The Myth Before the Play

The story of Oedipus had long haunted the Greek imagination. In Homer, he appears briefly as the doomed king of Thebes; in later poets such as Stesichorus and Pindar, his tale becomes a meditation on fate and moral blindness. By the time Sophocles took up the myth, the contours were fixed but the meaning remained fluid. In *Oedipus Tyrannus*, Sophocles had examined the terror of self-knowledge: the king who saves his city only to discover his guilt. In Oedipus at Colonus, he returns to the same figure decades later—no longer to expose his fall, but to narrate his transfiguration. The polluted exile becomes a holy man. The former outcast is welcomed into sacred ground. Through this inversion, Sophocles transforms myth into revelation: guilt is not the end of the story, but the beginning of understanding.