Oedipus Rex
Sophocles (-496–-406), -429
★ 3.73 from 245.2k ratings on Goodreads
A plague-stricken city, a king who promises to find a murderer, and an investigation that keeps turning back on the investigator. A steady pull of dread runs through plain, urgent scenes, while the choral songs turn lyrical and slow, and memory keeps circling back.
Feels like dread and passion. About freedom, memory and time.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy watching an investigation unfold on stage and don't mind a chorus commenting on the action. The English here is an older, formal translation, and the choral odes can slow the pace between confrontations.
Why read it
It gives you a compact tragedy about a ruler who keeps asking questions, and the tension comes from what he refuses to see.
Pages from the book
What stays unforgiven when a crime becomes the price of peace?
My lot be still to leadThe life of innocence and flyIrreverence in word or deed,To follow still those laws ordained on highWhose birthplace is the bright ethereal sky.No mortal birth they own,Olympus their progenitor alone:Ne’er shall they slumber in oblivion cold,The god in them is strong and grows not old. A man refuses to let the truth about his birth stay buried.
Let the storm burst, my fixed resolve still holds,To learn my lineage, be it ne’er so low.It may be she with all a woman’s prideThinks scorn of my base parentage. But IWho rank myself as Fortune’s favorite child,The giver of good gifts, shall not be shamed.She is my mother and the changing moonsMy brethren, and with them I wax and wane.Thus sprung why should I fear to trace my birth?Nothing can make me other than I am. The chorus watches a city’s confidence curdle into arrogance.
Of insolence is bredThe tyrant; insolence full blown,With empty riches surfeited,Scales the precipitous height and grasps the throne.Then topples o’er and lies in ruin prone;No foothold on that dizzy steep.But O may Heaven the true patriot keepWho burns with emulous zeal to serve the State.God is my help and hope, on him I wait. Sophocles.Sophocles wrote more than 120 plays and served as an Athenian general; only seven of his tragedies survive whole.
Books that feel like this
More by Sophocles
Antigone
Sophocles, -441
A young woman defies a new king to bury her brother, and discovers how much a city will sacrifice to enforce its own order.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Oedipus Rex for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy watching an investigation unfold on stage and don't mind a chorus commenting on the action. The English here is an older, formal translation, and the choral odes can slow the pace between confrontations.
- What is Oedipus Rex like?
- A steady pull of dread runs through plain, urgent scenes, while the choral songs turn lyrical and slow, and memory keeps circling back. Feels like dread and passion. About freedom, memory and time.
- What should I read after Oedipus Rex?
- If you liked Oedipus Rex, try The Odyssey (Homer), John Brown’s Body (Stephen Vincent Benét) and Short Fiction (Mary Shelley).
A taste of the feed
What the greatest of the Greek heroes would trade for a day of paid labour.
“I spake; Achilles quickly answered me:— ‘Noble Ulysses, speak not thus of death, As if thou couldst console me. I would be A laborer on earth, and serve for hire Some man of mean estate, who makes scant cheer, Rather than reign o’er all who have gone down To death. Speak rather of my noble son, Whether or not he yet has joined the wars To fight among the foremost of the host.
The Odyssey · Homer
Three hundred years old, and still checking for grey hairs.
Am I, then, immortal? This is a question which I have asked myself, by day and night, for now three hundred and three years, and yet cannot answer it. I detected a grey hair amidst my brown locks this very day—that surely signifies decay. Yet it may have remained concealed there for three hundred years—for some persons have become entirely white-headed before twenty years of age.
Short Fiction · Mary Shelley
The moment a wife becomes a stranger in her own kitchen.
Against the dark background of the kitchen she stood up tall and angular, one hand drawing a quilted counterpane to her flat breast, while the other held a lamp. The light, on a level with her chin, drew out of the darkness her puckered throat and the projecting wrist-bone of the hand that clutched the quilt, and deepened fantastically the hollows and prominences of her high-boned face under its ring of crimping-pins. To Ethan, still in the rosy haze of his hour with Mattie, the sight came with the intense precision of the last dream before waking. He felt as if he had never before known what his wife looked like.
Ethan Frome · Edith Wharton
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