Ignorance In Oedipus

Fate plays a large role in the lives of the Greeks. Fate was believed to determine people’s future, over which they had no control. In the play, Oedipus’s destiny was to be the one to kill his father, and to marry his own mother. Because Oedipus’s fate was predetermined, he had no way of controlling his actions, or the outcome of his actions, throughout the play. Oedipus’s ignorance towards the identity of his real parents lead him to perpetrate the crimes he committed. Fate and ignorance hold responsibility for the acts of crime Oedipus executed, making him innocent.
There is no doubt that Oedipus was guilty of marrying his own mother and killing his father, but he committed these acts unknowingly, making him innocent. Oedipus was

not aware that Jocasta was his mother at the time he married her, and neither was she. Jocasta and her late husband, Laios, decided to expose of their child because a prophecy said their child would be the cause of the king’s death. The child was given to a shepherd to be removed. Jocasta believed her son was left with his ankles bounded on the side of a mountain to die. The shepherd felt sorry for the child, so he kept him and gave him to another shepherd instead. “I pitied the baby, my King, and I thought that this man would take him far away to his own country” (Sophocles 64). Many years later, Oedipus committed an act of murder. When Oedipus left his home in Corinth, to escape a prophecy he had been told where he would be responsible for the death of his father, he was forced off the road by a chariot. Oedipus struck the charioteer and then hit the old man inside of the chariot with a club, killing him along with all of his men. Although Oedipus did in fact kill the men, he did not know who they were.
Oedipus had no control over his actions because they were a part of his destiny. Fate and ignorance hold responsibility for the acts of crime Oedipus committed. Before Oedipus was born, fate determined he would be the one to kill his father and marry his mother. “[T]o her Who bore him, son and husband the very same Who came to his father’s bed, wet with his father’s blood” (Sophocles 25). Although Oedipus made the conscious decisions to kill the men leaving Corinth, and to marry Jocasta, he was not aware of who these people really were. If Oedipus had any idea of the true identity of his parents, he would have never committed the crimes of murder and patricide.