It presents a kind of nightmare vision of a world suddenly turned upside down: a decent man discovers that he has unknowingly killed his father, married his mother, and sired children by her. Everyone knows the story, the first detective story of Western literature everyone who has read or seen it is drawn into its enigmas and moral dilemmas. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.The place of the Oedipus Tyrannus in literature is something like that of the Mona Lisa in art. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University.

There remains something unsettling about its plot structure and its ambiguous meaning, and that is what lends it its power. Yet works of art are always opening themselves up to new readings which see them reflecting our changing and evolving moral beliefs, and that is perhaps why Oedipus the King remains a great play to read, watch, analyse, and discuss. Or perhaps that’s to impose a modern reading onto a classical text which Sophocles himself would not recognise. That one event will set in motion a chain of events that will see him married to his mother, the city over which he rules in the grip of plague, and – ultimately – Oedipus blinded and his wife/mother hanged. Oedipus kills Laius because he is a stubborn and angry man in his anger and pride, he allows himself to forget the prophecy (or to believe himself safe if he kills this man who definitely isn’t his father, no way), and to kill another man. He wasn’t punished for pilfering your possessions, but he will nevertheless receive his just deserts. Or maybe his habit of taking an intrusive interest in other people’s wallets will lead him, somewhere down the line, to getting what the ancient Greeks didn’t call ‘his comeuppance’. Did the criminal get away with it? Maybe. A thief steals your wallet and you never see him, or your wallet, again.

Our actions have consequences, but that doesn’t mean that a particular action will lead to a particular consequence: it means that one action might cause something quite different to happen, which will nevertheless be linked in some way to our lives.

Oedipus tyrannus