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“Oedipus the King” (Gr: “Oidipous Tyrannos”; Lat: “Oedipus Rex”) is a tragedy by the
ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, first performed in about 429 BCE. It was the second
of Sophocles' three Theban plays to be produced, but it comes first in the internal
chronology (followed by “Oedipus at Colonus” and then “Antigone”). It follows the story
of King Oedipus of Thebes as he discovers that he has unwittingly killed his own father,
Laius, and married his own mother, Jocasta. Over the centuries, it has come to be
regarded by many as the Greek tragedy par excellence and certainly as the summit
of Sophocles’ achievements.

Dramatis Personae
OEDIPUS
THE PRIEST OF ZEUS
CREON
CHORUS OF THEBAN ELDERS
TIRESIAS
JOCASTA
MESSENGER
HERDSMAN OF LAIUS

Synopsis Back to Top of Page

To briefly recap on the background to the play:

Shortly after Oedipus’ birth, his father, King Laius of Thebes, learned from an oracle that
he, Laius, was doomed to perish by the hand of his own son, and so ordered his
wife Jocasta to kill the infant. However, neither she nor her servant could bring
themselves to kill him and he was abandoned to elements. There he was found and
brought up by a shepherd, before being taken in and raised in the court of the childless
King Polybus of Corinth as if he were his own son.

Stung by rumours that he was not the biological son of the king, Oedipus consulted an
oracle which foretold that he would marry his own mother and kill his own father.
Desperate to avoid this foretold fate, and believing Polybus and Merope to be his true
parents, Oedipus left Corinth. On the road to Thebes, he met Laius, his real father, and,
unaware of each other's true identities, they quarrelled and Oedipus' pride led him to
murder Laius, fulfilling part of the oracle's prophecy. Later, he solved the riddle of the
Sphinx and his reward for freeing the kingdom of Thebes from the Sphinx’s curse was
the hand of Queen Jocasta (actually his biological mother) and the crown of the city of
Thebes. The prophecy was thus fulfilled, although none of the main characters were
aware of it at this point.

As the play opens, a priest and the Chorus of Theban elders are calling on King
Oedipus to aid them with the plague which has been sent by Apollo to ravage the
city. Oedipus has already sent Creon, his brother-in-law, to consult the oracle at Delphi
on the matter, and when Creon returns at that very moment, he reports that the plague
will only end when the murderer of their former king, Laius, is caught and brought to
justice. Oedipus vows to find the murderer and curses him for the plague that he has
caused.

Oedipus also summons the blind prophet Tiresias, who claims to know the answers
to Oedipus' questions, but refuses to speak, lamenting his ability to see the truth when
the truth brings nothing but pain. He advises Oedipus to abandon his search but, when
the enraged Oedipus accuses Tiresias of complicity in the murder, Tiresias is provoked
into telling the king the truth, that he himself is the murderer. Oedipus dismisses this as
nonsense, accusing the prophet of being corrupted by the ambitious Creon in an
attempt to undermine him, and Tiresias leaves, putting forth one last riddle: that the
murderer of Laius will turn out to be both father and brother to his own children, and the
son of his own wife.

Oedipus demands that Creon be executed, convinced that he is conspiring against him,
and only the intervention of the Chorus persuades him to let Creon live. Oedipus'
wife Jocasta tells him he should take no notice of prophets and oracles anyway
because, many years ago, she and Laius received an oracle which never came true.
This prophecy said that Laius would be killed by his own son but, as everyone knows,
Laius was actually killed by bandits at a crossroads on the way to Delphi. The mention
of crossroads causes Oedipus to give pause and he suddenly becomes worried
that Tiresias' accusations may actually have been true.

When a messenger from Corinth arrives with news of the death of King
Polybus, Oedipus shocks everyone with his apparent happiness at the news, as he
sees this as proof that he can never kill his father, although he still fears that he may
somehow commit incest with his mother. The messenger, eager to ease Oedipus' mind,
tells him not to worry because Queen Merope of Corinth was not in fact his real mother
anyway.

The messenger turns out to be the very shepherd who had looked after an abandoned
child, which he later took to Corinth and gave up to King Polybus for adoption. He is
also the very same shepherd who witnessed the murder of Laius. By now, Jocasta is
beginning to realize the truth, and desperately begs Oedipus to stop asking questions.
But Oedipus presses the shepherd, threatening him with torture or execution, until it
finally emerges that the child he gave away was Laius' own son, and that Jocasta had
given the baby to the shepherd to secretly be exposed upon the mountainside, in fear of
the prophecy that Jocasta said had never come true: that the child would kill its father.

