Laudator Temporis Acti

Sophocles, Ajax, Electra, Oedipus Tyrannus. Edited and Translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994 = Loeb Classical Library, 20), pp. 466-467 (Oedipus Tyrannus 1360/1-1362/3):

νῦν δ᾿ ἄθεος μέν εἰμ᾿, ἀνοσίων δὲ παῖς,
ὁμογενὴς δ᾿ ἀφ᾿ ὧν αὐτὸς ἔφυν τάλας.

But now I am abandoned by the gods, the child of unholy parents, a sharer in my father's marriage bed.

Lloyd-Jones' translation ("sharer in my father's marriage bed") doesn't correspond with the Greek text that he prints. "Sharer in my father's marriage bed" is a translation of Meineke's conjecture ὁμολεχὴς.

P.J. Finglass in his edition of Sophocles, Oedipus the King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) prints (p. 155) the same Greek text as Lloyd-Jones but translates accurately (p. 582):

As it is, I am abandoned by the gods, the child of unholy parents, and jointly engendering with the person from whom I was sprung in my misery.

Finglass comments (id.):

The usual sense of ὁμογενής, 'of the same γένος, related', would not work here: it is unremarkable, and certainly not a sign of pollution or wickedness, that Oedipus should be related to one of his parents. The context makes the otherwise unattested active sense inescapable; for a similarly creative use of a compound adjective ending in –γενής cf. Eur. Her. 798–800 ὦ λέκτρων δύο συγγενεῖς | εὐναί, θνατογενοῦς τε καὶ | Διός (cited by Pearson (1929b) 175), where the bed is συγγενής because it represents a marriage in which Alcmene was jointly engendered by Zeus and Amphitryon. There is thus no need for ὁμολεχής (coni. Meineke (1843) 314) or ὁμόγαμος (coni. Musgrave, notes).

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex. Edited by R.D. Dawe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 234:

ὁμολεχής: Meineke's effective alteration of ὁμογενής. To say that Oedipus slept with his mother takes us further up the scale of horror — which is precisely where we are going, as the next line makes clear — whereas ὁμογενής is merely drab. Of course Oedipus belonged to the same family as his mother; and it requires special pleading to urge that here ὁμογενής has the meaning 'having children born of the same wife as was married to his father'.

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