Oedipus
Savior-king whose intelligence is the instrument of his unmaking.
Ancient Greek · Tragedy · c. 429 BCE
Oedipus Rex
Sophocles
A plague-stricken Thebes waits while its king hunts a murderer and discovers he has been hunting himself. Knowledge arrives as blindness.
Theban play
How terrible—to see the truth when the truth is only pain to him who sees!
Characters
Jocasta
Queen who sees the pattern first and tries to stop the inquiry.
Tiresias
Blind seer who holds the truth the sighted king cannot bear.
Themes
Tragic irony
The audience knows what the hero’s excellence will cost him.
Knowledge
To know oneself is not always salvation; here it is a sentence.
Motifs
Physical vision and moral insight trade places by the end.
The Sphinx’s question returns as the riddle of Oedipus’s own life.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.