Oedipus King of Thebes

About the book

Thebes suffers under a plague, and Oedipus promises to discover the unpunished crime said to stand behind the city's distress. His earlier success has made him a figure of confidence, but the search for the killer of Laius brings him into conflict with a prophet, with Creon, and with accounts of events he thought he understood. Sophocles gives the investigation its force through questions, testimony, and the changing significance of remembered details. Public responsibility and private identity become increasingly difficult to separate. The play does not need rapid changes of place to produce dramatic movement; each conversation changes what the available evidence might mean. This rhyming verse translation presents a tragedy in which the desire to know is both an admirable response to suffering and a source of extraordinary danger.

• Knowledge and identity
• Responsibility
• Fate

Why read it

For a tightly constructed tragedy that makes inquiry itself the action, with every answer changing the question that follows.

English rhyming verse translation by Gilbert Murray