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Existentialism & Culture

Oedipus: A Thinker At The Crossroads

Eva Cybulska asks who Oedipus thinks he is.

The myth of Oedipus is very old. It first appeared in written form in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. Aeschylus and Euripides wrote plays about the hero, as did Julius Caesar, Ovid and Seneca, and more recently Andr é Gide and Jean Cocteau. But the greatest version of all is the play Oedipus Tyrannos by Sophocles, first staged in 429 BC.

The fifth century BC was Greece’s golden age of enlightenment, and Sophocles was contemporary to some extraordinary minds.

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