Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, first performed circa 429 BCE, re-tells a classical Greek myth in the form of a play. The original audiences of the tragedy would have been quite familiar with the story of Oedipus, which actually begins generations before the events presented in Oedipus Rex. The action of Sophocles’ play is merely the final segment of the long Oedipus myth—Sophocles portrayed the rest of the story in Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus, the other plays in the trilogy known as the “Three Theban Plays.”
The myth of Oedipus begins with the founding of the city of Thebes by a man named Cadmus, who slew a dragon and was instructed to sow the dragon's teeth in order to give birth to a...
