Author of Oedipus Rex, the master synthesizer of Greek tragedy
The pivotal figure among the three great Greek tragedians. He added a third actor and painted scenery, bringing the structure of tragedy to maturity. Oedipus Rex tells of a king who, the harder he strives to escape a prophecy, the more surely walks into killing his father and marrying his mother — two thousand years later, Freud borrowed his Oedipus to name the most famous complex in all of psychoanalysis. Antigone, in turn, set "the law of conscience" against "the law of the king" on an eternal scale.
Oedipus spends his life fleeing the oracle that he "will kill his father and marry his mother," and every step he takes to escape only drives him toward his fate. With this story Sophocles presses the question: when a person struggles desperately to break free of a foretold end, is that very struggle not already written into the end?
Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.