die in the wilderness. This cruel command is obeyed. The child's feet are pierced, cords are passed through them, and it is left hanging from a tree in the wildest pass of Mount Cithæron. There a shepherd finds it, and, moved with pity, carries it to his master Polybus, king of Corinth. The wife of Polybus, being childless, resolves to adopt the foundling as her own son, and thus the stranger is received into the palace, and is given the name of Œdipus—"Swell-foot." He grows up to manhood, never doubting that he is the son and heir of Polybus.
In the mean time King Laius had grown old, and thirty years after his child had been thus exposed, he made a second pilgrimage to consult the god of Delphi. From this pilgrimage he never returned, for on his way home he was attacked and slain by some unknown hand, at the spot where the road from Delphi branches off to Phocis and Bœotia. Creon succeeds him; but his reign is brief, for a monster, with the face of a woman, the wings of a bird, and the tail and claws of a lion, was bringing desolation on the city of Thebes. The Sphinx (as this monster was called) proposed a riddle which no Theban could solve; and the life of a citizen was the penalty for every failure. So terrible was the visitation, that Creon, in despair, offered the crown of Thebes and the hand of his sister Jocasta to any who could unravel the enigma and save the state.
At this crisis Œdipus, like the "fated fairy prince," comes to the rescue. He had left the court of Polybus, indignant at an insult offered him on the
