Sophocles' Oedipus the King

Oedipus the King, also called Oedipus Tyrannus, is a tragedy by the Athenian playwright Sophocles, first staged around 429 BCE or a few years later; the exact year is unknown. Thebes is struck by a plague, and its king Oedipus promises to find the killer of the former king, Laius, because the oracle at Delphi says that is the cure. As he questions witnesses, the evidence turns on him. Oedipus learns that, as an abandoned baby, he was saved and raised in Corinth, and that he is Laius' son. He had killed his father at a crossroads and married his mother, Jocasta. She hangs herself and he blinds himself with her brooches.¹³

Sophocles built the play on a myth already known to Athenian audiences, so its force comes from irony: the audience knows the truth while Oedipus pursues it. The play is a detective story in which the investigator is the culprit, and every attempt to escape the prophecy helps fulfil it. Oedipus is intelligent, decisive and good at his job, which makes his fall hard to dismiss as simple punishment. Scholars have long debated how far the play is about fate, character or the limits of human knowledge. An ancient note says it won only second prize at its festival.¹³

Aristotle's Poetics uses Oedipus the King as the model of tragedy, drawing on it for his terms peripeteia (reversal) and anagnorisis (recognition). Seneca, Dryden, Voltaire and Stravinsky later reworked it, and Sigmund Freud gave the name Oedipus complex to a theory of childhood desire in 1900, though Freud's idea has little to do with Sophocles' play, in which Oedipus acts in ignorance. The tragedy remains among the most performed works of the ancient stage.¹