Oedipus RexSophocles
About Oedipus Rex
Sophocles' , produced around 429 BC, is the play Aristotle took as the model of tragic construction in the . A plague has fallen on Thebes. The oracle declares that the cause is the unpunished murder of the former king Laius, and Oedipus, who rules the city as Laius' successor, swears to discover the killer and exile him. The play then shows Oedipus discovering, step by step, that the killer is himself, that Laius was his father, and that the queen he married is his mother. At the end he blinds himself with her brooches and leaves Thebes.
The action is structurally a detective story in which the detective turns out to be the criminal. What makes it tragic is that every step of the investigation is driven by Oedipus' own virtues: intelligence, public responsibility, refusal to stop short of the truth. The oracle had said what would happen. Oedipus' parents had tried to prevent it. Oedipus himself had fled Corinth to escape it. The prophecy is fulfilled through the very actions taken to evade it, and the play forces the question whether knowledge of one's fate makes any difference to the fate itself.
is the Syntopicon's central text on fate considered as an order the human agent cannot get outside of, and one of its chief texts on knowledge as a good that is at the same time the instrument of ruin. The tradition returns to it whenever the relation between ignorance and innocence is in question.