Oedipus - Oedipus or Oedipais?

Oedipus or Oedipais?

It has been suggested by some that in the earliest Ur-myth of the hero, he was called Oedipais: "child of the swollen sea." He was so named because of the method by which his birth parents tried to abandon him—by placing him in a chest and tossing it into the ocean. The mythic topos of forsaking a child to the sea or a river is well attested, found (e.g.) in the myths of Perseus, Telephus, Dionysus, Romulus and Remus and Moses. Over the centuries, however, Oedipais seems to have been corrupted into the familiar Oedipus: "swollen foot." And it was this new name that might have inspired the addition of a bizarre element to the story of Oedipus' abandonment on Mt. Cithaeron. Exposure on a mountain was in fact a common method of child abandonment in Ancient Greece. The binding of baby Oedipus' ankles, however, is unique; it can thus be argued that the ankle-binding was inelegantly grafted onto the Oedipus myth simply to explain his new name.