Oedipus Rex
Sophocles(-429)
Extract
Let every man in mankind's frailty consider his last day; and let none presume on his good fortune until he find life, at his death, a memory without pain.
A plague is killing Thebes and the king who saved the city once before swears he will find the source of its corruption, not knowing that every step of his investigation leads back to himself. Sophocles presented this tragedy around 429 BCE, and in it perfected a dramatic structure so inevitable that Aristotle would hold it as the measure of all tragedy. Oedipus is brilliant, relentless, and doomed, not by stupidity but by the very qualities that make him great: his refusal to stop asking questions, his need to see clearly. The chorus watches. Tiresias warns. Jocasta begs him to stop. He cannot. What Sophocles understood is that knowledge and catastrophe can be the same thing, and the courage to pursue one is inseparable from the other.
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