“O children, latest brood of ancient Cadmus.” A king comes out to a plague-struck city and vows to find the man who caused it, not knowing he is hunting himself. Aristotle's model of tragedy, in Sophocles' own Greek.
The prologue is live as a word-depth beta: Oedipus’s opening address to the suppliants at his door, in the original Greek, every word glossed with its sense and the flowing English beside it. He calls the Thebans “children of Cadmus,” describes the plague-heavy city, and names himself — “the one all men call famous, Oedipus.” This is a full tragedy; it grows scene by scene.
❦ Read Oedipus Rex in GreekA taste of the format — open the reader above to read all of Oedipus Rex word by word.
The tragedy every later tragedy is measured against, and it opens with a king who does not know who he is. You are reading the actual Greek of Sophocles, word by word, from the play’s first line.
Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannus for the Athenian stage around 429 BC, at the height of the city’s power and just as a real plague was ravaging it. Sophocles was a general as well as a playwright, and won the drama prize more often than any of his rivals. Aristotle, writing a century later, treated this play as the textbook example of how a tragedy should be built. The Greek here follows the 1887 Cambridge edition of R. C. Jebb, checked against a second public-domain text.
The whole play is a single act of dramatic irony: the audience knows from the first minute what Oedipus spends the tragedy refusing to see. His name is the trap. Oidipous means “swollen-foot,” because his parents pinned his ankles and left him on a mountain to die rather than let a prophecy come true; and Greek ears also caught oida, “I know,” inside it. The man famous for solving the riddle of the Sphinx cannot solve the riddle of his own name until it destroys him.
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