to Thebes. His sense of pridehis sense that
Laius should move aside for him and not vice versadrives Oedipus to get angry enough to murder
the man who will not let him pass. Much later, as the play opens andreturns from the oracle with
the news that someone's sin has caused the plague in Thebes, Oedipus has too much pride (hubris)
to imagine it could possibly be him.
This human pride is connected to a much
more fatal form of pride, according to the Greek worldview. Oedipus has the pride to think he
can beat what the gods have foreordained. That is a terrible sin. When he learns, while living
in Corinth with the people he thinks are his parents, that he was fated at birth to murder his
father and marry his mother, he believes he can make his own fate. He heads out from Corinth,
believing that he has escaped from the...
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