Oedipus King of Thebes

About

Aristotle considered Oedipus Rex the perfect tragedy, and it has shaped Western drama ever since: a king who pursues the truth about a plague devastating his city, only to discover that he himself is the source of the corruption he seeks to end. Sophocles wrote the play around 429 BCE, likely after a real plague struck Athens, and its exploration of fate, free will, and self-knowledge has never lost its power. Freud borrowed its central situation to name the Oedipus complex, cementing the play's reach far beyond the stage. Gilbert Murray's English verse translation, used in this edition, was itself a landmark of early twentieth-century classical scholarship. The climactic self-blinding remains one of the most viscerally powerful moments in dramatic literature.