Oedipus Rex
Sophocles (-429)
“A man investigates a murder, discovers he is the murderer, and that the victim was his father. Aristotle called it the perfect tragedy. He was right.”
At a Glance
Oedipus, King of Thebes, launches an investigation into the murder of his predecessor Laius to end a plague devastating the city. The investigation reveals, step by step, that Oedipus himself killed Laius — who was his biological father — and that he has been living in incest with his mother Jocasta. Jocasta hangs herself. Oedipus blinds himself with her brooch-pins and is exiled. The oracle of Apollo, delivered at his birth and again before the play begins, has come true in every detail.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Aristotle, writing sixty years after Sophocles's death, called Oedipus Rex the finest tragedy ever written — a judgment that has not been seriously challenged in 2,400 years. He used it to define the basic terms of tragic theory: hamartia (tragic flaw), anagnorisis (recognition), peripeteia (reversal of fortune), and catharsis (purgation of emotion). Every tragedy written in the Western tradition has been written in its shadow. Freud named the most influential psychological complex of the twentieth century after it.
Diction Profile
Formal elevated verse throughout — no colloquial register except in minor characters; prose never appears
High