Oedipus the King (Oedipus Rex) Help

[LDC2]

I am writing an essay on opedius the king and do not quite understand the prompt. I am stuck on it a while now. help will be greatly appreciated.

"The number three appears several times throughout the play. Laios is killed where the three roads met. Oedipus is three times damned: damned in birth, damned in marriage, and damned in the blood he shed. Clues to discovering the mystery is brought by three people: the prophet Teiresias, the messenger, and the shepherd. Symbolically, The number three represents completeness, closure, unity, awareness, perhaps even spiritual awareness. How is Sophocles' use of the number three represents Oedipus as the archetype (pattern of tragic man?"

[gizmo1]

It is an obscurely phrased question. Perhaps an answer lies in the riddle of the Sphinx. It concerns the three ages of man. If you consider Oedipus at those three ages and in what way he crawls in the morning of his life (with his bound feet) and the way he walks upright in his youth (as a warrior, king and lover) and stumbles in his old age (blind and in exile, even in the end becoming a snake if memory serves me right), maybe this will point you towards what the question is getting at.

Sidenote - the number three is also associated with Greek Goddess of withcraft Hecate, three Fates, Three Furies (who come after those who kill a parent (like Oedipus. ) Also one of the greatest Greek tragedies is written as a trilogy - the Oresteia - have a look at that too when you are thinking about closure and the number three.