It is he who persists in unravelling the fatal secret, in spite of warnings to the contrary, because he thinks it will benefit himself and his neighbours. To effect this purpose he devotes the greater part of the play to the gradual discovery of the murder and the incest, and makes Oedipus himself the author of the discovery, and the unconscious agent in his own destruction. Sophocles, on the other hand, prefers to concentrate the interest upon a single point of time, and gives a different moral to the legend, converting it into a picture of the blindness and fallibility of mankind. Hence it may be inferred that, in his treatment of the story, the emphasis was laid, more on the causes and effects of the crime of Oedipus, than on the actual process of its discovery. The aim of Aeschylus, in his three tragedies, was to trace the course of ancestral guilt, and to exhibit the mysterious workings of destiny during successive generations. Little is known about this composition but it was probably as simple in structure as the Septem, with which it was written in connection, and bore no resemblence to the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles.

The story of Oedipus, which has supplied Sophocles with the most famous of his tragedies, had already been handled by Aeschylus in the central play of his Theban trilogy. The following essay on Oedipus Rex was originally published in The Tragic Drama of the Greeks.

The oedipus plays of sophocles