With all now finally revealed, Oedipus curses himself and his tragic destiny and
stumbles off, as the Chorus laments how even a great man can be felled by fate. A
servant enters and explains that Jocasta, when she had begun to suspect the truth, had
ran to the palace bedroom and hanged herself there. Oedipus enters, deliriously calling
for a sword so that he might kill himself and raging through the house until he comes
upon Jocasta's body. In final despair, Oedipus takes two long gold pins from her dress,
and plunges them into his own eyes.
Now blind, Oedipus begs to be exiled as soon as possible, and asks Creon to look after
his two daughters, Antigone and Ismene, lamenting that they should have been born
into such a cursed family. Creon counsels that Oedipus should be kept in the palace
until oracles can be consulted regarding what is best to be done, and the play ends as
the Chorus wails: ‘Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last’.

Analysis Back to Top of Page

The play follows one chapter (the most dramatic one) in the life of Oedipus, King of
Thebes, who lived about a generation before the events of the Trojan War, namely his
gradual realization that he has killed his own father, Laius, and committed incest with
his own mother, Jocasta. It assumes a certain amount of background knowledge of his
story, which Greek audiences would have known well, although much of the
background is also explained as the action unfolds. The basis of the myth is recounted
to some extent in Homer’s “The Odyssey”, and more detailed accounts would have
appeared in the chronicles of Thebes known as the Theban Cycle, although these have
since been lost to us.

“Oedipus the King” is structured as a prologue and five episodes, each introduced by a
choral ode. Each of the incidents in the play is part of a tightly constructed cause-and-
effect chain, assembled together as an investigation of the past, and the play is
considered a marvel of plot structure. Part of the tremendous sense of inevitability and
fate in the play stems from the fact that all the irrational things have already occurred
and are therefore unalterable.

The main themes of the play are: fate and free will (the inevitability of oracular
predictions is a theme that often occurs in Greek tragedies); the conflict between the
individual and the state (similar to that in Sophocles’ “Antigone”); people’s willingness to
ignore painful truths (both Oedipus and Jocastaclutch at unlikely details in order to
avoiding facing up to the inceasingly apparent truth); and sight and blindness (the irony
that the blind seer Tiresius can actually “see” more clearly than the supposedly clear-
eyed Oedipus, who is in reality blind to the truth about his origins and his inadvertent
crimes).

Sophocles makes good use of dramatic irony in “Oedipus the King”. For example: the
people of Thebes come to Oedipus at the start of the play, asking him to rid the city of
the plague, when in reality, it is he who is the cause; Oedipus curses the murderer of
Laius out of a deep anger at not being able to find him, actually cursing himself in he
process; he insults Tiresius’ blindness when he is the one who actually lacks vision, and
will soon himself be blind; and he rejoices in the news of the death of King Polybus of
Corinth, when this new information is what actually brings the tragic prophecy to light.

Oedipus complex
PSYCHOLOGY
 WRITTEN BY:

 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

See Article History

Oedipus complex, in psychoanalytic theory, a desire for sexual involvement

with the parent of the opposite sex and a concomitant sense of rivalry with the
parent of the same sex; a crucial stage in the normal developmental
process. Sigmund Freud introduced the concept in his Interpretation of
Dreams (1899). The term derives from the Theban hero Oedipus of
Greek legend, who unknowingly slew his father and married his mother; its
female analogue, the Electra complex, is named for another mythological
figure, who helped slay her mother.
Freud attributed the Oedipus complex to children of about the ages three to
five. He said the stage usually ended when the child identified with the parent
of the same sex and repressed its sexual instincts. If previous relationships
with the parents were relatively loving and nontraumatic, and if parental
attitudes were neither excessively prohibitive nor excessively stimulating, the
stage is passed through harmoniously. In the presence of trauma, however,
there occurs an “infantile neurosis” that is an important forerunner of similar
reactions during the child’s adult life. The superego, the moralfactor that
dominates the conscious adult mind, also has its origin in the process of
overcoming the Oedipus complex. Freud considered the reactions against the
Oedipus complex the most important social achievements of the human mind.