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Oedipus: Oedipus Rex
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Though Oedipus Rex is a Greek tragedy, it is a mystery story at its heart. The central action of the play is an investigation into the murder of King Laius of Thebes. It is through this investigation that Oedipus solves the mystery of his birth and falls from his most high and fortunate position to a lowly and ruined state. The dismaying facts that are brought to light through the investigation into Laius’s murder demonstrate that every man’s fortune is subject to change.
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The story of Oedipus the King (... called Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus Rex) was told in the play by Sophocles written about 430 B.C. and performed in Athens. It won second place in the drama competition that year.
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The story of Oedipus has inspired artists and thinkers since ancient times. The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote a tragedy entitled Oedipus that influenced writers such as England's John Dryden and Alexander Pope and France's Voltaire and Pierre Corneille. Later artistic treatments of the Oedipus story include a translation of Sophocles' work by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, a play entitled The Infernal Machine by Jean Cocteau of France, music by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, and the movie Oedipus Rex by Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. Sigmund Freud, one of the founders of modern psychiatry, used the term Oedipus complex to refer to a psychological state in which boys or men experience hostility toward their fathers and are attracted to their mothers.
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Sophocles's Oedipus Rex is probably the most famous tragedy ever written. It is known by a variety of titles (the most common being Oedipus Rex), including Oedipus the King and Oedipus Tyrannus. Sophocles first produced the play in Athens around 430 B.C. at the Great Dionysia, a religious and cultural festival held in honor of the god Dionysus, where it won second prize. In the play Oedipus, King of Thebes, upon hearing that his city is being ravaged by fire and plague, sends his brother-in-law Creon to find a remedy from the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. When Creon returns Oedipus begins investigating the death of his predecessor, Laius, and discovers through various means that he himself was the one who had unknowingly killed Laius and then married his own mother, Jocasta. Jocasta commits suicide, Oedipus blinds himself, takes leave of his children, and is led away.
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A bipedal, saurchisian, therapod, Oedipus rex reached a height of some 18 meters. Oedipus Rex lived, on average, to about 30 years of age. There are multiple instances of fights between Oedipus' main competitor Tiresias (Prudentia tiresias): a smaller, more agile, species with the ability to see into the future. Oedipus skeletons have frequently been found with broken arms, legs and even (healed) necks.Mrs. Jones Actually fought him and won. It was ... the first recorded speces to ever bear children with it's mother.
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The story of Oedipus, which has supplied Sophocles with the most famous of his tragedies, had already been handled by Aeschylus in the central play of his Theban trilogy. Little is known about this composition; but it was probably as simple in structure as the Septem, with which it was written in connection, and bore no resemblence to the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles. The aim of Aeschylus, in his three tragedies, was to trace the course of ancestral guilt, and to exhibit the mysterious workings of destiny during successive generations. Hence it may be inferred that, in his treatment of the story, the emphasis was laid, more on the causes and effects of the crime of Oedipus, than on the actual process of its discovery. Sophocles, on the other hand, prefers to concentrate the interest upon a single point of time, and gives a different moral to the legend, converting it into a picture of the blindness and fallibility of mankind. To effect this purpose he devotes the greater part of the play to the gradual discovery of the murder and the incest, and makes Oedipus himself the author of the discovery, and the unconscious agent in his own destruction.
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