Oedipus Rex
Theater of Dionysus, Athens
Genre’s Characteristics
 A tragedy is a serious drama featuring a main hero
or main character, often of noble birth, who strives
to achieve something and is ultimately defeated.
 The structure of most Greek tragedies presents a
tight, formal arrangement of parts:
Prologue: opening scene of the play
 Alternating sections of the Chorus’s lyric songs and
conversation of the play’s characters
 Exodus: concluding scene of a play

Sophocles
 Born in 495 B.C. near Athens, Greece
 At 28 years old he entered his first City Dionysia.
 Sophocles went on to write 120 plays, winning 18
first prizes and never less than second place.
 Sophocles was an active citizen and also served as a
priest, on the Board of Generals, and as an actor.
Oedipus….the trilogy!
 The First of a Trilogy:
 Oedipus Rex
 Oedipus at Colonus
 Antigone
 But written as:
 Antigone
 Oedipus Rex
 Oedipus at Colonus
Characters
 Oedipus (the King)
 Jocasta (the Queen)
 Creon (Jocasta’s brother)
 Teiresias (blind prophet)
 Laius (former king of Thebes)
 Chorus
 Served as intermission, commentators, mood-setters, and
performed lyric poetry to honor the gods
The Story
 The story would have been familiar to
Sophocles’ audiences:
 Jocasta
and Laius have a son, but there’s a prophecy
attached.
 They tie his ankles and send him away with a
shepherd.
 The shepherd gives the baby to the King and Queen
of Corinth, who raise him as their own.
 Oedipus hears of a prophesy and so runs away to try
and avoid it.
 On
the way to Thebes, Oedipus meets Laius and kills him.
 He also answers the Sphinx’s riddle and saves Thebes.

FYI: the Sphinx was a winged, man-eating creature with a lion’s
body and a woman’s head.
 Are
you clever enough to answer the riddle?
• “What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon,
and three legs in the evening?
 When
Oediphs solves the riddle, the
Sphinx kills herself and Oedipus
inherits the throne of Thebes (which
also includes its queen, Jocasta!).
Themes
 Fate vs. free will
 Power/irony of sight
 Emotion vs. control
 Authority: use and misuse
 Divine vs. human wisdom
Terms to know
 tragic hero: character who makes an error of
judgment or has a fatal flaw which, combined with
fate and external forces, brings on a tragedy.
 hamartia: wrong-doing, error, (fatal or tragic)
flaw, injury committed in ignorance
 hubris: pride, not being aware of your human
limitations
 catharsis: emotional purging

Apollo: in the Age of Reason
 en media res: in the middle of the action
 dramatic or tragic irony: a literary technique,
originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full
significance of a character's words or actions are
clear to the audience or reader although unknown
to the character.
-Oxford American Dictionary
Oracle at Delphi
 Most important shrine in Greece—for the god Apollo
 Built around a sacred spring; it was considered to be
the “omphalos” (the navel)—the center of the world.
 Priestess of Apollo—Pythia—
gave cryptic answers to
those seeking answers.
Thanks to:
 http://www.wepapers.com/Papers/7348
6/Oedipus_the_King_by__Sophocles.p
pt
 http://www.ap-
english.com/home/Oedipus.html