In old Greek stories, Oedipus is the son of King Laius and Queen Jocasta of Thebes. When he was a baby his father left him to die on a mountain, because a prophecy said the boy would kill his father. A shepherd saved him, and he grew up in Corinth, not knowing who his real parents were. As a man he went back toward Thebes. On the road he killed a stranger in a quarrel — that stranger was his father. He later answered the Sphinx's riddle, became king of Thebes, and married the queen, Jocasta, his own mother, still without knowing. When the truth came out, the story ends in ruin: Jocasta dies, and Oedipus blinds himself. The Greek name was understood as “swollen foot,” from the story that his feet were pierced when he was abandoned. Freud later took this story as a name for a pattern of family feelings (see oedipal). This is not Odysseus, the traveller from The Odyssey.