Snow White
Romulus and Remus
Oedipus and the Sphinx
Hansel and Gretel
Moses
Abandonment features in many different tales. Snow White is left in the forest; Romulus and Remus, the mythological founders of Rome, are placed in their cradle in the Tiber River; Hansel and Gretel are forced from their home and into the hands of a witch. In the story of Moses, it is his abandonment that saves his life. As the Pharaoh has ordered that all male babies born to Hebrews be drowned in the Nile, Mose's mother hid him in a basket in the river where he would be found (and most likely be adopted) by the Pharoah's daughter. In Hansel and Gretel's case, the children return back home, having killed the witch, to find that their stepmother has died and they then are able to live happily with their father.
However, in other stories, the theme abandonment turns out to be tragic. In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Oedipus is abandoned as an infant because it has been thought that he will grow up to kill his father and marry his mother, the King and Queen of Thebes. So a servant is then ordered to take the baby away and kill him, but the servant cannot carry out the order, so leaves the baby at the gates of the royal family of a distant city, Corinth. When Oedipus is a young man, he hears of the prophecy, thinks that it is in reference to his adoptive Corinthian parents, and flees. Ultimately, the prophecy comes true as he kills his real father, Laius, in self-defense and marries Laius' widow Jocasta, his real mother. Jocasta then hangs herself and Oedipus blinds himself with the pins from her dress. Tragedy resulted from the abandonment of the child, implying that this fate might never have occurred if the baby had been cared for, and such a fallacy had not been believed.
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