This article examines Oedipus at Colonus as a drama of sovereign custody over the dead. Drawing on Mbembe’s understanding of sovereignty as articulated through the power to dictate life and death, it argues that Sophocles stages death as a field of political regulation rather than degradation or erasure. Through secrecy, restricted access, controlled mourning, and territorial enclosure, Athens transforms Oedipus from polluted exile into a guarded civic resource whose invisible tomb secures the future of the polis. By monopolising knowledge of the burial site and excluding kin from witness, the city regulates visibility, memory, and space, thereby consolidating authority through mortuary sovereignty, the regulation of access, visibility, and commemorative knowledge surrounding a powerful death.
