Oedipus the King

Discussion

Fate is responsible not only the character.

Oedipus the King is perhaps the best known of any Greek play. Lauded by Aristotle as the example of all that is best in tragedy, it appealed no less to Freud for its way of demonstrating through myth the most basic of all relationships, those between a child and its parents. The story was one that was tackled by all three of the Greek tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Only the Sophocles play survives, though episodes from later stages of the saga can be found in Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, Euripides' The Phoenician Women (Phoenissae), and Sophocles' own Antigone, performed several years before Oedipus the King, and Oedipus at Colonus, which was produced posthumously in Athens in 401 BC (Walton, 95).

Myths set tasks for men, or present enemies to be confounded, or evil to be avoided. Ajax and Philoctetes belong to the Trojan expedition and thus join in the greatest task of Greek myth. Although their problems in our plays are largely personal, they take their meaning from the context of the Trojan War and the purpose of its Greek leaders. As for the hero's enemy, in the traditional story it is typically a dragon, and the Sphinx of the Oedipus legend is a refinement on the primitive chthonic monster. In most myths, however, the primary enemy is either a divinity or someone in the hero's own family. Ajax is such a victim: he has defied Athena's power, and she will destroy him (Long, 68).

More mysteriously, Oedipus seems shadowed by an unexplained interest of Apollo (in some versions, though not in our plays, Laius' rape of Chrysippus accounts for the curse on the house); Neoptolemus assigns Philoctetes' suffering to a violation of the shrine of Chryse. When man confronts god, the issue is ...