The story belongs to the Theban cycle, of which we have already heard. It is older than Homer, who calls Jocasta _Epicasta_; and it had many variants. In the Eleventh Book of the _Odyssey_ there is the quaint epitome of it which the hero gives when he is describing his visit to the World of the Dead. Among the shades which throng there he sees Jocasta.
“_And then beheld I Epicasta fair, Oedipus’ mother, her who unaware Did a strange deed through ignorance of mind, To intermarry with the son she bare._
“_And he his mother wedded, having slain His father: and these things the Gods made plain To all men suddenly; then he among The folk Cadmean held a troublous reign,_
“_In lovely Thebes, according to the fate By purpose of the Gods predestinate For evil: but she went her way alone To the strong Warder of the darkling gate._“[21]
This version agrees in the main with that of Sophocles, and points to the antiquity of the story. Even in those early times the fate of Jocasta and Œdipus was part of an ancient myth. Like the story of Io, remote ancestress of the founder of their city, it is a tale of wrong wrought upon mortals by a god. Perhaps it is not so primitive as the Io legend. There is nothing in it quite so naïve as the idea of the heifer-maiden loved by the supreme god and mercilessly hunted by his jealous queen. The Olympian hierarchy is now established, with its system of greater and lesser gods, and Zeus at their head has grown, in accordance with the theory of Æschylus, wiser with age. Apollo is now the persecutor. And with the development in the divine order goes a corresponding complexity in the human elements of the story. The actors in it are the instruments of their own suffering. The inimical power is not now frank tyranny. Its victims even believe it to be friendly, or at least placable; and it is by their own deeds that the decree against them is brought to pass. Yet this apparent advance still leaves the story in a dark past, far behind the poets. And there are some aspects of it—the curse fulfilled by Œdipus of parricide and incest; and the stark unreason with which it was regarded—which make us feel that the primitive age has only just given place to one of gross superstition.