When a peasant who saw everything is called to testify, his story strikes Oedipus as disturbingly familiar. Far ickier than the accusation of murder is the fact that -if true- it means that Oedipus has been getting busy with his own mother and has even sired children with her. Oedipus doesn’t believe it at first, thinking it’s an attempt to facilitate a coup. Oedipus mocks and threatens the oracle until the fortune-teller gets fed up and tells the king that it was he, Oedipus, who killed his predecessor. Oedipus consults his own oracle to find out who the ne’er-do-well is who murdered the last king, and the fortune-teller tells Oedipus that he’ll never say who committed the killing -but acknowledges that he does know who it was. When the oracles are consulted about how the calamity might be brought to an end, Oedipus is told that he must banish the killer of his predecessor, i.e. In “Oedipus the King,” the titular character is facing a crisis in his kingdom.

The three plays of this trilogy are “Oedipus the King”, “Oedipus at Colonus,” and “Antigone” Of the three plays, the first is the most well-known. However, the common conception of Oedipus -as in the Oedipal Complex-probably has more to do with Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis than it does with this story. One needn’t be educated in the Greek classics to know that somewhere in this trilogy there is a man who gets intimate with his mom.

Oedipus rex book