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If we were to point to a single aspect of Sophocles' play which might be regarded as a key to the underlying meaning of the action, as the most profitable way into the discussion, as the best method with which to alert the reader to the shape of the conflict upon which the composition is structured, we would point to the one fundamental change in the source-myth that Sophocles institutes, the change by which the playwright finally reveals through the mouth of the Herdsman that it was Jocasta and not Laius who gave the infant Oedipus away, the change which stresses her role in the abandonment of the babe. As a glance at Hamilton, or Graves, or any of the major compilations will show,1 the usual telling of the tale, the telling that Sophocles inherited, has the business of abandonment the other way around, with the father and not the mother as the crucial determinant. With regard to precisely the way in which Sophocles works this change into the now of the action, the dramatic use of it that he makes on the dynamic level, it is also of fundamental importance to our understanding of the play, but will be taken up later, during the course of our reading, at the appropriate place. Let me say here that in my view this change of the source-myth to stress the mother's role in the separation not only adumbrates Sophocles' whole purpose in the play, or the essence of his design for tragedy, what is perhaps