previous next
[3]

Going forward from here you will come to a road called the Cleft Road, the very road on which1 Oedipus slew his father. Fate would have it that memorials of the sufferings of Oedipus should be left throughout the length and breadth of Greece. At his birth they pieced his ankles with goads and exposed him on Mount Cithaeron in Plataean territory. Corinth and the land at the Isthmus were the scene of his upbringing. Phocis and the Cleft Road received the pollution of his murdered father's blood. Thebes is even more notorious for the marriage of Oedipus and for the sin of Eteocles.

1 With the proposed emendation: “on this road.”

Pausanias. Pausanias Description of Greece with an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones, Litt.D., and H.A. Ormerod, M.A., in 4 Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1918.

The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.

Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1903)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Thebes (Greece) (1)
Phocis (Greece) (1)
Greece (Greece) (1)
Corinth (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (10 total)
  • Commentary references to this page (1):
    • W. W. How, J. Wells, A Commentary on Herodotus, 8.35
  • Cross-references to this page (7):
  • Cross-references in notes to this page (2):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: