Spot Passage Quiz on Oedipus Rex Directions: On a separate piece of paper, identify the speaker and the specific circumstances of the following passages: 1. Then I will tell you what I heard at Delphi: In plain words The god commands us to expel from the land of Thebes An old defilement we are sheltering. It is a deathly thing, beyond cure; We must not let it feed on us longer. 2. The riddling Sphinx's song  Made us deaf to all mysteries but her own. 3. I make this proclamation to all Thebans: If any man knows by whose hand Laios, son of Labdakos, Met his death, I direct that man to tell me everything, No matter what he fears for having so long withheld it. 4. How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be When there's no help in the truth! I knew this well, But made myself forget. I should not have come. 5. Tell us: Has your mystic mummery ever approached the truth? When that hellcat the Sphinx was performing here, What help were you to these people? 6. So you dared come back. Why? How brazen of you to come to my house, You murderer! Do you think I do not know That you plotted to kill me, to steal my throne? 7. You do wrong When you take good men for bad, bad men for good. A true friend thrown aside- why, life itself Is not more precious. 8. You are evil incarnate! 9. Set your mind at rest. If it is a question of soothsayers, I tell you That you will find no man whose craft gives knowledge Of the unknowable. 10. Now, you will remember the story: Laios was killed By marauding strangers where three highways meet; But his child had not been three days in this world Before the king had pierced the baby's ankles And left him to die on a lonely mountainside. 11. How strange a shadowy memory crossed my mind, Just now while you were speaking; it chilled my heart. 12. At a feast, a drunken man maundering in his cups Cries out that I am not my father's son! 13. Think of it: I have touched you with these hands, These hands that killed your husband. What defilement! 14. Have no more fear of sleeping with your mother: How many men, in dreams, have lain with their mothers! No reasonable man is troubled by such things. 15. For God's love, let us have no more questioning! Is your life nothing to you? My own is pain enough for me to bear. 16. But I Am a child of Luck; I can not be dishonored. Luck is my mother; the passing months, my brothers, Have seen me rich and poor. 17. ... he must remember when we two Spent three whole seasons together, March to September, On Kithairon or thereabouts. He had two flocks; I had one. Each autumn I'd drive mine home And he would go back with his to Laios' sheepfold.- Is not this true, just as I have described it? 18. I pitied the baby, my King, And I thought that this man would take him far away To his own country. He saved him- but for what a fate! For if you are what this man says you are, No man living is more wretched than Oedipus. 19. He struck at his eyes- not once, but many times; And the blood spattered his beard, Bursting from his ruined sockets like red hail. 20. And yet I know Death will not ever come to me through sickness Or in any natural way: I have been preserved For some unthinkable fate. But let that be.