This tale, meant to console Oedipus, alarmed him: he had abandoned his home in Corinth, having been warned that he would kill his father and marry his mother. Jocasta, while comforting Oedipus, revealed that Laius was prophesied to be killed by his own son, but had in fact been killed by robbers at a crossroads as he travelled to Delphi. The murderer, said Tiresias, will be revealed to be both brother and father to his children, and son and husband to his mother.

Tiresias declared: ‘You are the criminal you seek!’ An angry Oedipus mocked the blind prophet, who responded that it was really the king who lacked vision.

Oedipus, curious to know more, summoned the blind prophet Tiresias, whose reluctance to speak made Oedipus suspect him. The cause was religious pollution: Laius, the previous king and husband of Jocasta, had been murdered while travelling and the culprit had never been caught. He hoped to discover the cause of the plague that afflicted the city and sent his brother, Creon, to consult the Oracle at Delphi. It would kill any traveller who failed to answer its riddle – ‘which creature walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon and three in the evening?’ Oedipus answered correctly – ‘Man?’ The Sphinx threw itself off a cliff and Oedipus was offered the city’s crown and its dowager queen, Jocasta. It sat outside the cursed city’s walls as a punishment from the gods. Oedipus became ruler after defeating the Sphinx, a creature with the head of a woman, the body of a lioness and the wings of an eagle. These vivid translations combine elegance and modernity, and are equally suitable for reading or theatrical performance.Oedipus, King of Thebes, is supported by his daughter (and half-sister) Antigone, as they walk though the plague-ravaged city. Antigone dies rather than neglect her duty to her family, Oedipus's determination to save his city results in the horrific discovery that he has committed both incest and parricide, and Electra's unremitting anger at her mother and her lover keeps her in servitude and despair. His greatest innovation in the tragic medium was his development of a central tragic figure, faced with a test of will and character, risking obloquy and death rather than compromise his or her principles: it is striking that Antigone and Electra both have a Recognized in his own day as perhaps the greatest of the Greek tragedians, Sophocles's reputation has remained undimmed for two and a half thousand years.

Love and loyalty, hatred and revenge, fear, deprivation, and political ambition: these are the motives which thrust the characters portrayed in these three Sophoclean masterpieces on to their collision course with catastrophe.

Oedipus the king and antigone