# Oedipus Rex — Character guide

> Key figures in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles.

- [Oedipus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/oedipus_rex_se/characters/oedipus.md): Oedipus rules Thebes as the man who solved the Sphinx's riddle and won both crown and queen, and when plague strikes he takes the suffering of every citizen as his own: 'Your sorrow touches each man severally... but I gr
- [Jocasta](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/oedipus_rex_se/characters/jocasta.md): Jocasta stands at the center of Thebes's royal house — sister to Creon, mother of Oedipus's children, and the one person who remembers the city before the plague. When Oedipus's search for Laius's killer begins to circle
- [Creon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/oedipus_rex_se/characters/creon.md): Creon is the king's right hand — 'the trusty Creon' — sent to Pythian Phoebus to learn how Thebes might be saved, and he comes back crowned with laurel and bad news: the city harbors a pollution that must be driven out. 
- [Teiresias](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/oedipus_rex_se/characters/teiresias.md): Teiresias is the seer whose sight outlives his eyes, the one man in Thebes who can name the pollution the oracle demands be expelled. Summoned by Oedipus to help track Laius's killer, he resists — he would rather go home
- [Laius](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/oedipus_rex_se/characters/laius.md): Laius ruled Thebes before Oedipus and died abroad on the road to Delphi, killed by robbers — or so the one surviving witness claimed. His murder, never avenged amid the city's troubles, is the 'fell pollution' the god co
- [Herdsman](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/oedipus_rex_se/characters/herdsman.md): The herdsman is the last living witness to Laius's murder, the one man who fled the attack and could say how many robbers struck. He is also the shepherd who, years earlier, was given a doomed infant with riveted feet an
- [Messenger](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/oedipus_rex_se/characters/messenger.md): He comes as a stranger bearing what sounds like simple tidings: Polybus, king of Corinth, is dead, and the Corinthians want Oedipus to rule them. But he carries a second, older story — that he himself once received an in
- [Polybus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/oedipus_rex_se/characters/polybus.md): King of Corinth, adoptive father of Oedipus, whose death sets events in motion.
- [Apollo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/oedipus_rex_se/characters/apollo.md): God whose oracle at Delphi prophesied Oedipus's fate.
- [Menoeceus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/oedipus_rex_se/characters/menoeceus.md): Father of Creon and Jocasta, mentioned as part of Theban royal lineage.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/oedipus_rex_se/characters