The most famous of all Greek dramas, Sophocles’ play, supported by Aristotle in the Poetics, set the standard by which tragedy has been measured for nearly two-and-a-half millennia. Tragic drama that is centered on the dilemma of a single central character largely begins with Sophocles and is exemplified by his Oedipus, arguably the most influential play ever written. No other drama has exerted a longer or stronger hold on the imagination than Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (also known as Oedipus Tyrannus or Oedipus Rex). Charles Segal, Oedipus Tyrannus: Tragic Heroism and the Limits of Knowledge The play stands with the Book of Job, Hamlet, and King Lear as one of Western literature’s most searching examinations of the problem of suffering.

In Sophocles’ hands, however, this ancient tale becomes a profound meditation on the questions of guilt and responsibility, the order (or disorder) of our world, and the nature of man. It is a story that, as Aristotle says in the Poetics, makes one shudder with horror and feel pity just on hearing it. It presents a kind of nightmare vision of a world suddenly turned upside down: a decent man discovers that he has unknowingly killed his father, married his mother, and sired children by her. Everyone knows the story, the first detective story of Western literature everyone who has read or seen it is drawn into its enigmas and moral dilemmas. The place of the Oedipus Tyrannus in literature is something like that of the Mona Lisa in art.

The oedipus plays of sophocles